The opening shot of a film is everything. It is the initiation of a conversation between the work and its audience, an instantaneous setting of the table for what is to come. In ways both conscious and subconscious, an opening shot (good or bad) communicates more to viewers than almost any other shot in the film’s runtime. This is why when filmmakers knock their film’s opening shot out of the park, it remains with an audience. The opening shot of John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween is very much one such shot. It’s also why in 2022 when the first trailer for Halloween Ends opens with a beat-by-beat recreation of the shot, it is especially noteworthy.
David Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends looks to bring the Halloween franchise to a close once more, serving as the final (final) film for Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode and the creative team that has been working on these films since 2018’s Halloween. Eschewing every Halloween film from continuity except Carpenter’s 1978 original, Gordon Green’s trilogy of sequels has remained deeply indebted to Carpenter’s work throughout. The 2018 film essentially served as a full-blown legacy sequel to 1978’s Halloween, while Halloween Kills went out of its way to bring in every single character who could possibly still be alive from Carpenter’s original film.
Thus, it makes perfect sense for the marketing campaign for Halloween Ends to open with an extended love letter to Carpenter’s craft in a direct fashion. Gordon Green had previously teased that Halloween Ends would act as “an appreciation of (Carpenter’s) legendary body of work” while being “there to honor Carpenter” but not “necessarily just emulating him.” From the trailer’s meticulous recreation of the original film’s opening shot and the way in which it is used to subvert expectations deliberately, it certainly seems as if David Gordon Green and co. have stayed true to their word.
The opening shot of Carpenter’s Halloween is a sustained POV oner, utilizing Panavision’s Panaglide camera rig that Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey used throughout the film. The result is a proto-steady cam that maintains fluidity and legibility without ever feeling cold or disconnected from minute human errors, making it perfect for a POV shot such as this. The shot begins outside the Myers house before traveling inside, as the character whose eyes the audience is seeing through picks up a knife and dons a mask. The camera ascends the stairs to Judith Myers’ bedroom and watches in detached bemusement as the character brutally stabs her to death. The camera then retreats back outside, where a car is pulling up, and the Myers parents are rushing to the house.
The shot then cuts to the reveal of the Myers pulling the mask off of young Michael, still holding the bloody knife. Modern audiences may take this moment for granted, but the reveal that Carpenter’s murderer was nothing more than a child was subversion in and of itself. Earlier horror films like 1974’s Black Christmas had utilized POV shots to submerge the audience in the killer’s mind to startlingly grotesque effect. Carpenter and Cundey took that approach and built upon it not only by delivering a much more formally complex and choreographed shot but also by deliberately weaponizing audience expectations. Viewers would be expecting the killer to be a deranged lunatic, a monster of his own accord, not an entirely innocent-looking suburban child.
In this way, the trailer for Halloween Ends very much takes the baton from Carpenter and runs with it over four decades later. Even if general audiences are not overly familiar with the specifics of that opening shot, they are certainly savvy enough to know what to expect from looming POV camera movements with heavy breathing sound effects layered over the top. David Gordon Green puts audiences right back into the mind of the killer just like Carpenter did in 1978, the camera slowly ascending the steps of the house and nearing the cracked open door of a bedroom.
In Carpenter’s film, young Michael was able to unassumingly enter his sister’s bedroom to sneak up behind her and murder her. But in the Halloween Ends trailer, the shot jarringly cuts to an over-the-shoulder shot of Michael entering the bedroom to see Laurie Strode waiting for him, gun aimed directly at him. It’s an inventive reversal that is very reminiscent of Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride’s best beats in their own 2018 Halloween.
It’s also indicative of the film at large. The recently released official synopsis for Halloween Ends reveals that it will focus on a babysitter falsely accused of murder in a world where the people of Haddonfield have been primed to expect the worst thanks to their history with Michael Myers. Here, Gordon Green illustrates these expectations within the audience themselves in a starkly effective fashion.
Halloween Ends promises to be the culmination of the “saga,” one final battle between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. There is something immensely fitting about the series’ proposed finale featuring such overt ties to the first film, all while utilizing Carpenter’s visual vocabulary to turn the audience’s expectations on their head, in much the same way Carpenter did with the original Halloween.
Halloween Ends releases in theaters on October 14, 2022.