Believer Faces The Same Mistake As David Gordon Green’s Halloween Reboot

Good comedians don’t explain their punchlines. Humor, like horror, relies on trust between the audience and the storyteller. We relate to the bit, fill-in the blanks, absorb the analogy or observation, and empathize, gleefully recoil, or otherwise place ourselves in relation to the storyteller and situation. The comedian can’t do this for us. If they do, the humor is lost. 

Sadly, this is exactly what David Gordon Green does over the course of his «Halloween» trilogy, and his reaction to its «backlash» (read: criticism) suggests he genuinely doesn’t see his insufferable Storysplaining, or his repeated underestimation of the audience, as the problem it truly is. 

In 2022, the director responded to his second chapter’s poor reception by telling SFX Magazine (via Games Radar), «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,» he said, adding «For me, that’s just part of the fun.» From there, he claimed audiences just wanted a shot-for-shot remake of the original. Later, when «Halloween Ends» earned the same criticism, Green told MovieMaker that, «For every bite of backlash, you also get people that are thanking you for taking it to a new place and keeping it alive.»

Clearly, the director thinks what upset «Halloween» fans was that he took the story in a different direction. He’s incorrect: the problem with «Halloween Kills» isn’t a lack of resolution, an injection of chaos, or the fact that it wasn’t the original. No one expects resolution in a Michael Myers movie, particularly when they know there’s a follow-up, and audiences want new things. «New and different» isn’t the problem here, and neither (for once) is the fandom.