'Halloween Kills' actress Judy Greer on the sequel's bloody finale: 'It's beautiful'

After it was postponed for an entire year by the COVID-19 health crisis, Halloween Kills finally stabbed its way into theaters and onto Peacock this past weekend. In addition to giving the Halloween franchise its second-largest box office debut in North America, the film also provided audiences with a much higher body count than its 2018 predecessor.

The screenplay by Danny McBride, Scott Teems, and director David Gordon Green puts Michael Myers on a warpath full of sharpened kitchen knives, punctured eyeholes, bludgeoned skulls, and Silver Shamrock masks leaking blood. Nearly being burned alive really makes a guy hungry for homicide, and this time around, no one is safe.

**SPOILER WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the end of Halloween Kills!**

With one more chapter slated to hit the big screen next fall (Halloween Ends will kick off production in early 2022), Haddonfield couldn't exactly lose its jump-suited boogeyman in the bleached William Shatner mask. At least not yet. So while Halloween Kills wasn't able to make good on the catchy slogan of "Evil dies tonight!", it could provide Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) an ironclad excuse to bring down everything she's got on the taciturn killer that first shattered her psyche over four decades ago.

That excuse comes in the form of Laurie's daughter, Karen (played by Judy Greer), who, after luring Michael into an ambush headlined by Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) and Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), takes a trip back to the Myers house and into the bedroom where Judith Myers was murdered by her little brother on that fateful Halloween night back in 1963. This turns out to be a very bad idea because mob justice is no match for the Shape.

Michael kills everyone (Tommy and Brackett included) and then returns home to finish off Karen. It's a literal gut punch (or stab, one might say) of an ending that Greer recently described as "very sort of avant-garde and cinematic" during a conversation with IndieWire. "The end of the movie is like an opera," she added. "It’s beautiful, I think."

Credit: Universal Studios

Fortunately, Greer was a little more prepared than the rest of us, having been tipped off about Karen's fate by Gordon Green prior to filming. "David called me before he sent me the script to tell me what the ending would be, so I knew, and I was very sad,” the actress recalled. “First of all, I think it was the right decision and a cool decision. I was sad because I want so badly to go back to my family and make another one of these movies. So that was my sadness.”

Once principal photography kicked off in Wilmington, North Carolina, the director and makeup effects designer, Christopher Nelson, got down to brass tacks on the best way to kill Karen. "He and David together talk about like, ‘What would be cool? What haven’t we seen before?’" Greer said. "Before I started shooting my role, Chris was trying to figure out like, ‘What’s a really special way [to do this]? We’re going to do this. We have to do it special and perfect and beautiful.'”

Laurie and Karen's own daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), probably won't be too happy about this turn of events. Allyson in particular must be an absolute wreck after losing her boyfriend and both parents on the same night to the same psychopath within the span of a couple of hours. But maybe things aren't as bleak as they seem. If Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) can survive a gushing neck wound, then Karen can certainly come back from a few stabs to the torso... Right?

“Not looking good for me,” Greer reportedly concluded with a chuckle. “But, hey, one never knows.”

Halloween Kills is now playing in theaters and on Peacock. Set four years after the events of Kills, Halloween Ends is scheduled to open in theaters everywhere on Oct. 14, 2022.

(Universal Pictures, Peacock & SYFY WIRE are all owned by NBCUniversal)