Halloween Ends Director Breaks Down the Shocking Opening Scene

To say that the opening scenes of Halloween Ends are unexpected for the franchise would be a bit of an understatement, which director David Gordon Green recently recalled as being the exact message he wanted to get across to audiences. While Green’s Halloween opened with a scene in which Michael Myers was confronted in a mental institution and reunited with his mask and Halloween Kills opened with a flashback to the night he was apprehended in 1978, Halloween Ends kicks off with a disturbing depiction of one fateful night for Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) as he is babysitting a young boy. Halloween Ends is in theaters and on Peacock now.

WARNING: Minor spoilers below for Halloween Ends

A year after the events of Halloween Kills, Corey is babysitting a young boy on Halloween night, only for some mysterious events to start to unfold. Rather than Michael being to blame for the incident, the sequence delivers something far more tragic than what most audiences were expecting.

“When [John] Carpenter first made his Halloween film in 1978, there was the working title of ‘The Babysitter Murders.’ One of the things we wanted to look at was the subgenre of that,” Green recalled to ComicBook.com. “Look at a movie like When a Stranger Calls and things like that and movies that influenced some of our choices in an opening. And we wanted to have an opening, a cold open that no one knew anyone, none of these players were of the legacy of Halloween so we could start to point towards something that was a little different from our previous two installments. Even the font of the film is blue instead of orange when we’re doing our title sequences, which is a little nod to Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which was its own curveball to the franchise.”

He continued, “I have to say, I wanted this to really go for it, and the ambition we had to do something different, do something out of the box, that invited some of the tropes and cliches that we’re trying to honor from within not just the Halloween franchise, but within the slasher genre, wanted to bring some of that in, then show people a new take and fuse things like a love story through it.”

Halloween Ends is in theaters and on Peacock now.

What did you think of the film’s opening? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!