Synchronicity in life is always a strange thing to comprehend. Have you ever had a song stuck in your head that happened to start playing randomly in the grocery store? Remember when Deep Impact and Armageddon came out the same year? How about the short time differential between The Illusionist and The Prestige? Do you recall in 1997 when Volcano and (the highly superior) Dante’s Peak came out nearly simultaneously? Sometimes, when one studio hears about one movie in production, they’ll race to get something similar out as quickly as possible. I call this the Asylum Effect (if you aren’t familiar, Asylum creates low-budget-quick-turnaround films that mirror big-budget films, i.e., their version of Transformers was Transmorphers). These incidents aren’t always malicious, rather, they just happen. One thing that seems less like a coincidence is the distinct similarities between Home Alone and Dial Code Santa Claus. 

An Overlooked Horror Christmas Classic That Maybe Inspired Home Alone

Dial Code Santa Claus (also known as Deadly Games, 3615 Code Father Christmas, Game Over, and Hide and Freak) is a 1989 comedy/horror/thriller from writer/director René Manzor. Thomas (Alain Lalanne) is a very young boy with a large imagination. Resigned to one of the largest mansions I’ve ever seen, Thomas fills his days with Rambo-style antics by working out, building trapdoors, and playing war with his precious dog J.R. His mother, Julie (Brigitte Fossey) manages a Printemps, which is a French chain of department stores. Thomas spends the majority of his time with his near-blind grandfather Papy (Louis Ducreux), due to his mother’s insanely busy schedule. However, it feels like Julie attempts to make herself busier than she needs to be as a way to cope with the recent loss of her husband, Thomas’s father. On Christmas Eve, Thomas uses a Minitel to talk with Santa, only he’s not talking to Santa… he’s talking to a cold-blooded and unnamed killer (Patrick Floersheim). Unfortunately for Thomas, the vagrant finds out where he lives, and he’s ready to spread some Christmas spirit. 

From the description alone, it might not sound like Home Alone, and, going with my belief that these two films are a bit too similar, I think that was purposeful. Home Alone feels different enough to be its own entity, and I would hate to accuse John Hughes of plagiarism–I mean he’s not the Australian author John Hughes. But let’s take a step back and look at the quickest form of elevator pitch that would apply to both of these films: a young boy who is more self-aware than your typical 8-year-old, with rocky familial relations, finds himself at the behest of a home intruder(s) with villainous intent. From that simple description, Dial Code Santa Claus and Home Alone could easily be one of the many outcomes once the pitch was accepted. What’s even stranger is how both films are Christmas films. Did John Hughes take the premise of an “obscure” French film? How in touch with world cinema are Americans [in 1989] anyway? No one will notice. 

Okay, enough talking about John Hughes and Home Alone. The point has been made, and we can all move on. As someone who isn’t really into Christmas or Christmas horror by proxy, it’s no surprise Dial Code Santa Claus flew past my radar. It’s a shame. Dial Code is a genuinely original, odd, and heartwarming tale of resilience and the human condition. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt genuinely moved by a film, and this film hit me hard. However, every vice has its versa, and this film is far from perfect. The consistency of the direction and cinematography vary from scene to scene, creating a fairly messy visual tale…the continuity errors don’t help either. Tonally, Manzor’s script is all over the place. At the drop of a hat, the film switches from comedy to horror to drama without giving the audience a minute to catch their bearings. The majority of the time it’s not overly egregious, but when this happens during major plot points, the film feels a bit confused. Dial Code Santa Claus is charming for how it tells its story, however, how they tell the story will not work for everyone. 

It’s the Christmas season. Let’s be jolly and focus on the positives! Unlike Home Alone, Thomas does not find himself home alone. Thomas finds himself in the company of his grandfather, but with his near-blindness, Thomas is the one who must take control when la merde frappe le ventilateur (when shit hits the fan). Having a child lead a film is always a risk, and most of the time it doesn’t pay off. Luckily for Manzor, he found Alain Lalanne. Full of charisma and energy, Lalanne absolutely eats this role up. The emotional turning point in Home Alone is when Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) realizes Marley (Roberts Blossom) isn’t the big bad urban legend he was made out to be. Home Alone tries forcing an emotional connection without really earning it, he’s a privileged little boy who has to learn empathy—big deal. There’s nothing to care about in that character. On the other hand, Thomas is dangerously creative and truly a tragic character. You can empathize with him right off the bat. 

A Movie Carried By A Small Protagonist

Thomas is quite an interesting character. Part of me believes after this whole debacle, their family packed up, moved to the States, and changed their last name to Kramer…because this kid is a little Jigsaw in the making. He looks at himself almost as the patriarch of the family. When he has an inkling that his mother might be falling for her coworker Roland (François-Eric Gendron), he fixes her car so she doesn’t have to be chauffeured around anymore. A montage scene of Thomas setting up traps shows how forward-thinking and ambitious he is. Kevin McCallister sets up a few pulley systems and puts a hot rod on a door handle, Thomas literally sets up a tripwire with darts that shoot into the killer’s neck before being led into a literal fire trap. Unlike Home Alone, where the violence feels cartoonish and pointless, Thomas and Papy legitimately are out to kill the invader. (Yes, the Wet Bandits show injuries, but there’s no way in hell your skull isn’t getting caved in from a paint can at that speed.)

