Read This: How Home Alone acclimated children to slasher movies

The Halloween season may be over, but that doesn’t necessarily mean an end to thrills, chills, and nightmares. The upcoming holidays bring with them a terror all their own. There are numerous seasonally appropriate horror films, ranging from Black Christmas to Christmas Evil and even, arguably, Gremlins. But in an intriguing think piece at Hope&Fears, Rhett Jones suggests that the most important holiday horror film of them all is 1990’s Home Alone, a film that’s ostensibly a family comedy, because it introduced its very young, impressionable audience to the wonderful world of slasher movies. According to Jones’ theory, Home Alone protagonist Kevin McCallister has a lot in common with Michael Myers of the Halloween franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday The 13th films. The key difference is that Kevin is a child who doesn’t actually kill his victims; he just tortures and mutilates them horribly. Also, because these victims are criminals themselves, they are nominally more deserving of Kevin’s sadism than the horny teens slashed up by Jason and Michael.