Dhe sausage and the parable are two objects that have little to do with each other and yet are related to one another in a striking way. Because the sausage is known to have two ends. And the parable? Even. With the many film series that have developed over the decades, especially in American entertainment cinema, one could well ask the question: Are these sausages that calculatedly miss their essence, or are they parables that aim for infinity because did they choose such a clever curve through the cosmos of their motifs?
The movie comes on time
The director David Gordon Green has now presented another “Halloween” film just in time for the spooky autumn festival, which, not only with its title, expresses clear ambitions to perhaps end a series that began in 1978: “Halloween Ends” would probably spontaneously be called ” Halloween ends” until you realize that there is also a hidden plural. “The Ends of Halloween” would probably be a title to discuss with Elfriede Jelinek, who – together with Thomas Piltz – came up with the ingenious German title for Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Gravity’s Rainbow”: “The Ends of the Parabola”.
“Halloween” is, of course, like all horror films, also a parable, a simile in which what one would like to make identifiable about it only meets in infinity. In such films, the audience’s thirst for fear is always balanced with the ingenuity of the creators. Or the endurance of maltreated creatures with the destructive power of their tormentors.
Michael Myers, for example, who has been terrorizing the town of Haddonfield in Illinois in the “Halloween” films since 1978, with a calendar that is as monotonous as it is irreversible, could be seen as a parable for pure evil. At least this is the hypothesis that Laurie Strode, who came into contact with the bloodthirsty Myers at the time as a high school student because of a property, came into contact with. Now an older lady, she is still played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who marked growth rings in her career with this role. Laurie refuses to acknowledge the trauma that the film series attempts to re-update from time to time. She is looking for a therapeutic way out of the compulsion to repeat the ever-new sequels, and she finds the obvious one: She takes possession of the story by writing it down, from her point of view and with her offer of peace that wards off spirits. Death should become text, after that he should please leave those who are still alive alone.
Now comes the babysitter killer
Those who are still alive in Haddonfield, however, do not get out of their entanglements in the local evil so easily. For example, Corey, a nice young guy, babysat a boy in a prologue sequence of the current movie three years before “Halloween Ends”. It came as it had to, without Michael Myers showing up. Since then, Corey has been known as the babysitter killer, and teenagers think they can tease him. Allyson, Laurie’s granddaughter, lost her parents in one of Michael Myers’ murder sprees. She’s attracted to Corey: That, coupled with Laurie’s calming influence, could make for a happy ending. However, that wouldn’t fit the type of movie that Halloween Ends falls under. She has a shock order, reform work on the myth of evil is always subordinate to it.
David Gordon Green is an interesting director for the task of finding a plausible ending to the “Halloween” series opened by legendary genre veteran John Carpenter. He has worked for a long time on the border between auteur cinema and mainstream, his southern story “Undertow” is one of the finest examples of the special romance that is so special in this part of America. With the actor and author Danny McBride he has a friend at his side, who is also able to give a credible form to wonderfully off-beat ideas like the one for the television series “Eastbound & Down” – a failed baseball star in a provincial town consistently tests all the potential of his ridiculousness .
Green seemed to have settled into the stoned humor subgenre quite well when he revived the “Halloween” stuff in 2018. And now he has achieved something that only really results in project work in such a franchise: he wrote his own trilogy into the series. In fact, their goal is something of a reversal of the original premise. The annual comeback must coincide with a memorable year as Michael Myers resigns. Green very consciously plays with the ritual facets of Halloween and brings together what the series has now spread over almost two generations.
He won’t know the German joke about sausages, but there is a nice irony in the fact that evil (in one of its earthly incarnations) finds an end in a kind of sausage machine for harder objects. Allyson now has to decide whether to accept her grandmother’s offer of peace, or whether she’s so devastated by “Halloween Ends” that she eventually erupts into something that could even point the way beyond multiple endings into the ongoing serial.
