Would The Burglars Have Survived “Home Alone”? We Asked An Intensive Care Doctor

United States doctrine dictates that your home is your “castle” and as such you have a right to defend it. An intruder is legally presumed to mean you serious harm, so it could be said Kevin McCallister was acting within his rights when he rigged his house in preparation for Harry and Marv’s arrival. The Wet Bandits were waging war, but were they comical obstacles or literal death traps? Just how many corpses might the McCallisters have returned home to?

Two words: scrotal exploration.

Dr Daniel Funnell

Dr Daniel Funnell is an intensivist, a kind of medical doctor who specializes in critical care medicine, managing severely ill patients in an intensive care unit (ICU). He oversees the management of patients with life-threatening conditions requiring constant monitoring, but during his time off, he’s not against dissecting Home Alone to figure out just how many ways two fictional burglars might have died at the hands of an 8-year-old – to the benefit of us all.

ICU is critical work, making his time precious, which is why in hindsight I realize we should’ve established what film we were watching before I made it 30 minutes into Home Alone and he into Home Alone 2. Another half hour later and we were finally at the same point in the same movie, paused on a freezeframe that shows a mannequin stuffed in the McCallister’s basement (that mobster theory is looking stronger by the minute).

Between threatening furnaces and stolen toothbrushes, there have been plenty of hijinks but not much violence. That is, until Kevin receives a rousing speech from an old man in the church (the McCallisters can add stranger danger to their list of failings as parents). Then, things finally kick off.

“So, point-blank ball bearing to the gonads,” I say. “Talk to me.”

I’m not an expert on gonad ballistics, but the testicles are totally unprotected.

Dr Daniel Funnell

“Two words,” said Dr Funnell, “scrotal exploration.” It’s a kind of emergency surgery done to pinpoint the source of acute scrotal pain, with common causes including torsion where the testes get twisted. Less common: getting shot directly in the groin by a small child.

“I’m not an expert on gonad ballistics, but the testicles are totally unprotected,” said Dr Funnell. “If you hit them with enough force, they’re going to absorb all the damage. Aside from the eye, it might be the worst place to be shot by a ball bearing at point-blank range.”

Such an injury can cause a hematoma, a build-up of blood sort of like a bruise but much worse. This can cause ischemia (oxygen starvation) as it puts pressure on nearby vessels preventing blood flow, and that can lead to tissue death known as necrosis.

It often requires draining to restore circulation and prevent permanent damage, without which the affected body part (in this case, testicle) may have to be removed. Though rare, scrotal trauma can be fatal, but Harry bravely staggers on into another trap: a red-hot doorhandle.

Big burns covering a large percentage of body area tend to get colonised by lots of different types of bacteria because the usual function of skin gets broken down, so bugs can just go to town.

Dr Daniel Funnell

“There are types of burns that can be treated by anyone and then there are types need to be seen by specialist centres,” said Dr Funnell, “for example, the palms.”

“Smaller burns are probably ok, but big burns covering a large percentage of body area tend to get colonised by lots of different types of bacteria because the usual function of skin gets broken down, so bugs can just go to town. Just getting burned releases loads of inflammatory mediators, so you can’t work out if a patient’s high temperature is from the burn, or the bugs, or both.”

An infected burn can lead to sepsis, but that probably wouldn’t kick in while Harry was still at the McCallister’s. The more immediate problem would be the intense pain that big M-shaped burn would cause, and to demonstrate this, may I introduce you to: The Sensory Homunculus.

This horrific model is a map in which body size is proportional to sensation. As you can see, the hands are massive, so an injury like a burnt palm is going to cause severe and debilitating pain. Still, this is Hollywood, so the heist goes on for Harry, and now it’s Marv’s turn.

“Nail through the foot,” I say. “Surely we’re wandering into tetanus country?”

“Tetanus causes spastic paralysis, so if you get it, the mortality rate is around 20 percent,” said Dr Funnell. “It basically works as an anti-diazepam – you just get spasms everywhere and can’t breathe or walk.”

“It’s exceptionally rare, I’ve never seen it, and anyway,” he refences the movie that’s still playing, “Harry’s just had his hat set on fire.”

He’s not impressed. I can tell, especially when he says, “I was promised serious injuries,” but then…

“Okay good, paint can – this is more like it,” he says. “This is really the first potential fatality – with just 18 minutes to go.”

Post-paint-can, you’re going to be sticking that into whatever looks like where there once dwelled a mouth and see if you can find the larynx.

Dr Daniel Funnell

“A full paint can swung from the first floor like that – you might get away with it, but a paint can to the head could be enough to cause a potentially life-changing brain injury.”

That the paint can goes straight into the face is an extra complication, he tells me. Your nose and mouth are inconveniently close together when it comes to high-impact facial trauma. I say inconveniently, because if you’re going to establish an airway, you need one of them to be recognizable.

“We have fibre-optic scopes where you have a camera on the end of a thin tube that you can control the tip of,” he tells me. “Post-paint-can, you’re going to be sticking that into whatever looks like where there once dwelled a mouth and see if you can find the larynx.”

“If you can’t then you have to do an emergency front of neck airway. Like the biro trick you always see in the movies, only professionally done.”

The tarantula, we agree, wouldn’t be an issue. There’s some debate online, but fandom forums have named Aphonopelma seemanni as a likely candidate species. Like most New World tarantulas, it’s described as docile and rarely aggressive with venom comparable to a bee sting. The bigger problem, however, is the crowbar Harry uses to get it off.

“A crowbar to the abdomen could definitely cause a splenic or hepatic rupture,” says Dr Funnell. “They’re both incredibly vascular organs. The liver, for example, contains about a tenth of the whole blood supply of the body at any given time. So, you could quickly bleed to death.”

Then we come to the treehouse. Some might question whether having a second-story zipline was ever a good idea in a household full of children, but while twisted ankles and broken noses are all on the cards after Harry and Marv’s crash landing, intensivist Dr Funnell isn’t impressed.

“To be honest with you,” he tells me, “Harry and Marv could probably have gotten through this film without any lasting injuries, and that saddens me. Home Alone 2 is for the real ones.”

So, do I recommend installing your own Kevin McCallister style security system this Christmas? Absolutely not. After all, people have died falling off the toilet, and there’s enough trash to take out at Christmas without adding two corpses into the mix.

Do I anticipate the certainty of death would’ve been much higher had we followed Dr Funnell’s lead and watched Home Alone 2 instead? You’ll just have to come back next year and see.