Manzor’s script creates a childlike whimsy throughout the film’s first half. It shows us Thomas is a genius with grand ideas and a sense of wonder. It’s not until the film’s second half that that facade slips into true terror. One of the most intriguing aspects is how the film opens versus how it ends. The opening shot consists of a garbage truck running over a snow globe, a true depiction of innocence being shattered. Our first look at Thomas is of him asleep in his gigantic airplane bed with a fan pointed directly at him, simulating wind. From there, we get a montage of Thomas working out, sharpening a [plastic] knife (with a bit too many closeup shots of sweaty child skin), scaling a ledge, and trapping his dog in the floor pit they have for some reason. The final shot of the film is of Thomas covered in mud in front of Santa’s (the killer’s) corpse as his mother runs over and consoles him. Eff around and find out, right? Thomas’s morning routine is an emulation of his military father, doing everything he can to be a macho-man badass and doing things that would give an average person PTSD. Sadly, there’s no way Thomas would have gotten out of this film without extreme PTSD.  

Rather than giving us Rambo Jr. the entire film, Manzor drops in small moments here and there to remind us that Thomas is still a child. In Thomas’s wake-up scene, we see him scaling a tight ledge, until the camera pulls back to see he is on a balcony. Later in the film, when being chased by the killer, Thomas is forced to scale an actual ledge on the snowy rooftop. During this time, he breaks down, screaming and crying for his mother. After Thomas steals a cop car, understandably, he comes to a face-off with the killer. They stare dead into each other’s eyes. Using the gun from inside the cop car, Thomas directs the barrel toward the killer and cries out, asking why he’s doing this. It is just another one of the heartbreaking moments where Thomas breaks the “manly” and “adult” facade he portrays so heavily. 

Killer Hobo Santa Is Legitimately Scary

Speaking of the killer, let’s talk about him. It would have been nice to have him fleshed out a little more. Most people I know who’ve seen this film assume he’s a deranged unhoused person, so we’ll go with that. His intentions are unclear, but we have some context clues to piece together what’s going on. At the film’s beginning, the killer tries to join a group of neighborhood kids in a snowball fight, but they quickly depart from the area. From there he gets hired to be Santa Claus for Julie’s incredibly impromptu Christmas festivities (it’s Christmas Eve, and she’s making her team plan this extravaganza now). As the kids pass with their parents, he throws out candies and treats to the giddy children, all with wide smiles on their faces. Things go south when Marion (Marion Bureau), whose mom is inside the store, approaches him. He strokes her face, yeesh, and things start to feel…icky. Marion yells out that he’s not the real Santa and straight-up slaps her. Contain your laughter. 

From here on out, the killer is unleashed. Something at this moment clicks in his head. He makes his way to Julie’s home and starts dispatching the help one by one. The killer has these moments of innocence that are entirely eclipsed by his insidious nature. One of the most compelling scenes of his terror comes when Thomas and Papy are chased into the garage and into the car. Thomas eventually gets the car started but can’t bring himself to run the killer over. Set to the tune of an audibly confusing psychedelic techno-rock song, the killer walks up to the car and slams his head smack dab on the windshield, cracking it and his skull. The scene gets even more intense as he attacks the car with a sledgehammer and long metal pipe in a mixture of expertly used slow-motion shots intermixed with higher frame rate impacts. 

Super quick segue: while we’re talking about music, we have to talk about one of the first songs on the soundtrack. When Thomas is doing his morning routine, a song starts playing, and I cannot find it for the life of me. AND I NEED IT. The song is a bastardization of Eye of the Tiger and the lyrics, the intelligible ones, are just funny. It’s a hard rock Christmas song that feels tonally off while working in just the right ways. Oh, they have Bonnie Tyler’s rendition of Merry Christmas, which is fine. Author’s note: if you know the first song I’m referring to, please comment the title and or DM me because I NEED TO KNOW.

Is Dial Code Santa Claus better than Home Alone? Yes. Though, I’m probably biased because I don’t really like the film. Was this film plagiarized off of? I also want to say yes, but I find it hard to believe John Hughes was able to watch this film in 1989 and, with such a quick turnaround, pump out Home Alone. If there were two or three years between the films, I think you could easily make the argument, but it’s hard to say yes. Synchronicity in life is always a strange thing to comprehend.

Dial Code Santa Claus is one of the few Christmas horror films that will go on my yearly December viewing list. Overwhelmingly fun and intriguing, Dial Code brings a new take, especially for 1989, on the home invasion subgenre. Not relegating itself to a single genre, René Manzor created something that genre fans and non-genre fans alike can enjoy. While select scenes feel paced awkwardly, the film does an overly effective job of telling a story and sticking to its themes. Staying away from excessively graphic, but still impactful violence, audiences will find an accessible horror film in this criminally underseen French romp. That is, as long as they know Santa doesn’t exist.