BETTER WATCH OUT (2016)
Stop me if you’ve seen this one before: the babysitter, charged with protecting a young kid, realizes that someone is trying to get into the home she’s been hired to guard for a few hours while Mom and Dad are out. A simple night of making sure a kid doesn’t die in all the usual, mundane ways (falling, choking, drinking bleach) becomes a fight for her own survival as much as the kid’s, and now she fears stabbing, slashing, and stalking, not to mention all the other ways female bodies can be violated. It’s HALLOWEEN (1978). It’s THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009). It’s WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979 & 2006). It’s ANNABELLE COMES HOME, sort of. It’s a million different urban legends. And it’s BETTER WATCH OUT, Chris Peckover’s film whose poster positions it as a horror-ific take on HOME ALONE (1990). (“You might be home, but you’re not alone,” the tagline warns).
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover posits that it might be best to approach horror films like folktales. She says that in horror, like in folklore, “there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants.” For Clover, “the ‘art’ of the horror film, like the ‘art’ of pornography, is to a very large extent the art of rendition or performance” (Clover, 1996). She is arguing that it’s pointless to focus on what a horror film does first, and that it’s actually more fun to pay attention to what a horror film does again, what it restages that’s already been done before, to trace the migration of horror images across films and generations. BETTER WATCH OUT is all about performance, and it’s all about pornography, too. It’s about the ways in which a young boy is molded by the suffocating, compulsory hetero-masculinity of the suburbs, and about the ways his impressionable young soul is hollowed out by media that tells him it’s his right to want to sleep with the babysitter. After all, his dad sure does.
In the version of this story called BETTER WATCH OUT, we meet Ashley (Olivia DeJonge), a young girl who’s about to head off to college after the holidays. She’s been babysitting Luke (Levi Miller) for years, and he’s been nursing a crush the entire time… and so tonight, in what he sees as his last chance, he’s decided he’s going to scare her into his arms by watching a horror movie together. After all, he’s heard that “fear makes girls wet.” Never mind that he’s only 12.
That’s the basic setup, and before long, it’s not just the horror movie on TV that scares Ashley. It’s the person lurking at the window. The unseen stranger tossing a brick inside, reading U LEAVE, YOU DIE. Slipping into the house unseen. Standing down the hallway. Following them into the closet, where they cower together, terrified. It’s THE STRANGERS (2008), and it’s a bit THE SHINING (1980), and the original THE PURGE, and so many more.
SPOILERS AHEAD
And the movie knows that. And Luke knows that. Because, we learn half an hour into the film, it’s not actually an outside threat that Ashley needs to worry about. It’s Luke himself, staging the home invasion with the help of his best friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould), in the hopes that the fear will arouse Ashley and she’ll finally sleep with him. Voice often cracking—keeping him on the eerie edge of the onset of puberty—Luke becomes the villain of the thing as his plan spirals out of control.
He’s an effete young man who represents far more of a threat than he initially seemed, an embodiment of something essentially rotten at the very core of youthful American masculinity. It’s not (just) HOME ALONE; it’s PSYCHO (1960).
It makes sense to set this type of story at Christmastime, the season at which we’ve taught young kids that they will be receiving a reward only if they’ve acted right the rest of the year. After all, the song from which the movie takes its name is all about behaving correctly, or else you won’t get a visit from Santa. Accordingly, Luke is a “good kid” (or, if you will, a “nice guy”). He does well in school; he doesn’t act out in front of his parents; he dresses like a young accountant at an office Christmas party. And now, he’s ready to collect. And he doesn’t care who he has to hurt in order to get what’s coming to him. Or who he might need to be ready to kill. Why would Ashley want to be with that guy her age? He’s a jerk, not like Luke!
He’s like a kid expecting a bike from Santa, and he’s throwing a temper tantrum because the bike said, “Actually, no thank you!” Only in this metaphor, the present he believes himself entitled to is a human woman, one who has suddenly realized that the cute young kid she’s seen grow up isn’t so harmless and adorable anymore. He’s on the precipice of being a man, in all of the many dimensions of what that means. And she’s realizing that maybe it wasn’t so harmless when the kid’s father commented on her looks the minute he opened the door, and that it probably affected the kid, too, to hear his mother question his father’s sexuality because he’s fastidious about Christmas decorations. All of these things have consequences, and the consequences might just be deadly for the babysitter caught in the vortex of their convergence.
To be clear: for all its thematic preoccupations, BETTER WATCH OUT has quite a sense of fun and whimsy to it, too. This is a movie that positively revels in its influences, finding a lot of joy in perverting its wintry setting. This is a movie that knows cinematic blood just looks visually cool when it’s splattered on glistening, new-fallen snow. The most memorable sequence in the film involves Luke re-staging one of the traps from HOME ALONE, gleefully discovering whether a human head actually responds like it did in that wholesome holiday classic when hit with a full can of paint thrown from an upper floor. The dialogue is witty and quick, and there are laughs to be had even as you can’t quite believe the movie is going there. It also helps that every performance just sings, from Levi Miller’s chilling affability as Luke to Ed Oxenbould and Olivia DeJonge’s easy rapport…the two having played siblings in M. Night Shyamalan’s THE VISIT.
To be clear about one final thing: this isn’t a moralizing, “horror movies are bad” film, not one that thinks those other titles made Luke the way he is. Instead, the art of BETTER WATCH OUT is that it’s a movie that knows you are bringing your cinematic knowledge of all those other ones to your viewing, just as Luke is bringing his knowledge of those movies to this sadistic plan he’s concocted. It’s using the driving force of the near-mythic power of those told and re-told stories to make a point about something larger than itself. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch it succeed.
And, oh yeah, because all movies should carry this sort of trigger warning: there are spiders. You better watch out, indeed.
Clover, C. J. (1996). Men, women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the modern horror film. British Film Institute.
