Holiday Classic Gremlins Helped Shape The Tone Of Chris Peckover's Better Watch Out
Christmas horror movies are some of the most fun you can have during the holidays. There's something thrilling about combining the comfort of a holiday movie with the violent chaos of horror, to make a movie all about feeling unsafe during a time when you're supposed to feel the safest. The juxtaposition of blood and snow, plus all the Christmas lights make for delightfully colorful movies. It also helps that Christmas horror movies work on two separate holidays; You can add them to your October AND December watchlists.
One of the best horror Christmas movies of the past few years is Chris Peckover's "Better Watch Out." The Australian horror movie is an R-rated riff on "Home Alone" and "Funny Games." It follows Ashley (Olivia DeJonge), a 17-year-old babysitting precocious 12-year-old Luke (Levi Miller) at Christmas time. After Luke, who has romantic feelings for Ashley, fails to seduce her, the doorbell rings and the two are attacked by intruders. Of course, that's only the beginning of this twisted tale, which evolves into a funny, thrilling, very gory horror movie with one of the nastiest villains of the past decade.
Of course, it may not surprise you to know that director Chris Peckover is a fan of the classics. After all, "Better Watch Out" features plenty of homages, including a brilliant take on the paint can from "Home Alone." Still, when it came to influences, there was another classic holiday horror movie that had a tonal impact on this film.
Deck the halls with guts and screams
To promote "Better Watch Out," Chris Peckover did a Reddit AMA back in 2017. During the Q&A, someone asked Peckover to identify his favorite horror movie and his favorite Christmas movie. Peckover's response to the former was Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist," which he called "just the most blissful blend I've ever seen of revulsion, care for its characters, terror, and wonder about things beyond our world."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Peckover's answer for his favorite Christmas movie was Joe Dante's "Gremlins," a movie he said "had a huge tonal impact on 'Better Watch Out.'" Indeed, if you're looking for a "Home Alone" style horror movie that also has some wicked humor to it, you can't do much better than "Gremlins." This movie has a perfect mix of genres — it's a movie you can watch at any age and get something entirely new out of it. It's also a movie that unleashes absolute horror in typical Smalltown, USA Amblin Entertainment tone, resulting in a horror comedy that is horrific and violent, while simultaneously sweet and funny.
As a Christmas movie, it's endearing, heartfelt, and full of holiday spirit. But what makes this movie shine is its horror element. "Gremlins" is on the upper echelon of family-friendly horror movies, while also portraying some of the most brutal death scenes in a horror movie — really, microwaving a gremlin? That's a bit much, Lynn Peltzer. This is a movie that helped usher in the era of PG-13, thanks to its dark script and gory visuals, with a tale about Santa Clause that traumatized children everywhere. And that's just from the movie we got; the original script was far more gruesome, with a deleted scene that showed gremlins massacring the patrons at McDonald's.
'Tis the season to be gory
"Better Watch Out" takes a page out of Dante's book by going for a balance of tones. The film is fun when it wants to be, and has a touch of whimsy, but when it turns on the horror dial, you're in for a bloody good time that has you on the edge of your seat. Only, the horror is neither cool nor exciting; it's stomach-wrenching and closer to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" in how we're forced to watch the most despicable person commit atrocity after atrocity. The villain is not only a brutal killer, but a heartless psychopath with zero redeeming qualities, yet he is hugely entertaining to watch.
And still, very much like "Gremlins," Chris Peckover's "Better Watch Out" does have plenty of twisted humor. The funniest moments are those where you laugh, mostly because the only alternative would be clawing out your eyes to stop watching moments of absurdity that hide something dark and horrific. The scene where all the gremlins sing along to "Snow White" in a movie theater is funny, sure, but it is also incredibly tense knowing they just murdered a bunch of people, and are about to murder a bunch more. Similarly, when "Better Watch Out" pulls a paint can gag like "Home Alone," the result is hilarious because it is exactly what would happen if someone were to do it in real life, but it is also horrifying and bloody.