Warning: this story contains Halloween Ends spoilers. The latest Halloween was the end for classic characters Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney), but it was the beginning for a new character. Nearly 45 years after the Shape first stalked the streets of Haddonfield, Illinois, a new evil took shape: copycat killer Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell). A babysitter who becomes the town pariah after a child accidentally dies under his watch, a corrupted Corey is touched by evil — and commits most of the killing in Ends. Though Corey ultimately doesn’t survive Ends, most of the film’s screen time is spent passing the torch to the second generation of “Michael Myers.”
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Why Focus on Corey in Halloween Ends?
“I wanted to get a new perspective of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and the family, and I wanted to bring a new central character to be a pivotal exploration of those characters and the town,” director and co-writer David Gordon Green told EW. “We’d seen the story of a stalker, and we’d seen a lot of the ways that trauma had affected Laurie Strode, but I really wanted to see how that affected the town.”
Three years after the child’s death — and four years after Michael returned on Halloween night 2018, murdering dozens between 2018’s Halloween and 2021’s Halloween Kills — Corey’s traumatic background is brought to the forefront in his relationship with Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak).
Green explored Haddonfield’s trauma by “bringing in a new character of Corey Cunningham, and discovering first his own immediate trauma in our cold open, and then how that affects him, and then how an encounter with our already established evil could become kind of an infectious thing. It’s a study of the contagiousness of these negative entities that are in our lives. If they go unchecked, then they spread. If we can wrap our head around them, and be our own hero, then maybe we’ve got a fighting chance.”
Is Corey the New Michael Myers?
After his encounter with a sewer-dwelling Michael Myers, a corrupted Corey spirals and commits his own killing spree: first in a scarecrow’s mask, then while wearing Michael’s Shape mask. As the second Shape, he brutally murders his overbearing mother (Joanne Baron), a smart-mouthed radio DJ (Keraun Harris), and a gang of high school bullies.
“Halloween Kills was very much a supercharged version of Michael Myers, but it was all within his consistent character,” Green explained. “One of the things I wanted to explore is someone that is emulating these [acts] of violence, but he’s messy, and he doesn’t know how to do it well, so instead of a clean cut to the throat, he’s got a corkscrew, and he’s just jabbing it desperately into a man’s throat. That’s something that Halloween movies don’t do because it’s not within the character of Michael Myers, but I wanted that midnight movie madness.”
The director added: “One of the exciting things about bringing a Corey character in here is I can do borderline campy violence to scratch that itch of the things that I like about some ’80s movies that I really respond to.”
Read More ▸ How the Ending of Halloween Ends Changed ▸ Halloween Stars Critique Halloween Ends: “Where’s Michael?” ▸ Halloween Ends Director Breaks Down Corey Cold Open
Halloween Ends is now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock.
