The Truth About Home Alone

It’s become something of a cliche in recent years to have a fan theory about a popular film or TV programme that hinges on the characters all being dead. Theories like that exist for everything from Rugrats to American Horror Story, and I don't particularly want to add to the pile, but this one actually makes sense, and so far as I can tell I’m the only one to have written about it.

    There are a lot of unrealistic elements to Home Alone, but the most immediately obvious is that the Wet Bandits take damage that would kill any real person, and keep going with minor injuries. Whether it’s taking multiple bricks to the head, having their skull melted by a blowtorch, or being electrocuted, the first two Home Alone films contain as much violence as any entry in the Saw franchise, and should, if they were at all realistic, have a body count to match - and yet they don’t. 

    The standard explanation for this is that, after all, these aren’t intended to be realist films - they’re just a bit of slapstick fluff, designed to entertain rather than to be thought about. Well, this is the internet, and no work of art gets away without being over-analysed and theorised about until it’s impossible to experience it without taking into account the sleep-deprived ramblings of someone you;ve never met. So, without further ado, here’s my theory on Home Alone 1 and 2.

The Wet Bandits are in Hell after being executed for murdering Kevin McAllister, and their punishment is to face off against him over and over again, and lose. Let’s look at the evidence:

Exhibit A: The Traps

Kevin McAllister is at an age where most kids are still figuring out that it’s not okay to pick your nose in public, and yet when the Wet Bandits try to rob his house he deals with them with all the expertise of a Vietnamese freedom fighter. The traps he builds are the kind of thing that a child might imagine, but would never have to practical skills to set up - unless the child had been gifted with supernatural Rube Goldberg powers to take revenge on his killers, of course.

Exhibit B: The Resilience of the Wet Bandits

I’ve gone into this above, and this video goes into more detail - basically, the Wet Bandits would have died dozens of times over in real life, yet they are barely even slowed down in the film. Ghosts, I tell you.

Exhibit C: The Wet Bandits’ Willingness to Kill

In the first film, the Wet Bandits eventually get into the house and catch Kevin, and they’re understandably pissed off. Most people, though, would think twice about killing a kid - especially when they’ve never committed anything more serious than burglary and vandalism up until this point. The Wet Bandits, though, are more than willing to jump straight from a routine B&E to the torture and murder of a child - and they would have gone through with it, too, if it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of the spooky neighbour who Kevin was frightened of earlier in the film. 

Generally speaking, when burglars are interrupted, their most common reaction is to run away - it’s just not worth fighting you over your DVD player. Escalating from burglary to assault and home invasion brings with it a significant increase in both the chances and the consequences of being caught, and for a lot of petty criminals it just isn’t worth the trouble. It’s even more unlikely for a burglar to kill the occupant of a house in order to complete the robbery - it happens, and when it does it’s horrifying, but those instances are the exception, not the rule. For most people murder is a big fucking deal - if killing a person were psychologically easy, we likely wouldn’t have survived as a species. So if it’s unusual for someone to commit an unplanned murder in order to facilitate a burglary, how much more unlikely is it for someone to decide, on the spur of the moment, to torture a child to death (the Wet Bandits are pretty grpahic about what they plan to do to Kevin)? Unless, of course, they already did it. These guys would kill a child, because they have killed a child - this very child, in fact. And here’s where it got them - trapped in an endless loop, facing off against their victim over and over again, and coming off considerably worse.

Exhibit D:

What are the odds of someone forgetting their child not once, but twice? Come the fuck on.

Creep (2014) - What if found footage, but good?

Everybody hates found footage films right now, and with good reason - there have been a slew of unimaginative jump-scare fests released since the success of Paranormal Activity that have caused the genre to be associated in most people’s minds with low-effort scripts and filmmaking that relies on loud-quiet-loud dynamics to build tension, rather than actual atmosphere. These films (the VHS franchise being the worst offenders) are the equivalent of fast food, as opposed to a good home-made meal. Just as McDonalds et al load their food with sugar and salt as a substitute for real flavour, films like the Insidious franchise create stress in the audience through sudden dramatic shifts in sound, and call it horror. If you came out of a film with your nerves shredded from dozens of jump “scares” then the film wasn’t scary, it was surprising. 

    You could be forgiven, then, for thinking that the sub-genre of found-footage horror was dead, and that nothing of value could come out of it. It’s just a played-out gimmick like 3D. But for the discerning viewer, there are a number of fantastic found-footage films out there, albeit buried under a mountain of crap - Sturgeon’s law applies here as everywhere else. In this blog post, I’ll be talking about my favourite found-footage film, and probably one of my favourite films full stop, 2014’s Creep.

Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice embody the term “filmmaker” to an extent rarely seen in this most collaborative of art forms. Brice directs the film; he and Duplass play the only two characters (save for a woman whose voice we hear on the phone at one point); due to the found-footage nature of the film, they do all the camerawork between them; and they wrote the script, which is based on a short story that they also wrote. The only other people involved in the film are Eric Andrew Kuhn (soundtrack) and Christopher Donlon (editing), and I doubt that there is a single prop in this film that cost more than thirty dollars - Creep is DIY to the fucking bones. 

    The plot goes like this: a freelance cameraman (Brice) gets offered a job by a strange recluse who lives out in the woods. The man (Duplass) explains that he has terminal cancer, and he wants to film a video for his unborn son whom he likely will not live to see. Duplass is incredibly creepy, and eventually Brice finds out that he was lying about the cancer - for this and other reasons, he leaves. Duplass then starts stalking him, and I’ll leave it at that. The film really does convey the terror of being stalked in a way that nothing else I’ve seen does, to the point that the middle part of it is reminiscent of a haunted house film. It has that same feeling of being trapped in a place that should feel safe, but whose sanctity has been violated in some way, so that even in your own bed you’re afraid of what might be watching you. 

    There are jump scares in this film, but not many, and those that there are are earned in a way that they never are with the average Blumhouse feature. What really makes the film so disturbing is Duplass’ performance as the titular creep. He’s not just, creepy, he’s practised - you get the sense that he’s done all this before, and he’ll do it again, and there’s nothing you can do about it because he’s better at this than you are. 

There’s no wider point I’m making here - this is just a short essay about a film that I love, and that I want to promote. So give it a look - at only 77min, it’s hardly a big time investment, and even if you hate the end as much as I did the film as a whole will still make you double-check your locks before you go to bed tonight. Just avoid the sequel.

You Should Know Shelley Duvall's Name

When you talk about the film The Shining, two names usually come up: Stanley Kubrick, and Jack Nicholson. Kubrick, of course, directed the film, while Nicholson gave a career-defining performance as RP McMurphy with an axe (he would later go on to such iconic roles as RP McMurphy, but a gangster, and RP McMurphy, but he’s in the army this time). The name most people don't remember is that of Shelly Duvall, the actress who plays Jack Torrance’s wife. She is unquestionably the star of the film, and delivers possibly the most accurate portrayal of someone in utter terror that I have ever seen on film, largely because Stanley Kubrick bullied her into a near breakdown. 

    That’s probably why nobody remembers her - when she does get brought up, it’s usually as another example of how a brilliant male director treated his actors like shit, but damn it he got results. It was all for the art, don’t you know. And in every such article, whether it’s on Cracked,com, in the pages of Sight & Sound, or in any other cultural publication, there’s always the same implication that it was Kubrick who should really get the credit for Duvall’s performance. After all, he stressed her out so much that she started going bald and cried so much she suffered from dehydration - isn’t that why she plays such a convinced victim?

    No, it isn’t. When you take a bad actor, or even a mediocre actor, and put them under intense stress, you;ll get a bad performance. I’ve heard a lot of ex-military types say that noone “ever rises to the occasion” in stressful situations; rather, they descend to the level of their training. I’ll take their word for it when it comes to their line of work, but it’s definitely true in terms of performance. Shelley Duvall gave one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in a horror film (perhaps even better than Toni Colette’s in Hereditary) because she is an incredible actress. Nicholson, meanwhile, played the same character he’s been playing since One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest - of course, like anyone who does the same thing over and over again, he’s become exceedingly good at it, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s essentially a one-trick pony.

TL;DR: Shelley Duvall should be a cinematic legend, and Stanley Kubrick was a bit of a cunt.

What Is Wrong With Funny Games

First things first, let me confess to something: I haven’t seen Funny Games. Or rather, I haven’t seen the original 1997 Funny Games - only the 2007 remake. In this essay, though, I won;t just be passing judgement on the 2007 English-language version, but on the original as well, and here’s why.

    Michael Haneke was very clear on his reasons for remaking his film: he wanted it to reach a wider audience, so that he could more effectively spread the message contained therein. Funny Games (2007) was intended as a shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games (1997). It was directed by the same director, just ten years after the original released, and Haneke’s stated intention was to replicate the film exactly, but with a more famous cast and English dialogue, so that the film would be more palatable to Western audiences. Therefore, barring some differences in the look of the remake (the decade between the two films saw the advent of digital), and slight changes in the performances caused by the change in the cast, Funny Games (2007) should be considered more like a translation than a remake. If it fails to capture the spirit of the original, making my judgement invalid, that is the fault of Michael Haneke - he has failed in his attempt to translate the film. So when I refer to Funny Games, I will be referring to the English-language remake, but I doubt I would have a different opinion of the Austrian version.

