Editorials
Revisiting ‘Better Watch Out’ and Its Memorable ‘Home Alone’ Inspired Kill!
John Hughes was a prolific filmmaker with a reputation for having his fingers on the pulse of teen culture. He was a defining voice of youth in the ‘80s and articulated the trials and tribulations of adolescence in a way that left an indelible mark on cinema with many beloved films. His blend of emotional poignancy and humor extended beyond teen movies; Hughes also gave us memorable grown-up comedies and holiday classics like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and Home Alone.
Back in 2016, director Chris Peckover drew inspiration from Hughes during the creation of Better Watch Out, a mean-spirited twist on home invasion horror that navigates the social dynamics of teens against the holiday backdrop.
The plot follows 12-year-old Luke Lerner (Levi Miller) as he’s left alone for the night with babysitter Ashley (Olivia DeJonge) while his parents Robert (Patrick Warburton) and Deandra (Virginia Madsen) attend a holiday party. Harboring a longtime crush, Luke is hoping to seduce Ashley. Their quiet night of pizza and horror movie watching is interrupted first by Luke’s best friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould), and then by a masked and armed intruder. All hell breaks loose.
Initially, Zack Kahn’s screenplay was far bleaker, and the twist didn’t come until much, much later. Peckover and Kahn reworked it, making the ramifications of the twist a more prominent aspect of the story. When reflecting on the works of John Hughes, Peckover was interested in how his universally loved characters could remain so while essentially getting away with anything. Characters like Ferris Bueller, for example, who was so affable and charming; yet when you pick apart his actions, he’s not such a nice guy after all. Or the way that John Bender comes across as a misunderstood protagonist despite the way he treats Claire in The Breakfast Club. That’s Levi. An intelligent and well-mannered boy, but the more Better Watch Out progresses, the more sociopathic and dangerous he reveals himself to be. The cast’s tremendous performances and Peckover’s balance of tone, both the brutal and the brutally funny, make it work.
It’s not hard to see how easily films like Christmas Vacation or Home Alone could fall into horror with minor shifts in tone or perspective. Without the cheeky humor or the intent to make a family film, Kevin McAllister could’ve been catastrophically traumatized by the Wet Bandits, or worse- dead. Fitting then, that Peckover pays significant tribute to the holiday classic in what’s now become the film’s most memorable kill.
“Whoa, you’re fucking Home Alone-ing him?”
Garrett aptly says what we’re all thinking when we see Levi gleefully holding a paint can from the second-floor railing, trying to position his victim, Ricky (Aleks Mikic), in line with its pendulum swing. In a wry wink to the audience, the paint strategically covers the can’s exterior to spell out “Splatter.” Garrett and Ashley plead with Levi to drop it, so Levi complies by swinging the paint can one final time toward Ricky’s head. It collides with an awful, stomach-churning crunch; bright yellow infuses with Ricky’s blood, vivid and viscous. It’s a horrible way to go.
Peckover paints (ha, see what I did there) a pretty disturbing picture of what happens when heavy paint cans smash into a person’s face even when you don’t quite see it. The sound and implication, as well as the bloody aftermath, is enough for our minds to fill in the blanks. For the curious, though, the actual science behind Kevin McAllister’s booby traps has been a source of curiosity for years now, and this article and this video make it explicitly clear the toll this “trap” takes on a human face. The Wet Bandits got off miraculously, but poor Ricky did not go gentle into the good night.
None of this is to say that Peckover set out to make a John Hughes Christmas movie with a horror twist. Still, he does strike up an interesting dialogue with Hughes’s films, namely in how they often turned what could have been despicable characters into likable leads. In Better Watch Out, Levi begins as the pleasant hero, but it’s revealed to be a polished façade for the monster beneath. The detached and gleeful way he borrows from Home Alone to slaughter his romantic competition is the perfect highlight of both Levi and the film’s tonal balance between viciously warped and comedic. If you’re looking for a great double feature, look no further.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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