9 / 10
Official trailer
Gremlins is a Christmas horror comedy disguised as a family film. Joe Dante directed it. Steven Spielberg produced it through Amblin Entertainment. Chris Columbus wrote the screenplay. Zach Galligan plays Billy Peltzer, a young bank teller in a small American town who’s given an unusual pet by his father for Christmas. Phoebe Cates plays Kate, Billy’s coworker.
Hoyt Axton plays Billy’s inventor father. Howie Mandel voices Gizmo, the original gentle creature. Frank Welker voices Stripe, the leader of the gremlins after the transformation. Things go badly for the town.
Gremlins delights me in the meanest possible way. It dresses up as a cozy Christmas creature picture and then lets its monsters wreck a whole town, and I enjoy every minute of the chaos. Gizmo is the sweetest thing Dante puts on screen, Stripe is a gleeful little menace, and the film gives me both at full strength.
The film made approximately one hundred and fifty-three million dollars worldwide on an eleven million dollar budget. It was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1984. The MPAA rating system created the PG-13 rating in response to Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, both of which were rated PG but contained material that parents objected to. The PG-13 rating took effect in July 1984, one month after Gremlins was released, and is one of the lasting consequences of the film’s commercial success and its commitment to being scarier than its marketing suggested.
The Tone Problem That Is a Strength
Gremlins is the rare film that can’t decide what tone it wants to be in.
The opening is a Spielberg-Amblin Christmas movie about a boy and his magical pet. The middle is a creature feature with significant body-horror elements. The third act includes a sequence where the gremlins watch Snow White in a movie theater while being killed in a fire that Billy starts. Phoebe Cates delivers a monologue about why she doesn’t like Christmas that involves her father dying inside their chimney while dressed as Santa Claus.
None of this should work in the same film, and it does. Kate’s Santa story is my favorite example. It’s horrifying and it’s hilarious, and Cates delivers it so straight that I don’t know whether to laugh or wince, and I think that confusion is exactly what Dante wanted.
The tonal whiplash is the film’s identity. Joe Dante directed Gremlins as a horror comedy that uses Christmas as its setting because Christmas amplifies the contrast. A scene of practical-effect monsters terrorizing the same locations follows every scene of cheerful small-town life. The film never settles into either tone. The audience can’t relax.
For Writers
Tonal instability can be a feature instead of a flaw if the writer commits to it. Gremlins doesn’t modulate. It oscillates. The horror is real horror. The comedy is real comedy. The film doesn’t soften either side to accommodate the other. The lesson is that genre mixing works best when each genre is taken seriously on its own terms. If you blend horror and comedy by softening both, you get nothing. If you commit to both at full strength, the contrast produces something neither could produce alone.
The Three Rules
The three rules for caring for a mogwai are the film’s structural engine. No bright light, especially sunlight.
Don’t get him wet. Never, ever feed him after midnight. The audience knows from the moment the rules are explained that all three will be broken. The pleasure is in watching how the breaking happens and what the consequences are.
The first rule break is accidental. Billy’s idiot brother sprays Gizmo with water. New mogwai erupt from his back. The second rule break is also accidental. The new mogwai trick Billy into feeding them after midnight.
They cocoon and emerge transformed. The third rule, sunlight, becomes the third-act resolution. Billy uses sunlight to kill Stripe. The setup is laid in the first ten minutes and pays off across the runtime with the kind of patient construction most genre films don’t bother with.
I adore how the rules work here. The second they’re laid out, I’m waiting for them to break, and the film makes the waiting as much fun as the payoff.
For Writers
Establishing rules that the story will break is a highly reliable structural move. The audience commits to watching how the rules get broken. Gremlins states the three rules in the first reel and spends the rest of the film paying them off. The lesson is that explicit constraints create reader engagement. The audience is waiting for the expected to arrive in unexpected ways. Give them rules. Then break them.
The Practical Effects
Chris Walas designed the creatures. The gremlins are puppets with cable-worked facial expressions and worked by puppeteers under, behind, and around the set. The film contains hundreds of individual gremlin shots, each requiring complex puppetry coordination. The bar sequence, in which dozens of gremlins are drinking, dancing, smoking, and breaking things, was among the most logistically complicated practical-effect sequences attempted in a major studio film up to that point.
I think the practical effects have aged beautifully.
The gremlins look like the puppets they are, and I wouldn’t change a thing, because they have weight, they occupy space, and the actors are reacting to something physically there. The bar sequence alone goes a long way toward the 9 for me. Modern CGI gremlins would look smoother, and I’d care about them a lot less.
For Writers
Visible craft can be part of what the audience enjoys. The Gremlins puppets are clearly puppets and that’s part of why they work. The audience can tell that real people built the things on screen. The lesson is that perfection isn’t always the right goal. Sometimes the seams of construction add value. Audiences accept and even enjoy work that doesn’t pretend to be magic. Hide the work less than your instincts suggest.
Craft Note
Joe Dante directed. Chris Columbus wrote (his first major produced screenplay). Steven Spielberg executive produced through Amblin. Zach Galligan as Billy Peltzer. Phoebe Cates as Kate Beringer. Hoyt Axton as Randall Peltzer. Howie Mandel voiced Gizmo. Frank Welker voiced Stripe. Chris Walas designed the creature effects. Jerry Goldsmith composed the score. Released June 1984. Approximately eleven million dollar budget. One hundred and fifty-three million worldwide gross. Directly responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating in July 1984.
Does Gremlins still hold up?
9/10, and I think it’s close to perfect. It’s a horror comedy that refuses to flinch from either side, it’s tonally daring, and every creature on screen was built by hand. Gizmo is my favorite creature design of the decade. The sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), is even stranger and almost as good. Watch this one first.
