A Christmas film that’s about as ingrained into our pop culture as much as It’s a Wonderful Life is the Chris Columbus classic Home Alone. But he was previously involved in another huge holiday film before his 1990 smash hit. He was the writer of the 1984 Joe Dante Christmas horror comedy Gremlins. And with the trifecta of creative minds like Columbus, Dante and executive producer Steven Spielberg at the helm, audiences were treated to an incredibly original, wacky and sometimes scary family film. It’s time to remember the three rules cause it’s Gremlins on this episode of Revisited.
Gremlins is one of those movies where it’s a simple straightforward story that gives the impression that there’s a ton of lore behind it but it isn’t truly necessary to explore, like Terminator or Alien, and it would be hard to explain anyway when you sit and think about it. The three rules of the Mogwai don’t logically add up. If you’re not supposed to get them wet, are their eyes and mouths dry? What about snow? What if the dog licks it? How long after midnight are you clear to feed them again? Is there a time limit? It’s variables like these that they actually parody in the second film.
The beauty of it is it doesn’t even matter. It’s all vague mysticism. It’s all fantasy logic. The charm of Gremlins is it’s a Steven Spielberg story of wonder that devolves into chaos and the fun of it all is just to see how much things these creatures can wreck. It starts intriguingly enough with a travelling inventor in Chinatown. He’s attempting to sell his new invention to an old shopkeep when something catches his attention. All we hear are the adorable high-pitched murmurs of a little critter and only see a blurry silhouette. The inventor is spellbound and wants to buy it, but the elderly shopkeeper, Mr. Wing, refuses and cryptically warns against it. His grandson sells the critter behind his back and tells the inventor three rules that are incredibly important for owning the critter: keep him out of bright light, especially sunlight that’s fatal to him. Don’t get them wet and don’t ever feed him after midnight. Right off the bat, you’re thinking, “Why?” “What happens?”
The other fun of it all and the suspense comes from discovering what happens. It’s like when you learn that the xenomorph’s blood is acidic in the original Alien and how the facehugger uses a host to hatch a baby. Enter Kingston Falls — the fictional small town that might look somewhat familiar. That’s because in a year the town set of Kingston Falls will be repurposed into Hill Valley in a little film called Back to the Future. We get a small preview of our town folk who may or may not get terrorized later on. Then, we meet our protagonist, Billy Peltzer, played by Zach Galligan. He’s seen trying to get his car running but to no avail. This starts the running motif of the movie series, but more on that later.
When we get to the bank, we meet the only person to rival Gizmo’s cuteness in this movie — Phoebe Cates playing Kate. Even though these two aren’t explicitly in school, Billy and Kate have a kind of tension of high schoolers who have crushes on each other. Kate’s even got that edgy cutter thing going on. “While everybody else is opening up their presents, they’re opening up their wrists.” Let’s see dialogue like that make it into a family film now.
Anyway, here we’re introduced to the evil human villain with the Ebenezer Scrooge-type character of Mrs. Deagle, who can shock the elderly simply by not being courteous. We’re also shortly introduced to the minor villain character who was supposed to be Mrs. Deagle’s silent partner in a deleted subplot. Judge Reinhold makes an appearance as a slight antagonist to Billy in this film and this would be a good summer for Judge as he would also co-star in another big hit — a little film called Beverly Hills Cop. When Billy finally gets home, we learn that he’s the son of the inventor from the prologue and we finally get to see what the creature was that he purchased.
It’s a good time to note that the trailers and TV spots for the film back in ‘84 kept the image of the gremlins relatively secret, only teasing bits and pieces of them. Even the poster barely showed what the appearance of Gizmo was. There wasn’t even an acknowledgment of the Mogwai creature being present before the gremlins show up so audiences were truly kept in the dark about what they were about to see. Was it the gremlin itself? Was it something else? What will this ugly creature look like?
The movie slyly surprises viewers with the cutest thing ever. Gizmo was unlike anything ever seen before. Those big old eyes. That adorable smile and cute little noises he makes, thanks to the voice talents of comedian Howie Mandel, who used the voice tones of his character from Bobby’s World. Billy’s inventor dad reveals he gave him the name Gizmo and here’s where the motif starts to take shape. Throughout the movie, Billy’s dad’s invention seemed to work for only a few seconds before going completely off the rails. Actually, both movies have running gags of technology and machinery malfunctioning and going haywire. This is because the origins of the gremlin folklore were popularized by pilots in World War II. The legend was that any kind of technical malfunction you had in your plane was caused by gremlins in your system. This is something Billy’s neighbor, Mr. Futterman, is constantly paranoid about.
