Uncle Macaulay is a monster.
Kieran Culkin seems to be telling his young children that they’re not ready to watch Home Alone, the comedy hit that starred his older brother. Ironically, Kieran was also in the movie as Kevin McCallister’s little cousin, Fuller.
To be fair, it sounds like Culkin will let his kids watch the classic movie someday. But he thinks his daughter Kinsey, 5, and son Wilder, 3, might be scared at their current ages. As he told E! News, “There’s still some scary parts” that could keep them awake at night.
“For the 3-year-old, there’s the tarantula and there’s the guy at the end who said, ‘I’m gonna bite off all your fingers,'” Culkin said. “That’s scary for a 3-year-old.”
It was scary in real life too. “In the first Home Alone, they hung me up on a coat hook, and (Joe) Pesci says, ‘I’m gonna bite all your fingers off, one at a time,'” Macaulay Culkin told Rule Forty Two in 2004. “And during one of the rehearsals, he bit me, and it broke the skin.”
Despite Uncle Macaulay’s scary stories, “we think they might be ready for Home Alone this year,” Kieran said. “If not, next year.”
Kieran could take a tip from Macaulay, who showed Home Alone to his son Dakota when he was just two. “I already showed it to him last year, he thinks it’s so funny,” Macaulay told Entertainment Tonight last year. “I convinced my oldest that he’s the kid in the movie. I said, ‘Remember you had yellow hair? Remember when you were getting the bad guys?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah!’ He is such a liar. I’m like, ‘You don’t remember any of that.'”
Kieran, who was about the same age as his daughter Kinsey when he had a small role in Home Alone, admitted he didn’t understand anything scary during filming. “I had no idea what that movie was about when I saw it, and I was in it,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I was at the premiere, and I was dying laughing. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I had no idea what the movie was about.”
How do you act in a movie when you don’t even understand the plot? Just follow director Chris Columbus’ instructions. “‘Drink this Coke, wear the glasses, say the thing that you memorized, look cute and go home,'” he explained. “Devin Ratray, the guy who plays Buzz, lied to me and told me the movie was all about him. And I believed him. And then when I saw it, the movie’s cracking me up, and I go, ‘Mac was on set all the time. That makes sense the movie would be about him.'”
The lesson here? Kids don’t know much, so you might as well let them watch Home Alone. Kinsey and Wilder will likely laugh without really getting what’s going on, just like their dad did.
