John Carpenter essentially made the slasher film mainstream with 1978’s deeply influential “Halloween,” which also helped launch the acting career of a young Jamie Lee Curtis. While a franchise was born, subsequent sequels never really took off. That’s changed with 2018’s “Halloween,” a legacy re-quel from filmmaker David Gordon Green, a sequel to the original that discounts all the other films and picks up 40 years after the original movie. Carpenter is still involved as an exec producer, the composer, and an overall godfather. While the sequel “Halloween Kills” comes out today, theatrically and on NBC Universal’s Peacock streaming channel, it’s received a lot of mixed reviews. While the original was universally praised, there’s still one more film left in this trilogy to wrap it all, “Halloween Ends,” due October 22, 2022.
READ MORE: ‘Halloween Kills’…And Kills And Kills, But Sadly Does Not Slay [Venice Review]
How does it all end? While speaking with Uproxx, director David Gordon Green teased some elements in the finale, saying it will mirror modern-day America, including the COVID-19 pandemic alongside bizarre politics.
“Where we’re leaving these characters on Halloween 2018, the world is a different place. So not only do they have their immediate world affected by that trauma, having time to process that trauma—and that’s a specific and immediate traumatic event in the community of Haddonfield. But then they also had a worldwide pandemic and peculiar politics and another million things that turned their world upside down,” he explained to Uproxx.
What Green means with “peculiar politics” is unclear, but he did say in a recent Cinemblend interview that “Halloween Kills” was known as “Mob Rules,” which might be a greater hint at things to come. Trumpism and anti-vaxxer sentiments seem to be the most obvious option, but who knows where it could go, given how polarized and broken the U.S. culture appears to be. While some horror fans have spoken out against the horror genre infusing politics into itself, a political lens on culture in horror goes as far back as George A. Romero’s “Night of The Living Dead,” and even before that, adding social and political themes isn’t exactly a new facet of horror.
David Gordon Green won’t be stopping with horror at “Halloween Ends,” as he’ll direct a trilogy of “Exorcist” films for Blumhouse that he’ll also co-write with Peter Sattler as he confirmed to Collider in a recent interview. The trilogy starring Ellen Burstyn and Leslie Odom Jr. made headlines when Universal Pictures acquired the project for a massive $400 million.
The filmmaker will also direct the pilot of a new “Hellraiser” series at HBO that is happening alongside a new feature film, so yes, Green will very much be entrenched in horror for the next few years of his life.