These days, it’s de rigueur for just about any movie Hollywood makes to be somehow tied in to a larger cinematic universe. Dracula can’t just be Dracula—he has to be part of a whole Universal monster-movie reality. It seems only natural, in such an environment, that people would begin looking for ways to tie together other even more disparate film worlds until just about any movie can be tied to any other by some devious variation of the Kevin Bacon game.
It’s in this spirit that Grantland writer James Concepcion has posited the theory that Home Alone’s little Kevin McCallister grew up to be the notorious serial killer Jigsaw from the Saw franchise. Concepcion makes his argument with connections drawn from the two characters that might seem a little silly, but actually hold together better than the Rube Goldberg-esque logic patterns of most of the later Saw films. For instance, could Kevin’s furnace-fueled hallucinations have led to the construction of Jigsaw’s most infamous traps?
And, of course, there’s the inescapable physical evidence, which Concepcion helpfully draws red lines on in classic Internet-conspiracy-theory style:
Not since the rumors about Marilyn Manson being Paul Pfeiffer from The Wonder Years has there been such a bold claim. Of course, all that remains now is for someone to create the Home Alone sequel that doubles as a Saw prequel.