A fan brought a Kevin McCallister doll on a visit to the “Home Alone” house in Winnetka, Ill.
Credit...Lyndon French for The New York Times

‘Home Alone’ Hits the Road, With Macaulay Culkin. ‘Filthy Animals’ Cheer.

In Chicago, where the suburbs served as locations, a showing of the film featured an appearance by the star. Delighted fans made their devotion known.

by · NY Times

It has been 34 years since Kevin McAllister paint-canned two sour-faced bandits in “Home Alone.” And every Christmas since, fans have taken self-made tours of suburban Chicago sites in the classic holiday movie, which finds 8-year-old Kevin defending himself against robbers after his family leaves for a vacation without him. The stately residence where exteriors were shot in Winnetka, Ill., is the area’s top tourist attraction, with thousands of visitors annually.

This year, Macaulay Culkin, who played Kevin and became a 10-year-old international superstar as a result, created his own multicity tour, holding screenings of the comedy followed by a Q&A. Billed as “A Nostalgic Night With Macaulay Culkin,” it played last week in Rosemont, Ill., just outside Chicago, and that proved a big draw for “Home Alone” stans.

They flocked to the Rosemont Theater in T-shirts quoting John Hughes’s script — “Keep the change, ya filthy animal!” — and roared at the burns and pratfalls of the bumbling thieves (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). Parents toted fleece blankets and stuffies for past-bedtime children; many were watching the movie, directed by Chris Columbus, on the big screen for the first time.

The appeal was intergenerational and uncomplicated. “It feels like growing up,” said Monti Smith, 26, a mega-fan from Nashville.

The Setting

The five bedroom, 9,126-square-foot brick home at 671 Lincoln Ave. in Winnetka has been a Mecca for movie buffs — and real estate agents. Its sale listing, for more than $5 million, went viral this year. (After a week on the market, the house found a buyer.) When a car pulled into the gated driveway last Friday, the driver paid no mind to the steady stream of onlookers or the traffic stopping for selfie-takers.

“I wanted to come see if it’s real,” said Elias Sanchez, 39, who watched the movie as a boy in Mexico and now works in construction in Las Vegas. He brought eight family members to see it, their top Chicago priority.

His children posed for photos: hands on cheeks, mouths agape, just like Kevin. “I grew up with it, and now they’re growing up with it,” he observed. “It’s a nice feeling. I love it.”

For friends Jane Aseltyne and Molly Walters, both 40, who came from Chicago and Michigan, standing in front of the home was surreal, Aseltyne said. “The movie was just like woven into the fabric of our lives.” She said she’d watched it “every year for the last 20 years, and sometimes randomly.”

Dan Miller, a lawyer, and his partner, Paul Channon, arrived from Cardiff, Wales. When they turned up at another location, Grace Episcopal Church in Oak Park, Ill., it was closed, but the staff let them in, Channon said delightedly.

After Chicago, Miller added, “We’re off to New York to do No. 2” — “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” the 1992 sequel.

The Stars

“Do you want me to make you guys feel old?” Culkin asked a minute after he arrived onstage with the moderator. “I’m 44.”

Once the baby-faced king of Hollywood, Culkin has long been somewhat off-the-radar. (Through a representative, he declined an interview request.) “Home Alone” “was kind of a curse and a blessing, for a while, for me,” he said at the event.

In the mid-90s, his teenage heyday, he took a nearly decade-long break from acting, as his parents engaged in a messy custody fight and he took control of his multimillion-dollar trust fund. Later, he dabbled in music and ran an off-kilter humor website and a podcast; he has only slowly returned to performing. He will next be seen in Season 2 of the Amazon series “Fallout,” his most high-profile role in years.

“Guys, thanks for remembering me,” he told the audience, repeatedly, in genuine tones. The “Home Alone” road show followed the perspective-shift of becoming a father of sons, age 2 and 3, with his fiancée, the actress Brenda Song. “I look at the movie differently now because of that,” he said. “I watch it through a different lens — I watch it with them. And they have no idea who they’re sitting next to.”

In the Q&A, he had high praise for collaborators like Hughes, who died in 2009, and John Candy, his co-star in another beloved production, “Uncle Buck.”

Both Candy, who died in 1994, and Hughes checked up on him — “how are you?” — as he became the most famous kid in the world, he said.

Whenever he sees Catherine O’Hara, who played his mother, he calls her Mom, he said, “and she opens up her arms — she goes, ‘Son.’” (Culkin got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last year; O’Hara’s speech made him tear up.)

Pesci, as a co-star, took a different approach. “He was trying to scare me," Culkin recounted. Thinking it would help the robber-victim dynamic, “he was like, I want to be menacing to this kid.” Once, rehearsing a scene in which Pesci’s Harry is threatening to bite off Kevin’s fingers, he inadvertently took it too far and really chomped Culkin. “I have a scar,” he said. But in the moment, he didn’t react much. “I saw his face — and I’ve never, ever seen Joe Pesci actually scared,” Culkin recalled. “Because he’s like, I just bit a kid!” (Through a representative, Pesci declined to comment.)

Recently, Culkin has also poked fun at his “Home Alone” persona, often in commercials that feature the house. So when it came up for sale over the years, “I had half a mind to buy it — just for giggles,” he said as the audience cheered. He imagined turning it into a movie fun house, where you could sled down the stairs. But, he said, “I got kids. I’m busy, man.”

The Merch

At the theater, Culkin’s face adorned shirts, earmuffs and at least one purse; many outfits paid tribute to the “filthy animal” quote, taken from a gangster movie that Kevin adopts as his tough-guy bible. Shown in snippets in “Home Alone,” the black-and-white “Angels With Filthy Souls” is not real; Hughes wrote it for the project.

Niche references ruled: Zac Ring, 36, a project manager from the Bay Area, wore a sweatshirt advertising Little Nero’s, the pizzeria whose unfortunate driver delivers to the McAllister manse. And die-hards like Smith sported collectibles — Home Alone 2 Adidas, released in 2022. He bought two pairs: one to wear, and one to display.

The Fans

Why did “Home Alone” resonate so deeply? Many viewers were around the same age as Kevin when they first saw it. In his solo quest to survive and protect his home, they found a hero’s journey for the pint-sized.

Miller, the lawyer from Wales, recalled seeing it when he was 5 or 6: “I was cheeky and blunt. I thought, I could do that. It’s a nice fantasy.”

Samm Makris had “two blond brothers who looked just like him,” she said of Culkin. “And we all had the dream of what would happen if we got left alone. They were always setting booby traps.”

Ring remembered “wishing someone would rob my house, because I know what to do now.” He rigged a bucket of water atop a door; his little sister was the unsuspecting victim.

For parents, it’s a throwback. “It makes me want to be a kid again,” said Heather Bright, a social worker in a mint-green fuzzy jumpsuit, alongside her 10-year-old daughter. They ring in every Christmas with it.

It was, above all, comfort viewing. “Like people watch ‘Friends,’ I watch ‘Home Alone,’” said Melissa Robertson, a Scottish mother of three who lives in New York. During the pandemic, instead of her normal holiday viewing, she began playing the film in April. (Her kids, she added, “are sick of it.”)

And for some families, it had an unexpectedly deep impact.

Tim Wheatley, from Frankfort, Ill., was waiting with his sleepy 10-year-old, Iris, to meet Culkin after the movie. Though she’s now a talkative fifth-grader, when Iris was younger, she was nonverbal, he said. She communicated through a text-to-speech device, and “Home Alone” was the first live-action movie she loved. She taught herself to read by copying its closed-caption dialogue into her device. It made a profound difference in her ability to be understood.

“It’s allowed us to connect with her,” her father said. “It’s a great movie.”

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