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‘Halloween Ends’ Is Just the Beginning: Reflecting On One Year of Corey Cunningham

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for 2022’s Halloween Ends.

October 14, 2023 is many things to many people. It’s Mother’s Day in Belarus, for instance. It’s Usher’s 45th birthday. But perhaps most importantly to the readers of Horror Press, it’s the first anniversary of the release of Halloween Ends, one of the most divisive sequels in a long-running slasher franchise that is more or less composed entirely of divisive sequels.

Now that we’ve had a year to rest on our laurels and think about it, it’s time to really drill deep and reevaluate one of the most controversial elements of the movie: Corey Cunningham. 

So What’s Corey Cunningham’s Deal?

Halloween Ends is (allegedly) the final movie to feature scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of Laurie Strode, the longtime Final Girl for the iconic serial killer Michael Myers. It is also the end of director David Gordon Green’s trilogy of Halloween legacy sequels, the first two of which took place on Halloween night 2018 before time jumping several years into the future. In the meantime, we are introduced via prologue to Mr. Cunningham (Rohan Cambell), a college student who accidentally kills a child he is babysitting.

In the intervening years, rumors have swirled around Corey as the townspeople of Haddonfield, Illinois have turned against both him and Laurie (blaming her for provoking Myers into his spate of 2018 killings). Although Myers has not been seen since then, Corey is relentlessly berated and bullied to the point that, when he accidentally discovers the killer’s hiding place, he takes Michael on as something of a mentor, like a nonverbal, bloodthirsty Big Brother. Thus Corey and Michael go on a killing spree while Corey romances Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), who is also somewhat sick of the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Haddonfield.

Corey is dead, largely by his own hand, as of the middle of the third act (to frame Laurie for his own murder, however briefly), which clears the stage for the promised showdown between her and Michael. However, the bulk of the body count in the first two acts comes from Corey rather than Michael, which is precisely why his character has been widely reviled by fans of the franchise. In addition to being a newcomer in the 13th entry of a long-running series, Corey took a lot of the spotlight that could have gone to Michael, also giving the murders a very different flavor from the previous movies. Go figure, a brooding bad boy with luscious curly locks doesn’t exactly exude the same vibe as the hulking masked killing machine that fans have come to know and love.

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Should We Cut Corey Cunningham Some Slack?

It is undeniable that Halloween fans do not like it when Michael Myers is sidelined unexpectedly. This was the case with 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the aborted attempt to abruptly swerve the franchise into an anthology format. However, while the Myers-less movie was widely despised at the time, a major critical reevaluation has taken place in recent decades and led many fans to swing back in the other direction, celebrating its unique spirit and abundance of goopy special effects. If anything, these days you’re more likely to run into someone overvaluing it as a knee-jerk response to its many years in the Halloween doghouse.

Now that the heat of the moment of the Halloween Ends release has cooled, it’s time to look at Corey with those same unbiased eyes. Because a lot about him works, especially when put into the context of the trilogy as a whole.

By the end of the mob justice finale that graces 2021’s Halloween Kills, it has become quite clear that David Gordon Green and his co-writers are intent on using this new trilogy to point a mirror at Haddonfield and the way it creates the monsters that stalk its streets. Whether this is a good idea is up for debate, but it is nevertheless a big, splashy, vaingloriously unsubtle announcement of the trilogy’s thematic intentions.

Corey Cunningham is the human embodiment of that theme, also bringing Halloween 2018’s theme of generational trauma full circle in the form of a character who handles his own mistreatment much much worse than the women of the Strode family. Because of the multiplicity of themes he serves, he is simultaneously a foil to Laurie, Allyson, and Michael Myers himself (just saying – it’s probably not a coincidence his name rhymes with “Laurie”). While that’s a lot to put on a character we just met, Rohan Campbell shoulders the burden admirably well, couching his pent-up rage inside an adorkable wounded bird charm that effectively delivers years of character arc in just a few scenes and at least almost credibly sells Corey and Allyson’s romance.

It’s Time to Forgive Corey Cunningham

I said “almost,” because the Halloween Ends screenplay consistently lets Corey down as much as it builds him up. While the title already reveals that this isn’t a torch-passing movie that will set Corey up to carry out further murders in future sequels, his ultimate fate proves how little function he has in his own story. When the movie kills him off, it instantly forgets about him, wrenching itself back into place during the Michael Myers showdown it always passed itself off as being. This cuts off the possibility for any sort of effective storytelling about Corey (Corey-telling?) at the knees.

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This isn’t even the first time the movie has feinted toward telling a more interesting Corey story. His blossoming relationship with Allyson has the potential to go full Bonnie and Clyde and thus present a truly meaty emotional challenge for Laurie to face. But this simply cannot happen because that storyline would render Michael Myers completely useless, which a Halloween movie in the 2020s just can’t do. So Corey’s storyline, while attempting to move forward, keeps butting up against the brick wall that is Michael, entirely failing to fit into this Myers-lite narrative whether we put on our “Halloween III was good, actually” hats when watching the movie or not.

What all of this adds up to, for this author anyway, is a character that is worth existing, but who is locked in a desperate search for a movie that can support him. Halloween Ends is not that movie, no matter how much film theory you can toss its way like life preservers off the deck of a sinking ship. But none of this is strictly Corey’s fault. He’s not an active impediment to the movie, just an element with much more potential than there was room for. Was it a mistake to put him in Halloween Ends? Probably. But there are a lot of elements of the trilogy that never quite found their place (just look at what Halloween Ends does with Kyle Richards), and Corey is merely one of them, not necessarily a film-breaking flaw in and of himself.

Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the  Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can also find his full-length movie reviews on Alternate Ending and his personal blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.

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Editorials

What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy

The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.

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If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.

Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown

Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?

But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)

Baghead Jason

What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?

What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.

However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.

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What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?

Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.

This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.

Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.

If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.

Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.

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So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?

It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us

I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.

For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?

Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.

However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.

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Poll taken from Horror Press Instagram account

What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie

Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.

Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.

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Editorials

Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

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I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?

Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?

Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest

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The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies

While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time. 

Watch the trailer for Umma below

Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More

Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.

I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.

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