Home Alone turns 25: Everything you need to know about the Christmas classic

ON December 7, 1990, a festive film called Home Alone was released in UK cinemas.

It went on to become the most successful Christmas-themed film of all time and is now a fixture on TV schedules across the world every December.

Macaulay Culkin played the bratty eight-year-old Kevin who was accidentally left at home when his parents went on holiday, forcing the youngster to defend his house against bungling crooks Harry and Marv, The Wet Bandits, in increasingly violent ways.

To celebrate its silver anniversary, here are 25 facts about the film you might not know….Writer John Hughes also penned ’80s classics like Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Breakfast Club and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. There have been four sequels to date, but only Home Alone 2: Lost in New York featured the original cast. Director Chris Columbus wrote Gremlins and The Goonies and went on to direct Mrs Doubtfire and two Harry Potter movies. The idea for Home Alone came from a scene in another John Hughes film, Uncle Buck, which also starred Culkin. The youngster interrogates a potential babysitter through the letterbox, a scene replicated in Home Alone but this time with one of the robbers. The role of Kevin McCallister was written specifically for Culkin, but the director auditioned more than 100 other boys just to make sure they had the right actor. Robert De Niro turned down the part of Harry, which eventually went to Goodfellas co-star Joe Pesci. The film remained in cinemas until the following summer and entered the Guinness Book of Records as the highest-grossing live action comedy of all time with $533 million in takings.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mDUSjBiHYeYThe

gangster movie that Kevin watches in the film, Angels with Filthy Souls, is fictional and was inspired by James Cagney’s Angels with Dirty Faces. Home Alone 2 featured its sequel, Angels with Even Filthier Souls. John Candy filmed his part over the course of an exhausting 23-hour day and improvised some of his scenes. In the scene where Marv has a tarantula on his face, actor Daniel Stern agreed to do it for one take only. He mimed his scream so as not to scare the spider and the sound was later dubbed in. Conspiracy theorists believe Elvis Presley has a part as an extra in an airport scene, using this as proof that he didn’t die in 1977. The house in the film is real and is located at 671 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois. It’s a major tourist attraction and was sold in 2012 for nearly $1.6 million. Joe Pesci avoided Culkin off camera to make the youngster scared of him. Macaulay’s younger brother, Kieran, appears as his bed-wetting cousin, Fuller. One of the most famous lines delivered by Kevin “Do you guys give up or are you thirsty for more?” was improvised. The movie’s famous poster was said to have been inspired by Edvard Munch’s classic painting, The Scream. It made Culkin the most famous child star in the world, but by 1994 his fame had already faded following a string of flops. Watching the film is one of the biggest Christmas customs in Poland, where it garners the highest festive TV ratings each year. Daniel Stern wore rubber prosthetics when filming the bare feet scene in the house, but the broken Christmas ornaments he steps on were actually just sweets. Kevin’s supposedly scary neighbour, Old Man Marley, wasn’t in the original script but was added to provide extra sentimentality. Hillary Wolf, who played Kevin’s older sister Megan, left acting to represent America in judo at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics. After filming finished, some of the artificial snow was donated to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which has since used it in a number of productions. The initial script had Kevin’s grumpy Uncle Frank being the brains behind Harry and Marv’s robberies. Viewers never see Kevin’s bedroom. Star Wars composer John Williams received two Oscar nominations for his music in the film.