All Four Of Halloween: Resurrection’s Endings Explained (and Which Is Canon?)

The filmmakers behind Halloween: Resurrection shot four different endings for the 2002 sequel, but which is canon? By the late 1990s, the Halloween franchise had produced five sequels of decreasing critical and commercial success. The seventh entry Halloween: H20 acted as something of a soft reboot, bringing back original lead Jamie Lee Curtis and ignoring all the other films except for the first two.

Halloween: H20 was a surprise success, not only at the box office but with critics as well. It seemed like the franchise was ready to be revived, so the studio soon moved forward with a direct sequel called Halloween: Resurrection. The problem is this sequel didn’t have a clear idea for where the franchise should go next, resulting in arguably the weakest entry of the series to date. This indecisiveness also carried through to the film’s ending.

Halloween: Resurrection’s filmmakers actually shot four variations of the movie’s final moments. The theatrical version has Michael’s “dead” body being brought to the morgue, then his eyes suddenly open right as the credits roll. Another finale sees final girl Sara (Bianca Kajlich) and Freddie (Busta Rhymes) inspecting Michael’s body as it’s wheeled out of the house. The two stare down at Michael Myers’ charred remains before he lurches to life, only for Sara to swiftly put a firefighter’s ax in his brain. The unintentionally hilarious part of this whole scene is the dozen or so police and firefighters in the background who don’t seem to notice or care that this is happening.

The third ending sees Ryan Merriman’s Deckard personally coming to the house to help rescue Sara, with the two actually meeting onscreen unlike the theatrical version. A wounded Freddie is later being taken out of the house, who apologizes to Sara for the death of her friends; it’s also left ambiguous as to whether Michael survived . The final ending is simply a jump scare of Michael popping out of a sewer and grabbing a random CSI character investigating the burnt-down house, in an ending that completely ignored Myers’s main targets in the film.

While it’s not uncommon for a movie to shoot multiple endings, having four different variations is rare. Films tend to evolve over the course of production, with everything from studio notes to test screenings affecting the final product. With Halloween: Resurrection, it seems the filmmakers couldn’t decide on whether or not Michael should definitively be alive or dead by the end. The theatrical ending settled on showing Michael is still alive, and while that one is technically the canon ending, the franchise soon rebooted itself with Rob Zombie’s Halloween a few years later. It was then made doubly unimportant when David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween specifically positioned itself as a direct sequel to the 1978 Halloween only,  and thus ignored everything else that came before it.

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