Books
‘Halloween Kills’ – What Can We Expect from the Extended Cut? The Novelization May Answer That Question
Ahead of the January 11, 2022 release on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD (plus a Best Buy Steelbook!), David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills will be released Digitally on December 13, 2021, with an “Extended Cut” of the movie being previewed by Amazon. In all likelihood, this new extended version of the sequel to Halloween 2018 will be available digitally and physically.
But what can we expect from the “Extended Cut”? We have no official details at this time, but David Gordon Green did recently tease that an extended version of the movie with an alternate ending was on the way. That reveal came in a chat with Collider last month.
Gordon Green explained, “There’s an additional scene that we filmed that was scripted. And actually I think is a pretty brilliant scene. So we’re going to do an extended version on the DVD, just so people can see an extended ending that’s different and cool.”
“We ended up lifting it when I became more confident of where we’re going to pick up in the next movie; it didn’t feel authentic to where we’re going to go,” he continues. “It’s part of the movie. It’s just not part of the appropriate momentum of… knowing where we’re going to pick up in [Halloween Ends], which, you’ll know in a year, it wasn’t the right look in the eye that we needed to give the audience.”
In the version of Halloween Kills that’s now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock, Michael survives a seemingly un-survivable assault from the residents of Haddonfield, massacring the mob and returning to his childhood home. In his deceased sister Judith Myers’s old bedroom, Michael seems to kill Karen Strode, and the film cuts to black from there.
As David Gordon Green notes, an “extended ending” was not only filmed but also originally scripted, and that last bit is interesting to note because writer Tim Waggoner based the official Halloween Kills novelization – which is now available – on the movie’s script. And wouldn’t ya know it, the novelization indeed does have an extended/alternate ending.
Waggoner recently explained to Bloody Disgusting’s Jason Jenkins, “The ending is the same as in the movie, except in the script it goes on just a touch longer. It doesn’t change anything about the ending at all. It just is a little different. It’s just like they ended thirty seconds early or something. Maybe that’ll show up on the special features of the DVD.”
Here’s how the novelization ends, after Michael kills Karen Strode…
Laurie turned and slowly walked toward the front of the recovery room. On the way, she stopped at her bed, reached beneath the blanket, and withdrew the knife that Allyson had left for her. Its solidness felt comforting, reassuring. Holding the blade tight, she continued toward the room’s entrance. A hospital phone was mounted on the wall next to the door. She lifted the receiver, tucked it between her cheek and shoulder, and began pressing digits. She knew Karen’s cell phone number by heart.
*
The Shape stands at his sister’s window as he did so many years ago, blood-splattered mask reflected in the glass before him. He does not see himself, though. He sees something else. Something beyond… something greater. He sees-
A series of musical tones plays then, distracting him. He turns toward the sound, sees the woman – Her daughter – lying dead on the floor, Christmas sweater in tatters, her chest a ragged mess of blood and torn meat. The music is coming from one of her pockets. The Shape tilts his head to the side, considers. The he kneels, reaches into the front pocket of the woman’s jeans with his three-fingered hand, and pulls out her phone. He stands, looks at the display, pushes a button, and raises the device to his head.
*
Laurie was relieved when the call was answered. She was about to speak when she heard heavy breathing on the other end, sick and distorted, as if whoever it was had been seriously injured. This wasn’t Karen. She knew that breathing, knew it as well as her own. She felt a tearing sensation deep inside then, as if a vital piece of her had been suddenly, violently ripped away.
Karen…
Her hand trembled, but when she spoke her voice was as cold as a windswept Arctic plain.
“I’m coming for you, Michael.”
Why would this extra little moment – Laurie declaring that she’s coming for Michael – not fit where Gordon Green is going next with Halloween Ends? Well, that could be because the next movie in the trilogy is going to jump ahead four years, so perhaps Gordon Green felt it best to not set the stage for that final battle so many years before it actually does take place.
This is all speculation on my part, of course, but it seems pretty clear at this point that the extended ending in the book is indeed also the extended ending in this new version of the movie that we’re going to be treated to on the road to Christmas. Which then begs the question: Will the Extended Cut feature even more new footage that we haven’t yet seen?
For starters, we’re hoping to see an additional shot of Michael Myers that was cut from the theatrical/streaming version, notable because it features ’78 star Nick Castle as The Shape.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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