Gremlins

If there can be a quintessential '80s Holiday/Horror/Family Comedy, it's Gremlins. I skipped this movie when it was released because the kindertrauma I experienced from Poltergeist and ET made me wary of any non-Indianan Jones Spielberg offering in 1984. Indeed, this odd tonal mix of horror and comedy—family fun set at Christmastime in a small town that's overtaken by mischievous little monsters—probably wouldn’t have sat well with me as it didn't with a lot of kids and, more precisely, some of their parents already furious with Spielberg for the violence and gore of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which was released a month prior and was still freaking out the youngsters. These two films were instrumental in the creation of the MPAA's PG-13 rating, which has contributed greatly to the infantilizing of Hollywood blockbusters over the last three decades but was originally meant to simply warn parents that a film contains images and sequences that may be "too intense" for children under thirteen. When Gremlins was released, I was just a few days shy of turning thirteen myself, and I never saw this picture in its entirety until around 2015.

Like 1984's Reckless, Gremlins was an early spec screenplay by Chris Columbus, who would go on to write The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes for Spielberg before becoming a director in his own right with Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and the first two Harry Potter films. Columbus was inspired by the sound of mice skittering around the inside of the walls of his loft at night. Spielberg loved the writing sample, considering it one of the most original scripts he'd ever read. He optioned the screenplay and started to set it up with Tim Burton, then an ex-Disney animator, as director. When that didn't come together, Spielberg turned to a filmmaker with experience blending horror and comedy, Joe Dante, the former Roger Corman editor who directed Piranha and The Howling and was one of the contributing directors of the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie, along with Spielberg.

Columbus' script, about a young adult named Billy whose father gives him a strange but adorable pet named Gizmo as a Christmas present, was much darker than the resulting picture. Gizmo comes with three important rules, which Billy inadvertently breaks, unleashing a horde of rascally little green creatures who wreak havoc on Billy's small hometown. The spec script features gremlins eating Billy's dog and decapitating one of his neighbors. Critically, it also featured the adorable Gizmo violently transforming into the evil lead gremlin, Stripe, when he gets wet. Spielberg's key script note was not to lose Gizmo, believing the pet should live and be present for the rest of the movie. That one change is probably responsible for the picture's massive appeal. Not killing the cute little creature and eating the family dog made this film not only palpable but highly enjoyable for the vast majority of audiences of all ages, despite the controversy and outrage by parents of traumatized little kids who thought they were gonna get another ET (though, I still think ET is 1000 times more disturbing than Gremlins!)

There is still plenty about Gremlins that's effectively creepy, which is kind of amazing when you consider how primitive the actual gremlins are. I gotta give Joe Dante and create designer Chris Walas props for… the props. Gremlins taps into viewers' primal emotions using plastic puppets that look like they could have been purchased at a Toys R Us. The creature effects here are hardly the sophisticated, finely detailed work Walas achieved two years later in The Fly. But such is the magic of movies. These at first cute and then devilish varmints are captivating and funny, and their vocalizations by comedians Howie Mandel, Frank Welker, and Michael Winslow humanize them in amusing ways. Of course, it helps that Columbus's screenplay is so recognizably structured (the opening is right out of The Wizard of Oz, complete with Polly Holliday as a kind of Miss. Gultch) and that Dante always puts together a great cast with cameos that don't stop the action by drawing attention to themselves. Jerry Goldsmith's score is also a big winner. So different from Goldsmith's usual grand sweeping orchestral music, the loud, almost winey "Gremlin's Rag" literally sounds like something a little Gremlin would compose. Like Ghostbusters, Gremlins is a time capsule now. It would make a great double feature with the period piece A Christmas Story, in that it feels familiar and comforting even if you didn't live through the era it depicts.