Halloween Kills director David Gordon Green opened up about the sequel film's fan backlash. Released in 2021, the slasher-horror film immediately follows the events of Green's reboot, Halloween (2018), and finds Michael Myers wreaking havoc on Haddonfield as he attempts to return to his childhood home. With Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) relegated to a hospital bed for the majority of the film, a mob forms and attempts to take on Myers. However, he manages to kill his pursuers and finally returns home.
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Halloween Kills was not well-received by critics or the public, with the film garnering a paltry 39% Rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Many criticisms were lobbied at the fact that Laurie remained absent for much of the plot while the leading characters acted illogically in their attempts to kill Myers. The film may have delivered on its promise of gore, but audiences debated whether it added anything substantial to the franchise.
Speaking with SFX (via GamesRadar), Green responded to Halloween Kills' critical backlash. The director explained his view on his film's criticism arguing that leaving certain plot points "unresolved" was intentional but perhaps not favorable to the audience. Green admitted that the final film creates an opportunity to clean up the mess that was left over from the previous movie. Read what the director said below.
"To me, psychologically, the whole point of that movie is kind of unraveling things and not resolving things."
"There's a lot of people that when they see an ending like that, or that kind of unresolved chaos, they get frustrated as a moviegoer. For me, that's just part of the fun, and then we get to come in and tidy it up with the last one. So any frustration that was expressed about the last one, I kind of just smile and say, 'Hold tight, here we come.'"
"It's funny, because it's so subjective what people want to see with these movies. Some people just want to literally watch the original film. You're not going to remake that; you have to do something different. Some people say they want X, and then when you literally sit down with your co-writers and are thinking about what that would be like, well, that's not really a movie, or that's not enough to sustain my interest, or that's not enough to go back and actually go to the emotional and logistical effort of making a movie. So what is the story we want to tell? What is the atmosphere and the vibe that we want to experience that makes each of our three contributions to the franchise very different?"
How Halloween Ends Can Remedy Kills Backlash
One of the reasons Halloween Kills stood in such stark contrast to its predecessor was because of how good the 2018 movie was. Many felt like Halloween was a return to form for the franchise, with Final Girl Laurie Strode making her reappearance and continuing the story from the events of the first film. Putting her on the sidelines for much of the film (and having Haddonfield's residents turn into a thoughtless, vengeful mob) didn't sit well in comparison to that film. While Michael Myers' kills in Halloween Kills were generally well-received, the pains of being a middle chapter in a trilogy showed.
Halloween Ends is set to pick up four years after the events of Halloween Kills with Strode living with her granddaughter and attempting to regain control of her life. With the film being Green's final in his Halloween trilogy, the film must address the circumstances of the deaths of Myers' victims in Halloween Kills as well as why the killer miraculously survived in the film's climax. However, audiences do not have to wait much longer to see if Green delivers on his promise with Halloween Ends hitting theaters and Peacock October 14.