Halloween Kills Ending Explained: Is [Spoiler] Alive or Dead?

October 15, 2021, 10:45pm

Halloween Kills lives up to its name when a brutal and relentless Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) slaughters his way through Haddonfield’s vengeful mob, culminating with a shocking final victim now confirmed to be dead. Spoiler warning for Halloween Kills, the new movie now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock. As an injured Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) recuperates at the hospital, her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) think Michael dead a second time — finally finished off and executed by the vigilante mob led by Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall).

But you can’t kill the boogeyman. The Shape slinks into the same bedroom where he stabbed his older sister Judith to death on Halloween night 1963, essentially recreating the murder when he viciously attacks Karen with a knife on the second floor of the old Myers home.

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A lingering shot shows Laurie’s daughter seemingly dead in the same spot as Michael’s first kill, but some held out hope Greer’s Karen could live to see Halloween Ends. (The start of Kills reveals that Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) actually survived what appeared to be his death in 2018’s Halloween.)

“Well, I was bummed to see the ending. I thought it was a good idea, though,” Greer told The Hollywood Reporter, confirming Karen’s death. “I thought it was really beautifully written, and it felt like a dance, like an opera, kind of. But it was also a little bit of a bummer, mostly because I like to play with my friends.”

Added Matichak, whose Allyson is downstairs when Michael murders her mother,”I was gutted in a lot of ways… You feel like you get out unscathed, you feel like you get out triumphant, and then you get crushed in a lot of regards. It’s a really beautiful ending in a lot of ways, and I agree with Judy. It’s, unfortunately, the right move, which sucks, but they really made it pretty poetic and pretty powerful.”

Unlike Kills, taking place on Halloween night 2018 and picking up where director David Gordon Green’s first movie left off, the trilogy-concluding Halloween Ends will be set in present-day 2022. It will be the final confrontation between Laurie and her boogeyman, now the target of a grudge more personal than ever.

Halloween Kills is now playing in theaters and streaming only on Peacock. Halloween Ends releases in theaters on October 14, 2022.