One Home Alone fan has shared several facts about the classic Christmas movie, which he jokes have “ruined” his childhood.
The popular TikTok account Talk2Pops posted a video last week to reveal some shocking details about the 1990 family comedy starring the newly minted Hollywood Walk of Famer, Macaulay Culkin.
“My childhood is ruined,” he wrote in the caption, adding that he learnt the fascinating tidbits from watching a 2019 episode of Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us docuseries.
Culkin, 43, portrayed the mischievous and bratty eight-year-old Kevin McCallister, whose family accidentally forgets him at home on the way to the airport for their Christmas holiday in Paris. Stranded at home, Kevin must protect himself and the premises from being robbed by two con men (played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern).
The first factoid Talk2Pops dropped was that “most of the snow in Home Alone was actually mashed potatoes”. He included a snippet from the documentary, in which it was noted that “there was no snow on the ground, so what they did was that they used white materials and potato flakes to imitate falling snow for Mrs McCallister [Catherine O’hara], who finally makes it home during a blizzard”.
Secondly, he shared the (perhaps more obvious) revelation that the actor who portrayed Kevin’s Pepsi-loving cousin, Fuller, is actually Culkin’s real-life younger brother, Succession star Kieran Culkin.
“But y’all, what really got me was that all these years, I thought this was a real movie that [Kevin] was watching,” he continued, referring to the fictional film Angles with Filthy Souls, which is played to deter the robbers. “Turns out they only shot it for the movie.”
He later noted that a majority of the scenes were actually filmed inside an intricate, two-story set built at a local Chicago school’s gymnasium, where the iconic 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was filmed, too. The exterior shots, however, were all shot at a house in Winnetka, Illinois.
It was then revealed that “most of the stunts in the movie were actually real”, without pads and wires. He included several clips from the documentary, in which Joe Pesci’s stunt double, Troy Brown, explained: “When I did the first stair fall, no one told me how to take the fall. I just launched myself as high and far as I could.”
“It was not funny at all,” Home Alone director Chris Columbus said: “It was terrifying.”
Finally, Talk2Pops, added that Culkin’s famous hands-on-cheek screaming scene was improvised. He was originally supposed to pat his cheeks twice before letting out a long screen. Instead, “he kept his hands there because it was such a little kid thing to do,” Columbus said. “He created this iconic moment by putting his hands there and keeping them there.”
