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.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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