Daniel Stern’s Explanation For How They Filmed The Home Alone Iron Scene Sounds Honestly Scary

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Some Christmas movies are classics, and I watch a few of them every year. Home Alone is definitely one of those for me, and so is the second movie, which is why I recently rewatched the original from 1990. I’m always fascinated by the behind-the-scenes details of Home Alone, so I was thrilled to come across some recent comments from Daniel Stern about how they filmed some of the funniest parts.

Marv endures a lot of painful booby traps in the final scenes of Home Alone. As I’ve gotten older and understood what it means to be responsible, I’ve realized he probably deserved the consequences Kevin McCallister inflicted on him. Thinking about the mess he and his partner left for families like the Murphys to deal with makes it hard to feel sorry for him. However, Daniel Stern is a talented actor, and it’s sad to hear about the dangerous conditions he faced while filming – apparently, a camera actually fell on him during production.

The behind-the-scenes featurette for Home Alone that you can get with the digital version on iTunes is a bit older, but it shares some interesting details about the filmmaking process. For example, Daniel Stern talks about the famous scene where the iron falls down the laundry chute and hits Marv. I always wondered how they filmed that, and Stern’s explanation makes it sound like it was actually a pretty dangerous stunt!

Filming the iron scene was pretty unique. They filmed it from below by attaching the camera to a rope and lowering it towards me. The rope was designed to quickly stop, leaving a 300-pound camera seemingly falling right at my face. We were hoping everything would work out safely!

Many action scenes use stunt doubles to handle dangerous falls, but the ‘iron drop’ in this film is effective because we clearly see the actor’s reaction just before impact. The camera follows the falling iron for a few seconds, putting us in its path, which adds to the intensity. It’s understandable why the filmmakers shot it that way, but you can also see why the actor was understandably nervous facing a heavy object falling directly at him.

The filming of this scene is discussed in the Netflix documentary series Movies That Made Us, specifically in the episode about Home Alone. While the show doesn’t detail actor John Candy’s experiences with it, cinematographer Julio Macat explains they used a secondary camera—which he called the “bonus cam”—to capture extra footage of the stunts. He suggests this extra coverage proved valuable during filming.

The more I find out about how this movie was made, the more I appreciate it, especially considering how hilarious the stunts were.

The heated iron wasn’t the only frightening element Daniel Stern dealt with on set. He also shared in a behind-the-scenes featurette that a real tarantula was used in the attic stairs scene – pretty scary!

Catch Home Alone streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

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2025-12-10 18:08