Is ‘Home Alone’ a Ripoff of This French Horror Comedy?
It’s fair to say that the genre we love has mined almost every children’s fable and turned them into a horror movie at this point. From Deadtime Stories to Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, it’s painfully clear that everything we held sacred as kids is up for grabs. It’s rarer still, however, for a horror film to be revamped and retooled as a big-budget family film aimed at rebellious kids in need of a mischievous role model. Suspiciously, that’s exactly what happened when Home Alone became a box-office sensation during the holiday season of 1990.
Anytime there’s a hit in Hollywood, there’s a pretty good chance someone is going to come out of the woodwork to claim that their original idea was stolen. For French filmmaker René Manzor, the shocking similarities between Home Alone and his own holiday horror comedy Dial Code Santa Claus (3615 Code Père Noël) were too glaring to ignore. Also known as Deadly Games and Game Over, Manzor’s film centered around a kid left alone who defends his family’s mansion from a murderous Santa Claus by rigging his toys and random home appliances into a deadly DIY security system. Replace Santa with the bumbling Wet Bandits from Home Alone and that premise should start to sound awfully familiar.
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Ironically, Manzor was inspired by American action films like Die Hard and Rambo (both Christmas movies, coincidentally). Alain Lalanne (the director’s son) plays Thomas in Dial Code a.k.a. Deadly Games, who’s dressed up like Stallone’s Vietnam vet through most of the film’s running time. “I didn’t want to do a serious copy of those big action movies,” Manzor told Polygon following the North American premiere of Deadly Games in 2018. “I wanted to tell the story from the kid’s perspective, to wink at the audience and break the fourth wall like Deadpool.” The character of Thomas would wind up being exported back to the States as a perfect blueprint for Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) in Home Alone. Both Thomas and Kevin overcame the odds using their wits instead of their brawn, just like John McClane (Bruce Willis). Thomas also happens to be barefoot throughout most of the movie.
The commercial appeal of Dial Code Santa Claus was undeniable, and the French wound up embracing Manzor’s film at a time when it was largely considered unfashionable to have a hit movie. In the country that gifted cinema with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Manzor was seen more as a sell-out than an auteur. Still, Manzor’s horror comedy thriller broke every record, topping the sales and rental charts for six months. One of the reasons the French may have responded so strongly to the film was the fact that its main premise embraced the technology of the time, using the French predecessor of the internet called the Minitel network.
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The system allowed users to dial a code or word (like “Santa Claus” for example) that could direct someone to message boards, phone directories, and chat rooms. In the film, Thomas thinks he’s connected to the actual Santa who he then invites over to his lavish home to prove that he really exists. Manzor has claimed that he got the idea after accidentally being connected to a sex chat room when he was innocently searching to buy his mother some flowers. How French!
Because Dial Code Santa Claus was such a success, Manzor struggled for three years to make another film after being associated with France’s most dreaded term for a director: commercial filmmaker. But luckily, the film received interest from the U.S. during its initial run at various film festivals. After the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival market in May of 1989, an unnamed American producer spoke with Manzor about a possible remake. (Some quick math will show that Home Alone would premiere a year and a half later in November of 1990).
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The similarities between the two films down to the kinds of traps that are set led Manzor to eventually threaten legal action against 20th Century Fox (per The New York Times). A lawsuit was never issued fully and an attempt to reach a settlement was unsuccessful. Recently at the Waterloo Historical Film Festival in Belgium where Manzor and producer Rick McCallum (Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace) were the guests of honor, Manzor was asked about what happened. “Basically, it was rebuffed by John Hughes into Home Alone and that became a huge, incredible success around the world,” he recalled. “Because of that, my career in the States took off. Everybody could see that the film was done before, and at the studios, they said, ‘Let’s hire that guy and he can write for us.'”
Home Alone became the biggest comedy ever at that time, while Dial Code Santa Claus was still trying to secure a proper release. In 1990, Manzor claimed that the film received a standing ovation at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival while Roman Polanski, Wes Craven, and Ray Bradbury were in attendance. Steven Spielberg, who had collaborated with Home Alone director Chris Columbus on Gremlins and The Goonies, also got wind of Manzor’s housebound horror-comedy hybrid. Legendary producer Kathleen Kennedy eventually made the introduction with Spielberg, who reportedly told Manzor that he had watched Dial Code Santa Claus three times with his son Max and a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas. Manzor would go on to direct multiple episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. For the record, Home Alone writer John Hughes claimed he had never seen Dial Code Santa Claus. Fox has also “denied any similarity between the films.”
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Home Alone may not be a candy-coated ripoff of Dial Code Santa Claus. But it’s readily apparent that there still doesn’t appear to be any concern about being blamed again for ripping off Manzor’s film. The latest entry in the Home Alone franchise, Home Sweet Home Alone, goes full circle and features a young delinquent named Max Mercer (Archie Yates) defending his parents’ home against (you guessed it) a burglar dressed up as Santa Claus.
Nearly 30 years after it was made, Dial Code Santa Claus aka Deadly Games received a proper U.S. theatrical release in 2018 and a Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome a couple of years later. It’s also available now on Shudder. Additionally, Joe Bob Briggs highlighted the film in his 2020 Christmas special, Joe Bob Saves Christmas. Sadly, the actor who played Santa in Deadly Games, Patrick Floersheim, passed away in 2016 before he was able to see the film’s resurgence. In an interview with the Austin Chronicle, Manzor called Floersheim’s performance “the keystone of the film.” “We didn’t want him to be Mr. Bad,” he added. “He is a child in a grownup’s body. He just wants to play, and just like a kid, he has no limits.”
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