BETTER WATCH OUT (2017) is an instant-classic holiday home-invasion horror
#31DaysOfHorror: October 7
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
The Plot
Luke Larimer is a 12 year old boy — 13 in a few weeks! — who’s in love with his babysitter. His parents are headed out to a holiday party for the night, so they call Ashley to see if she can babysit him one last time, before she moves away to Pittsburgh.
Luke figures this is his last chance to seduce the older girl. If he can convince her to watch a horror movie with him, he can get her scared enough that she’ll depend on him for protection. Too bad she’ll have to protect him when the home invaders arrive…
My Review
Just the other day, while reviewing Cult of Chucky, I mentioned that there aren’t enough horror movies that take place in the wintertime, and that I could see that film becoming a classic just because of how snowy and cold it is. It seems that 2017 has brought us another, even-better instant-classic holiday horror movie in Better Watch Out.
Every element of this movie worked for me. It’s funny. It has legitimately suspenseful sequences, and effective gross-out gore. The Christmasy production design gives the movie a fun feel; while a lot of home invasion movies take place in darkness and cramped spaces, Better Watch Out is shiny and colorfully-lit. It has strong performances from everybody involved, including Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould as the babysitter and the best friend respectively (reuniting after playing siblings in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit), but most especially Levi Miller, who plays Luke. Between this and next year’s surefire smash adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, Miller is a young actor to watch.
This film is very difficult to talk about without giving away a major twist that occurs at the end of the first act, about half an hour in. It sends the movie off in a completely unexpected direction, taking what at first appeared to be a home-invasion movie along the lines of Funny Games or The Strangers and elevating it to… something else entirely. It’s better to go in knowing nothing at all, so if you can avoid the trailers (which are absurdly spoiler-filled) and seek this out, do so. The review below is largely spoiler-free; instead, I discuss some of the horror tropes the film is playing around with.
Better Watch Out is clearly a film made by horror fans, for horror fans. As many horror-comedies are, it’s full of references to other movies, including but not limited to Psycho, American Psycho, The Shining, Halloween, The Birds, Scream, and Home Alone. Unlike a lot of reference-filled movies, though, the nods in Better Watch Out are mostly sly, subtle homages rather than explicit shout-outs; only the Home Alone connection gets named, as you can see in the tagline on the posters. It’s not groan-worthy like the Scary Movie franchise; instead, the pleasure comes from recognizing that the film is playing with specific horror tropes and inverting, upending, satirizing, or straight-up re-staging them in new ways.
In that way, Better Watch Out is a fantastic example of the way that horror movies can function like folktales do. This is something I wrote about a lot during last year’s attempt at #31DaysOfHorror (which I didn’t even come close to completing). In my review of The Hills Have Eyes I quoted Carol Clover and her engagement with James Twitchell’s Dreadful Pleasures, on horror’s repetition of familiar elements and remixed narratives.
Clover writes that, in horror as in folktale, “there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants.” As such, Twitchell recommends an “ethnological approach” to horror criticism, suggesting that critics and academics analyze horror films “as if no one individual telling really mattered,” focusing instead on tracing the migrations of horror images to audiences and then discussing why they were important enough to pass along.
An ethnological approach to Better Watch Out may be best. The film is first and foremost a variant on the classic “babysitter” horror film. Is there an “original” babysitter text in American horror? Halloween famously featured Jamie Lee Curtis as a babysitter who spends Halloween night fending off attacks from Michael Myers. That was in 1978. Predating this was the urban legend of the babysitter who gets prank phone calls, only to discover the calls are coming from inside the house — which served as the basis for When a Stranger Calls in 1979 and again in 2006. A stranger calling from inside the house — or, just outside, and then inside, as it were — is an important part of Scream, too. Babysitting is the impetus for the action in The House of the Devil (2009), and Netflix is even releasing an original horror movie later this month called, simply, The Babysitter.
So: why are babysitters a recurring element of horror films? I think there are two answers to that question, both of which Better Watch Out engages with.
First: sex. One only has to do a cursory google search for “babysitters in film” to see what screen representations of babysitters mean for a lot of people (read: straight men, horror’s presumed main audience) — the chance to relive some adolescent fantasy about the hot girl who came over your house while your parents were away. (Who cares if your parents were paying her?) There’s The 20 Hottest Babysitters in Movies and TV Shows, from Complex. Ranker.com brings you The Movie Babysitters You’d Most Want to Bang. And UnrealityMag brings you The Seven Best Babysitters In Movies, which begins, “Did anyone have a hot baby sitter when they were a kid? I remember mine. Her name was Maureen and she lived across the street from me. I used to love the days when my parents would go out at night. Just me and Maureen. Ah, those were the days.”
Better Watch Out is well aware of this legacy; in fact, it’s the main premise of the first part of the film. Luke is in love with Ashley, and after reading that our bodies emit dopamine when we’re afraid, just like they do when we’re aroused, he gets the idea that he’ll scare Ashley into his arms by watching a horror movie with her.
What Better Watch Out gets right that many other horror movies fail to, though, is that it’s fully aware of how messed up this entire trope is, and how degrading it can be to young women.
Luke’s father, too, is enamored with Ashley (playing into the trope of the father who sleeps with the babysitter). When he first opens the door, he looks her up and down and says “Good Lord, you are breathtaking.” She laughs and thanks him, but you can tell she’s a bit uncomfortable. Moments later, Mr. Lerner says to his son, in full earshot of his wife and the babysitter, “I don’t know about you, tiger, but I’m going to miss that girl.” Moments earlier, Mrs. Lerner has berated her husband’s masculinity, asking him if he’s “sure that he’s never sucked another man’s cock,” because he was whining about Christmas ornaments. When he’s blatantly hitting on the babysitter, it’s to prove his heterosexuality to his wife and son.
Better Watch Out fully realizes that this is a toxic environment for Luke to grow up in. His entire plan to sleep with Ashley by making her scared while watching a horror movie is manipulative and juvenile, not to mention unsettling coming from a 12 year old. When he gets the chance to prove himself as they find their home under siege, all of the dangerous ideas he has about women thanks to the preponderance of the babysitter trope cause him to act in rash, reckless ways that send the movie spiraling out of control.
This brings us to the other facet of why babysitters are so common in horror movies — babysitter narratives dovetail nicely with home invasion stories. American horror films often reflect the psyche of our society, so it’s nothing new to say that, because Americans prize our property ownership, home invasion films represent a deep-seated anxiety about our claim to our property being violated. When you couple those anxieties with the fact that you’ve left your child under someone else’s care — the care of a young, teenage girl who may or may not bring her boyfriend over, into your home — you have a narrative mix that taps into both things that Americans claim to pride ourselves on: our families and our property.
The original title of Better Watch Out was Safe Neighborhood, which I think is a good title, but it doesn’t capture the Christmas spirit quite like the new title does. The original title, though, nods to the way the film functions as an indictment of any number of middle-class suburban American attitudes, from toxic masculinity, oppressive heterosexuality, gender roles, and property ownership, among many more. It’s about the effect violent media has on young people, and the way that some people are just evil, regardless of what they watch. I can see it being an instant cult classic, watched every Christmas. Seek it out.
But where can I watch it? Better Watch Out is in limited theaters and on VOD now.