For those that haven’t seen it, Funny Games is about a family of three (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and someone else) who are visited at their home by two young men, who ask to borrow an egg. The men then overpower Roth and Watts and torture them through the night, eventually murdering all three. There’s a lot that works about the film. The dialogue is sharply written, the performances are all excellent, and the tension that Haneke generates never lets up, making Funny Games one of the hardest to watch films I have seen. Moreover, the torture that the two men inflict on Watts and family is primarily psychological. They force Tim Roth to ask his wife to undress for them; they taunt the two about their impending deaths; they murder the family’s dog, and guide Watts through a sadistic game of looking for the body. The only memorable act of violence in the film, besides the murders, is when one of the intruders breaks Tim Roth’s leg at the beginning of the home invasion, and even that is more a matter of practicality. One gets the sense that they broke Roth’s leg not as part of the torture, but as a prerequisite for it - in order for their plans to work, Roth has to be incapacitated. 

    Where a lesser filmmaker might use the set-up as an excuse to indulge in graphic violence, Haneke knows that the real horror happens in the mind of the audience, and that the quickest route to that mind is through dialogue. The audience aren’t really having their legs broken, but they are really listening to Peter and Paul (the two home invaders) talk.

    The cinematography is also very good (Haneke knows how to use a camera), and any film that has Naked City on the soundtrack earns points from me. Still, though, this isn’t a review - this is about what’s wrong with Funny Games. At the risk of looking like a philistine, here we go.

The things that work about Funny Games are exactly the elements that are most conventional. If this were just a horror film about a home invasion, it would be very well put together (although I still might not like it, for reasons I’ll go into later). Haneke, though, doesn’t make conventional films, and it seems he’s incapable of getting behind a camera without expounding his paranoia about the nature of video recording. In Caché and Benny’s Video, he did so in an interesting and rewarding way, but when making Funny Games Haneke was for some reason possessed by the spirit of a second-year film student, and decided to get really fucking meta. 

    Fourth wall breaks are a tricky thing. Do them right, and they can be great; do them wrong, and you look inept and pretentious. Haneke does not do them right. You see, the whole point of Funny Games is to question the audience - why are you still watching? Why do you like seeing people being tortured? Do we live in a society? So when Peter/Paul makes the family bet on whether they will survive the night (he, of course, bets that they won’t), he then turns to the camera and says, directly to the audience, “What about you? Who do you bet on?” or something of the sort. Get it? We’re watching the film, so we’re complicit in what the characters are doing. Later in the film, Naomi Watts manages to get hold of the shotgun Peter/Paul has been threatening the family with, and shoots Peter/Paul. Paul/Peter is shocked, and grabs a TV remote. He presses the rewind button and turns back time to just before Watts grabs the shotgun - he stops her, and saves Peter/Paul. Get it? It’s a film, so he can rewind it like a film. Get it? Do you get it yet? You’re rooting for the family, but you don't really want them to win yet, because you’re enjoying watching them suffer. Do you get it? Micahel Haneke isn’t sure you’ve really got it. 

    What’s really irritating about Funny Games is that Haneke clearly thinks he’s asking tough questions about our relationship to violent media, but he isn’t. He’s pointing out that we like to watch violent media - that’s it. He describes something that everyone already knows, and then acts as though he’s uncovered some deep truth. Without the pretension, Funny Games would be a pointless exercise in the depiction of cruelty. With it, it’s an hour and a half of listening to Michael Haneke’s opinions on cinematic violence - a fate only marginally better than that visited upon the characters in the film.

31 Great Horror Stories You Can Read Online For Free (Part 1)

There are two kinds of people in the world - those who understand that Hallowe’en begins at midnight on the 30th of September, and those who are wrong. Three years ago, I made an abortive attempt at the 31 Days of Horror on my Youtube channel. It resulted in my most-viewed video to date, but I crapped out in the second week when the election in the US happened and I decided to focus on politics. I now understand that my opinions on the arts are far more important than America’s gradual descent into fascism, so I’ve decided to give it another go. 

    For those who aren’t familiar with 31 Days of Horror, it’s a thing Youtubers do wherein they watch a horror film every day of October, and then make a video about it. I’ll be doing it slightly differently, though, because I don't have that much time these days. Instead of doing a video for my Youtube channel every day, I’ll be putting up a blog post relating to the horror genre - most will be about films, but some, like this one, will be more generally related to horror, because I get bored easily and rules are for losers. 

