Halloween Kills Ending Explained

This article contains massive Halloween Kills spoilers.

The second part of David Gordon Green’s rebooted Halloween trilogy, Halloween Kills, is upon us with more murder, more Myers, and much much more mayhem. This film follows on immediately from 2018’s Halloween—Michael has been left for dead in the burning basement but (surprise!) he’s not dead. Meanwhile Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), Karen (Judy Greer), and Allyson (Andi Matichak) are on their way to the hospital to get Laurie’s wounds treated.

Things are about to get a whole lot worse for Haddonfield as Michael massacres person after person until the bloody finale, which gives us hints about what we might expect from the final installment, Halloween Ends. So what does the ending of Halloween Kills mean?

What’s Michael Myers’ Motive?

Simply put, he still doesn’t really have one. Speaking to Den of Geek, director David Gordon Green confirmed as much when he said, “I believe he is a spectacular and resilient human being, with no motive, and with no emotion.”

However, exactly what Michael’s game plan is, is an important part of the movie. For much of the film, it looks like Michael is tracking down Laurie and that she is his ultimate goal—as was the setup for the original Halloween II in 1981 and many of its sequels. But by the end of the film, this appears not to be the case. Michael doesn’t go to the hospital (so it’s a nod to and twist on Halloween II). Instead Michael wants to return to the family home, the house where he murdered his sister and where he used to stare out of the window looking over the town

 By the end of the movie, he has achieved that. The final shots are of him staring from his old vantage point, and Laurie doing the same from her hospital bed. It’s a nice play on the tagline of the original 1978 movie “the night he came home.”

Is Michael Myers Immortal or Is He Human?

Good question! This particular point is going to cause much debate, we suspect. First of all, here’s what David Gordon Green says on the matter. 

“I believe he is flesh and blood,” says the director. “But I believe the interpretation of what Michael Myers has become is cosmic. I think Michael Myers, in our true Earth, has brought nightmares to millions of people. The boogeyman just as much as the shark in Jaws has kept millions of people away from the ocean. So you have that beautiful study of what is fear? Is fear the reality of looking someone in the eye when they’ve got a knife in your house? How does that compare to the paranoia and the uncertainty, and the expectation of what’s around the corner and what’s in the closet, what’s under the bed? How the boogeyman has supercharged the anxiety and emotions of his own community is sort of what this movie studies.”

So essentially Myers is a man (just as Jaws is a shark) whose legend is bigger than his physical form. However, while we might be able to buy that Myers has survived a burning building and the various body blows he suffers throughout the film, the very end of the movie, which sees the entire town of Haddonfield band together in an effort to stop Myers (after Karen lure him into the street by stealing his beloved mask), also sees Michael taking damage that no human could endure. Not only is he stabbed with a pitchfork, but he’s also shot at close range several times and still gets up and defeats the town. This is surely going to be addressed in Halloween Ends, which Gordon Green has said will be a more intimate affair.

Is Karen Dead?

Probably. But not definitely. At the end of the movie, Michael stabs Karen in the house that he used to inhabit (he’s already killed Big John and Little John who were living there). The closing scenes do suggest that Karen is probably dead, but Halloween movies have a habit of bringing people back from the brink. If she’s dead, it could be a massively additional motivator for Laurie. Though Laurie is still in a hospital at the end of Halloween Kills, in a room with Officer Hawkins (Will Patton), it’s her monologue intercut with Michael’s final scene that closes the movie.

“He is coming for me, but I am coming for him,” she says. We can expect to see a face off between the two in the final chapter.

Who Else Might Return for Halloween Ends?

The death toll in Halloween Kills is pretty high and that includes several returning characters, including Tommy Dolye (Anthony Michael Hall), Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet), Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), and Marion, Dr. Loomis’ nurse (Nancy Stephens). And as mentioned above, Karen might also be dead. Allyson is not, however. Nor is Hawkins, and he has some serious beef with The Shape, as we learn that when he was a young officer he accidentally missed when he was trying to shoot Myers and instead killed a colleague, for which he has extreme guilt (he also stopped Loomis from gunning down Myers). Lindsay (Kyle Richards) is also not dead, so could come back to help in the fight.

Gordon Green gave us a little hint as to what we might expect from Halloween Ends, including that it takes place four years after Halloween Kills—bringing us up to 2022 in the movie timeline (and presumably real time).

“I would say that Halloween Ends is a more intimate movie where we were able to curate some of the aftermath of the chaos,” the filmmaker says. “So some of the characters that you’re referring to will have processed the insanity of the circus of the massacre of 2018. And not only that, but they’ve also processed the world as it’s spun so wildly in the last four years. In a lot of ways, it’s a coming of age story.”

Expect a personal showdown to close off the series.

Halloween Kills is in cinemas and streaming on Peacock now.