Halloween Kills director David Gordon Green reflects on sequel's backlash: "It's 100% the movie I wanted to make"

While Halloween proved popular with horror audiences in 2018, welcoming back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode and examining the traumatic aftermath of being a Final Girl, its follow-up, Halloween Kills, divided fans. More violent than ever, it saw Laurie take a backseat and presented antagonist Michael Myers as more of a supernatural entity – and not everyone was into it. Now, director David Gordon Green has defended the slasher sequel, saying that it was "100% the movie [he] wanted to make" and that he's "extremely proud of its kind of insanity." 

In the new issue of SFX magazine, featuring the upcoming trilogy capper Halloween Ends on the cover, the filmmaker explains: "To me, psychologically, the whole point of that movie is kind of unravelling 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.'"

Set four years after the events of Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends follows Laurie (Curtis) as she tries to write a memoir about her past experiences. Michael hasn't been seen since his last murderous rampage, Laurie has moved in with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), and things in Haddonfield appear to have quietened down. But when a young man, Corey Cunningham, is accused of killing a boy he was babysitting, Laurie is forced to finally confront the evil she can't control, once and for all.

"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," Green continues. "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?"

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We'll find out how he and co-writers Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernie, and Danny McBride answered those questions when Halloween Ends is released on October 14.

The above is just a snippet of the long-read, available in the Halloween Ends issue of SFX magazine, available on newsstands from Wednesday, October 5. For even more from SFX, sign up to the newsletter, sending all the latest exclusives straight to your inbox.