    This, then, is the opening salvo of my 31 Days of Horror, and what better way to celebrate off the Hallowe’en season than by reading a different horror story every day of this month? Here’s the first part of my thirty-one great horror stories you can read online for free - the rest will be coming later on in the month.

1 David Foster Wallace - “Incarnations of Burned Children”

If you need proof that the distinction between “literary” and “genre” fiction is entirely artificial, look no further than this story. Written by the lit snob’s favourite, the prophet of the postmodern, the quintessential academic’s writer David Foster Wallace, this is nevertheless horror to the core. It’s a short story - you can read it on your tea break - but no less impactful for that. DFW left not an ounce of fat on this story, throwing the audience headlong into every parent’s nightmare, and leaving them there.

2. Rachel J Llewellyn - “Date Night”

“Date Night,” like most of my favourite horror stories, is nasty, brutish and short - so short, in fact, that there’s not much I can say without spoiling it. It concerns a man who has trouble with women, and the lengths he will go to to get the girl of his dreams - beyond that, you’ll just have to read it.

 3. Joe R Lansdale - “The Duck Hunt”

I’ve not read much Lansdale - just this and a story he contributed to a bizarro anthology - but if it’s all like this, I’m a fan. He gets the perfect balance of horror and sardonic humour, so that the silliness of the situation adds to, rather than detracts from, the fear. This is the kind of horror that aims to disturb, rather than frighten - the kind that makes you feel as if you’ve slipped into a world almost identical to our own, but seen through a funhouse mirror. 

4. Joyce Carol Oates - “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

I don’t mean to set up impossible expectations, but this is probably the greatest horror story ever written. A teenage girl sees a strange man while out with her friends; the next day, he appears at her house while her parents are away, and tries to convince her to go for a ride with them. I’ve read nothing else by Oates, but this story alone is enough for her to stand alongside any prose writer in the pantheon - horror or otherwise - and not suffer by comparison.

5. Jeff Vandermeer - “The Third Bear”

A mounting feeling of dread is not something most people place high on their list of desirable qualities in a work of art, but it’s something I look for. I love a story or a film that captures the sense of things going seriously, irrevocably wrong, and “The Third Bear” does that better than any short story I’ve ever read. The people of a medieval village have been menaced by three bears, two of which they killed - it’s a simple set-up, but Vandermeer takes the story down a road only he could navigate. The hopelessness that pervades this story stuck with me for days. Render unto Seether…

6. Laird Barron - “Frontier Death Song”

Cross Ernest Hemingway with Jack London, graft four extra testicles onto the resulting offspring, have it raised by Thom Jones and you’ll have Laird Barron. He was raised by a survivalist father who would take him into the wilds of Alaska for over a year at a time to live off the land; he raised and trained sled dogs for a time, and has raced thrice in the Iditarod; and he’s probably the only Bram Stoker Award-winner to boast a five hundred pound deadlift - with a biography like that, it’s hard to imagine him not being a hell of a writer. “Frontier Death Song” displays Barron’s talents as a writer of both horror and noir, pitting a retired dogsled racer against the forces of Hell. The prose is tight and it’s plot-driven in a way that most stories of this length can’t pull off - there’s a reason Barron is one of the most esteemed writers in modern horror.

7. Alanna J Faelan - “The Taurid Branch”

This story will break your fucking heart. Suffused with a deep sense of loss, this is the best example I could find of emotionally-driven horror, and it got much scarier once I realised that the Taurid meteor stream is a real thing, and we pass through it twice a year.

8. Theodore McCombs - “Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women”

I can’t quite put into words what makes this story so affecting. The concept is great - women all across the world suddenly become unkillable. They can still die of natural causes, but any attempt at murder fails. The story follows Edith, the wife of a police superintendent, as she prepares to act as executioner to a murderess (the thinking being that, as all the failed murder attempts have been by men, perhaps a woman can still be killed by another woman). 

    It’s not any of the elements of the story, though - it’s something in the conjunction of those elements. The imagery of the story is strangely beautiful (a man attempts to smother a woman, and she grows new mouths on her arms; a man tries to drown a woman, and she develops gills); McCombs has a good ear for prose; and the character of Edith is interesting, and gets more development than characters often do in short stories; but it’s something unnameable in the way they combine, like notes in strange music, that gives the story its magic. McCombs is one to watch.

9. Algernon Blackwood - “The Wendigo”

Blackwood rarely gets the credit he deserves as a writer of cosmic horror. Lovecraft is the name everyone knows, but Blackwood was just as important to the development of the genre and (so far as I know) was just regular old-timey racist, not Lovecraft level racist. 

