For a family-friendly holiday movie,Home Aloneis pretty dark – and not just because Kevin McCallister is clearly some kind of demon-child who inadvertently uses his black magic powers to knock out his neighborhood's power supply, thus setting up a Rube Goldberg Machine-esque sequence of events that ultimately fulfill his wish to be home alone.
Arguably the darkest line in the movie involves the suggestion that the 8-year-old protagonist might be a corpse come Christmas day.
Early in the film, as Kevin is absent-mindedly walking down the street, he comes shockingly close to being run over by the Wet Bandits' van. Harry slams on the brakes just in time, avoiding tragedy, but warns the kid to "watch out for traffic." Of course, at this point in the movie he doesn't realize that running Kevin over would have actually made his life a whole lot easier.
Then Marv leans over and tells Kevin, "Santy don't visit the funeral homes, little buddy." And you have to admit, an adult lecturing a small child about how corpses don't get Christmas presents from Santa Claus is unquestionably bleak.
It's not even the onlyHome Alonescene involving chatter about kids and funeral homes, lest we forget John Candy's improvised monologue about how his character, Gus Polinski, once accidentally left his son at a funeral home "alone, all day" with only a corpse for company. "He was okay after 6, 7 weeks," Gus explains. "He came around, started talking again. But he's okay, you know? They get over it. Kids are resilient like that."
The only other joke that comes close to matching this level of grimness comes later in the movie. After Kevin evades the Wet Bandits by ziplining to his treehouse, Harry and Marv pause at the open second floor window, unsure of what just happened.
"Where did he go?" Harry asks. "Maybe he committed suicide," Marv responds.
Let's face it, the haunting specter of death hangs over the entire movie, beginning just five minutes into the film, when Kevin's brother Buzz alleges that the family's creepy next door neighbor is really a serial killer who never got caught.
Which is nuts. Old Man Marley wasn't a murderer, he wasclearly supposed to be Jesus.
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