The following will contain mild spoilers for the new movie Don’t Breathe 2, so please skip over to another amazing story if you do not want to know any details.
It’s not mandatory, but there are times when a film director will pass a few recommendations to his or her cast members to watch in preparation for a shoot. Maybe it helps the actors understand the tone that the filmmaker is hoping to achieve. Or maybe it can show them what NOT to do, so that the new movie isn’t a straight up replication of a previous classic. That was kind of the case with young actor Madelyn Grace as she prepared for her role opposite Stephen Lang in the new horror thriller Don’t Breathe 2. Except, instead of watching scary movies, she and her director dove into… Home Alone?
Watch the clip above. It starts to make sense.
Fede Alvarez’s original horror thriller Don’t Breathe was a home invasion story (gone wrong), with Stephen Lang’s The Blind Man defending himself from would-be thieves while also protecting a terrifying secret happening in his basement. Rodo Sayagues didn’t want to simply copy the first film when he set out to make Don’t Breathe 2, but there still is an element -- in the first half of the movie -- of The Blind Man stopping people who are trying to get something from his house.
This time out, though, he’s assisted by a new character, Phoenix, played by Madelyn Grace. And anytime you see a kid racing around a house preventing bad people from getting in, it’s going to summon the spirit of Macaulay Culkin in the 1990 family classic, Home Alone. So when Grace spoke with CinemaBlend about the kinds of films she watched in preparation for this role, she told us:
Rodo, the director, actually compared that. He (said), ‘There’s not a lot of movies like this where a kid is leading it.’ But he said, ‘The only one I can think of is Home Alone.’ But that’s not… it’s a family movie!
And believe me, Don’t Breathe 2 is anything BUT a family movie. When the Blind Man sets his sights (sorry) on his adversaries, someone is going to walk away in a lot of pain. Hammers, Crazy Glue and a lot more are employed in Don’t Breathe 2 to take down the criminals who have targeted Normal (Stephen Lang). Strangely, out of context, the pain inflicted to the Wet Bandits in Home Alone just might be more brutal than anything shown in Don’t Breathe 2. But one is a comedy. Go figure that one out.
Determine for yourself which one is more brutal now that Rodo Sayagues’s Don’t Breathe 2 is screening, exclusively in theaters.