    Blackwood’s fiction speaks to me more than Lovecraft’s, and I think part of that is that Blackwood’s horror is much more grounded in nature. As frightening as it can be to think of otherworldly gods watching us from realms beyond the human imagination, it’s much more chilling when the monster is present in nature, as much a part of the landscape as the sea or the rocks. There’s an almost folk-horror aesthetic to Blackwood’s fiction, and one gets the sense that this story’s eponymous monster is no different from a bear or a wolf - just another creature that we share the wilderness with, but far more powerful and strange than any animal we know.

10. Merc Fenn Wolfmoor - “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You”

This one creeped me right the fuck out. The development of the concept is what makes the story so frightening, so I’ll avoid spoiling it here, but I can explain the basics. A company has created an immersive virtual-reality game where an anonymous girl eats you - there’s no blood, no pain, it’s basically a vore fantasy. Think of the creepiest possible development of that set-up, and you’ll probably still fall short of Wolfmoor’s imagination. “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of You” begins with a deeply unsettling premise, and only gets more disturbing from there.

11. Cassandra Khaw - “Don’t Turn On The Lights”

We all know the story - a young woman goes into her flatmate’s room to borrow something, grabs what she needs from near the door without turning on the light, and heads out for the evening. Upon coming home, she discovers the mutilated body of her friend, and scrawled on the wall in blood the words “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?”

    It’s an urban legend old enough that every generation since the invention of the electric light has probably had some version of it, and while it scared the shit out of us all as young children, it probably wouldn’t make for a very frightening story now, right? Wrong. Somehow, Cassandra Khaw manages to put an original spin on the tale, and makes it seem every bit as scary as when you first heard it in primary school. After reading this, you’ll want to sleep with the lamp left on.

Stop Pissing Around And Vote Labour, You Daft Cunts

Alright, listen the fuck up. Brexit has become the dominant political issue of the past three years. If you were a guinea pig, you would be able to remember things from before then, but apparently the average single-issue Remainer has an intellect somewhere below that of a small rodent, so half my Facebook feed is people talking about the upcoming European election as though the only issue of any relevance is Brexit. This is very useful to two types of people: the very stupid, and the very wealthy. It's useful for very stupid people, because the crayon-eaters among us find it difficult to think of two or more things at a time, and it helps them to have one easy idea (expressible in a single word, no less!) around which to base their entire worldview. For the very powerful, of course, it's useful as it gives them another cudgel to beat Corbyn with. They've tried "Corbyn hates women," then it was "Corbyn hates Jews," and now they've moved on to "Corbyn hates the EU." The Tories have been hit far harder by the Brexit debacle, if the local elections were anything to go by, but of course the ruling class and their lapdogs in the press are pretending that it's exclusively a Labour issue. So, in case any of you reading this were unsure of how to vote on Thursday, here's my last-minute guide to your options.

The Conservative Party
This is probably the only one where me and the hardcore Remain camp agree. If you're seriously thinking of voting for these scum, get in the fucking gulag.

The Liberal Democrats
For Christ's sake, just grow some balls and admit you're a Tory. What's your excuse for voting for these fucking Quislings? They're Remain? Well, what part of Brexit do you object to? If it's the mistreatment of migrants, the unemployment, the economy going to shit or the persecution of the vulnerable, then let me remind you that all that shit was already happening under the Tory government that this golden shower helped put in Downing Street.

The Scottish National Party
You'll notice I didn't use the phrase "Yellow Tories" when talking about the Lib Dems - that's because I needed something to say about Sturgeon's mob. Read the growth commission report, and then tell me you trust them.

Plaid Cymru
Plaid are actually a pretty good party, judging by their policies, but ask yourself - what will they do that Labour won't? And do you really trust a party that talks so much about "businesses" (and the liberal's favourite, "small local businesses") and so little about workers? Compare their policies to Labour and you'll see solid, achievable goals on one side and a lot of waffle on the other.

The Green Party
Who?

The Labour Party
See the title of this post. I've been critical of Corbyn since day one, but the fact is that he gives us our only shot at something we haven't seen in my lifetime - a genuinely progressive British government.

Look, we all know who the progressive choice is here. If you can manage to remember a time slightly outside the lifespan of a badly cared-for houseplant, when people gave a fuck about the suicides of benefit sanction victims, the million people relying on food banks, and the suffering of those living in poverty, then don't treat this election - or any other - like an opinion poll on our relationship to a trading bloc. And if you're still a single-issue Remainer, then at least have the self-awareness to admit that you're just a Tory with a hard-on for pan-European nationalism.