WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Halloween Kills, now playing in theaters and available to stream on Peacock.
With multiple revivals and reboots redefining the franchise across its over forty-year history, the Halloween franchise is perhaps one of the more convoluted slasher movie series in regards to its own continuity. The 2018 Halloween opted to streamline this by removing all but the 1978 original film from its official canon, including the subplot introduced in 1981's Halloween II that Laurie Strode was Michael Myers' long-lost sister. And this revised continuity has largely held true into Halloween Kills, save for the occasional Easter egg and nod to previous films in the franchise with the exception of one scene lifted directly from Halloween II that is incorporated into Halloween Kills.
In addition to bringing back the surviving cast from the 2018 film and Laurie herself, Halloween Kills features plenty of classic characters, each with their own vendetta against what the Shape cost them back on that fateful night in 1978. In addition to a vengefully driven Tommy Doyle and his fellow survivor Lindsay Wallace, Sheriff Leigh Brackett is still haunted by what the Shape cost him forty years ago, with his teenage daughter Annie among Myers' first victims when the masked serial killer broke out of Smith's Grove sanitarium. And as Brackett, now working at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital as a security guard, recalls his own experiences in 1978, archival footage from the largely non-canonical Halloween II is revisited.
Halloween II began immediately where the 1978 film left off as the Shape, having survived being shot six times by Doctor Sam Loomis, went on the run before setting his sights on Laurie while she recovered at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. While the events of the film are largely eliminated from Halloween Kills' continuity, the archival footage from Halloween II where Sheriff Brackett discovers the body of his murdered daughter Annie is reinserted into canon, with the grieving lawman silently closing his dead daughter's eyes before leaving the scene of the crime to inform his wife of the tragedy.
Obviously, the inclusion of this brief scene doesn't magically validate the standing of Halloween II back into the new canon, but it does provide a nice character moment for Brackett and nod to longtime fans of the franchise by directly quoting the past film. And it also helps inform Brackett joining Tommy's mob at the end of Halloween Kills to finally get his chance to avenge his daughter, putting several shots into the Shape during the 2021 film's climactic confrontation for a showdown over forty years in the making.
Sheriff Brackett was largely relegated to the sidelines in Halloween II, only appearing in the beginning and end of the 1981 film, before disappearing from the classic timeline completely. Halloween Kills gives Brackett much more to do while reinstating a quick glimpse from an evidently erased sequel. And while Halloween II largely remains out of the new continuity, the scene's inclusion opens the possibility of other moments from the excised history making their way back into the franchise in time for its big finale Halloween Ends next year, making the revised continuity something of an a la carte approach to selecting what remains intact for the canon. Just don't hold out for the Cult of Thorn making their big screen return any time soon.
To see this piece of canon be restored, Halloween Kills is in theaters now and currently available to stream on Peacock.