You remember how in Home Alone when Joe Pesci’s character gets his head lit on fire with a blow torch for like 10 seconds straight? What would actually happen to a human if that happened in real life? The intrepid Mark Rober used chicken skin, a styrofoam head, and a beanie to find out.
Spoiler: the head gets absolutely wrecked. If the blow torch scorched you like that in real life, in less than a second you’d get a third-degree burn. In two to three seconds, your skin is burnt all the way through. Your skull could protect you for the rest of the time so you won’t quite die immediately but you would need skull reconstruction after getting hit with that booby trap. Shout out to Macaulay Culkin.
Rober also tests some other fun things that happened in movies like if it’s actually possible to “shoot your eye out” with a Red Ryder BB Gun (A Christmas Story) and how much force a 153km/h snowball has on the human body (Elf).
And here’s a deeper dive into Home Alone-specific traps and what they would do to you. Heating a door knob from the inside wouldn’t make the outside knob too terribly hot (but the interior knob would definitely burn your hand), getting a can of paint dropped down the stairs and onto your head would be like getting punched by Mike Tyson twice at one time (and there’s a 42% chance your skull would crack), and trying to kill a tarantula with a crow bar to the chest is a very bad idea. Like death bad. Watch Vsauce 3 explain more: