30 Home Alone facts every true fan must know

Despite the fact that Hughes recommended Culkin, Columbus wanted to see who else was out there. "I think one of the final meetings — if not the final meeting — was with Macaulay," Columbus said. "We read a couple of the scenes together, and I called John and said, 'He’s amazing.'"

And he improvised quite a bit. Remember when he’s talking to Kevin’s mom in the van about being left in a funeral home overnight with a corpse? "That just came out of nowhere," Columbus told EW. "That was probably on hour 23 of shooting. We were all sort of punch drunk."

The scream was written in the script, but Culkin was supposed to just slap on the after-shave, move his hands, and scream; he wasn’t meant to keep his hands pressed against his face. "But on the first take, he slapped his face and kept his hands glued to his face as if he had just put superglue on [it]," Columbus said. Hence the Edvard Munch vibes.

John and Cynthia Abendshien owned the home, located at 671 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois, when it was used for the film. It was still something of a tourist attraction when they sold it.

Culkin has said, "In the first Home Alone, they hung me up on a coat hook, and Pesci says, 'I’m gonna bite all your fingers off, one at a time.' And during one of the rehearsals, he bit me, and it broke the skin." You can take the guy out of Goodfellas, but you can't take Goodfellas out of the guy.

He voiced grown-up Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years.

Stern told The Hollywood Reporter, "They said, 'Well, we have a rubber one, but we've got the real one, too.' They told me [the tarantula] was real nice and showed it walking across the trainer's arm … everyone seemed cool with it, so I just had them put the friggin' tarantula on my face."

"I asked if that would spook the spider, but I guess tarantulas can't hear," Stern said. "Again, I was committed fully to that movie ... I wanted to hit a home run in every scene."

"I had to pull my head out quickly, and I clipped my big-ass nose on the door thing," he said. In an earlier dog-door scene, you can hear him saying "shit" under his breath when he loses his shoe through the flap.

The ornaments were candy glass, but they hurt nonetheless. (Ironically, he wore rubber feet in a different scene, when he’s walking barefoot outside, but not for this one. )

According to the theory, he’s the man with the bushy beard standing behind Kevin’s mom at the airport, in the scene where she’s trying to get a ticket to Chicago. Elvis died in 1977, but a separate conspiracy theory posits that he merely faked his death to free himself from the trappings of fame. Why he’d show up as an extra in Home Alone is unclear, but Columbus did direct a 1988 movie called Heartbreak Hotel.

He plays Fuller, the one who wets the bed. He’s since appeared in movies like Igby Goes Down, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and The Cider House Rules.

His name was Larry Nicholas, and he’s the person you see zip-lining to the tree house and falling off Buzz’s shelves, for example.

Because Culkin had to stop shooting before 10 p.m. due to child labor laws, Columbus would film the child actor’s coverage first, then stand in for him later. "We would be shooting from like 5:30 at night to 6 in the morning," Columbus said.

It made $285.7 million domestically — a record for a family comedy — and held the number-one spot at the North American box office for 12 consecutive weeks.

It wasn't expected to do as well as it did, or to play in theaters from roughly Thanksgiving to Easter, dominating the box office for much of that time, and other movies suffered as a result. In The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? And Other Essays, screenwriter William Goldman writes that "to be Home Aloned," became a Hollywood phrase. "More than one executive said to me, 'My picture did 40, but it would have done 50 if it hadn’t been Home Aloned,'" wrote Goldman.

You know the scene where Marv and Harry have to stop short so as not to crash right into Kevin? That was actuallyshot with the van pulling away from Kevin, and then reversed in editing. No Macaulay Culkin’s were harmed in the making of this movie.

As eagle-eyed viewers have noticed, Mr. McAllister throws Kevin’s ticket in the trash while cleaning up after the pizza incident. That accounts for why they weren’t tipped off to Kevin’s absence by an unclaimed ticket.