How The 'Home Alone' And 'Halloween' Franchises Weirdly Parallel Each Other

Good news for fans of Christmas movies and bloodied paint cans, this weekend, we're getting a new entry in the Home Alone saga entitled Home Sweet Home Alone. You might be wondering just how many times suburban Chicago parents can thoughtlessly abandon their children during the holidays and, well, it turns out that the answer is: a lot. The production of the Home Alone series spans more than three decades and features a myriad of sequels most people who don't have an immediate family member in the cast have never seen. It's a confusing mess that, upon closer examination, may actually have more in common with a horror franchise than anything else – specifically, Halloween.

We've talked before about the prevalent theory that Kevin McCallister grew up to be the similarly cold-blooded, booby trap-loving Jigsaw, so in many ways, it makes complete sense that a series predicated on one character's violent rampage would follow a horror series model. But Kevin's narrative trajectory best resembles that of Michael Myers -- and, when you think about it, both the first Home Alone movie and the original Halloween are, at their core, about small children driven to violence after being left unsupervised in a suburban estate during a holiday.

The original movies were big hits and promptly followed by sequels that shamelessly copied much of what had come before. Halloween II literally takes place on the same night as Halloween, while Home Alone 2: Lost in New York duplicated many of the same beats as the first movie but set in Manhattan and co-starring an overpriced tape recorder. 

Then, for their respective third movies, both franchises broke from the continuity of the first two stories for similarly-themed adventures following entirely different characters. Halloween III: Season of the Witch was about an evil Druidic costume manufacturer, while Home Alone 3 was about some other rich kid with a thirst for human blood.

Since neither did well, for the fourth movie, they brought back the lead characters: Michael Myers and Kevin McCallister. But in both cases, these characters looked … off. With Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, it was because the producers thoughtlessly gave away the original mask after part two was finished, and in the case of Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House, they weirdly cast some brunette kid who looked nothing like Macaulay Culkin.

While Home Alone 5: The Holiday Heist has no connection to the McCallisters, it does co-star Malcolm McDowell, who coincidentally also starred in Rob Zombie's Halloween movies ...

Now Home Alone is back, and, like the recent Halloween reboot, Home Sweet Home Alone features a fresh cast of characters, along with a legacy character from the original movie. We got Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode, and, presumably because Culkin said no, we're getting the triumphant return of, um … Buzz? Really? Was Pigeon Lady busy? The snotty pizza delivery guy passed?

Hopefully, this means that should this trend continue and there’s a sequel to Home Sweet Home Alone, it will follow the new kid's neighbors as they form an angry mob and attempt to put a stop to his adorable reign of terror once and for all. 

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Top Image: Universal/20th Century Studios