Billy loves his new pet immediately, and let’s be honest, who wouldn’t? When he shows it off to a buddy, Pete, played by a young Corey Feldman, he attempts to hold Gizmo but accidentally knocks over a jar of soaking paint brushes, which spills the water onto him and now we see what happens when they get wet. As a bunch of new Mogwai sprout from Gizmo, you’d think the more furry creatures, the merrier. However, this new batch has a bad attitude and a much more chaotic energy to them. One night they tricked Billy into feeding them after midnight. Gizmo is equally unaware, but still opposed to it. I would be too. How could Billy just feed them a huge full plate of drumsticks? That was probably for a holiday party or something! Now we see what happens when they’re fed after midnight. Once the cocoons hatch and the gremlins escape, all bets are off and Kingston Falls would never be the same.
Gremlins, although written by Chris Columbus, was originally intended as a hard R-rated horror movie The gremlins were less playful and more vicious. At one point in the movie, Billy’s mom fights off the gremlins as she’s the first to encounter them. In Columbus’ first version, she actually gets killed with the gremlins chopping off her head and having it roll down the stairs. He also talks about a scene he wrote where the gremlins popping up at a McDonald’s, eat all the people, but leave the food.
It was when the script came across Steven Spielberg’s office at Amblin that it began to change. He bought the script and met with Columbus. Spielberg wanted to make the movie more audience friendly so it was brought down from a horror film to a hard-edged family film. What sealed the hook was Spielberg’s idea that Gizmo should not transform with the rest of the Mogwai. In fact, Gizmo was originally intended to be the head gremlin.
Spielberg would hire Joe Dante off the strength of his previous films, The Howling, and ironically, the Jaws clone, Piranha. Dante was a fresh face from the Roger Corman School of filmmaking and an absolute fan of the Looney Tunes. This is where the movie gets its maniacal edge with the gremlins out in full force. They’re beings with no discernible goal. They’re not explicitly killer animals or eating out of hunger. They just love to cause trouble and sport a healthy resentment to humans. They’re the embodiment of chaos and act without inhibition and they are constantly laughing that the madness they’re unleashing with no regard for human safety.
One of the highlights is the extended sequence where Billy’s mom discovers then fights off the gremlins. She takes out nearly every one of them at first. She catches one in a blender, straight up stabs one multiple times (it even lives long enough to suffer), then the part that every kid loved — she shuts one in the microwave and blows it up. By the way, this film is rated PG. It was this movie, this scene, that gave the ratings board the call to place a medium rating in between PG and R.
Additionally, there was an extremely dark story that Kate tells about her dad dying horrifically on Christmas that made her hate the holiday. This scene was also brilliantly parodied in the sequel with the strange Lincoln’s birthday speech. These scenes, coupled with the sacrifice scene in Temple of Doom where a man gets his still-beating heart ripped out, had parents up in arms about what passed for age-appropriate content and thus, thanks to Steven Spielberg, we have the PG-13 rating, where most blockbusters now reside.
The special effects for this movie was done by Chris Walas. Walas worked on Piranha with Dante and would go on to become a creature designer for Return of the Jedi right before this. So, when Dante needed someone to figure out how to make these creatures come to life, this was his go-to guy. Ironically, they malfunctioned all the time. According to Zach Galligan, it could take up to eight hours to repair a small mechanism of the puppets.
The crew especially had disdain for the small Gizmo puppet. There was a bigger one they used for close-ups, which they could fit more wires and parts in. But the small actual-sized one malfunctioned all the time with such a small shell and so many wires and parts crammed into it so it could have the range of movement and expressions. In fact, whenever the tiny Gizmo had to act opposite his co-stars, there could be as many as 15 crew members just off camera that ran the puppet. Joe Dante has said that the torturing Gizmo scenes were a big stress release for the crew since they hated the puppet so much.
Despite being a huge hit upon release with a $12 million weekend and growing its numbers in the subsequent week, the film actually never made it to number one. This is because the movie had the misfortune of opening opposite Ghostbusters in the same weekend on June 8. The movie would be one of the biggest hits of ‘84 with $148 million worldwide, and as you can guess, there was a ton of merchandise. Even Gremlin cereal, and if you were a big hit with kids, you had your own cereal.
1990 finally saw the sequel released with Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Joe Dante returns but the creature effects were now done by Hollywood Legend Rick Baker. The puppeteering technology advanced and they were able to do so much more. And they did much more. The gremlins had more distinct individual characteristics to them and Gizmo is even cuter than before. Thankfully a sequel without the creative team hasn’t been released, however there has been an animated prequel streaming on Max, which explores more of the backstory of the Mogwai.
In the future Gremlins is not a plotholeless movie but it doesn’t aim to be. It is incredibly solid in plot structure and it has that Steven Spielberg wonder and excitement with a harder-edged horror tone to it and flawlessly rode that line between family friendly and horrific chaos. And isn’t that what Christmas is about?
