Traditional Christmas Movies: Gremlins

It's Christmas! When inventor/gadget salesman Rand Peltzer finds a strange animal in a Chinatown curio shop, he believes it’ll be the perfect gift for his son, Billy, at least, as long as Billy follows the three important rules for caring for the animal. Unfortunately, Billy breaks those rules almost immediately, unleashing a horde of malevolent and mischievous creatures upon their small town.

The etymology of the word “gremlin” is a bit murky.

Some say that it derives from the Old English words greme or gremian, which mean to vex or annoy, which was then eventually mixed with with goblin. Others claim that it came from the Irish Gaelic word gruaimin which means “ill-tempered little fellow.” And in German, the word gramlein can apparently mean something like “a small bit of grief.” A common story from the late 1930s claims that an RAF bomber unit stationed in India are the ones who actually coined the word, and they did it by combining Grimm’s Fairy Tales with Fremlins beer, which was the only brand they available there. I don’t know if any of those are true, but I will say that the last one sounds a bit implausibly inorganic, and overly convoluted to me.

Although, to be fair, the idea of a bunch of lads, bored and far from home and drinking too much, because what else is there to do, and as a result, breaking stuff, and then blaming it on (looks at beer bottle…..) “uh, Guh—remlins… Gremlins did it, sir,” it does have a certain feel of truth to it.

Whatever. Doesn’t matter.

But the idea of these menacing little creatures, these large-eyed, sharp of tooth and claw little imps lurking in the shadows of an aircraft, waiting to cause trouble, is a sort of colloquial twist on old legends of the Fae, that make sense to me.

But that said, the earliest references do seem to begin in the post-WW1 era, where RAF pilots stationed in Malta, the Middle East, and India claimed they were being plagued by tiny malicious creatures whose sole concern seemed to be breaking shit and creating mishaps. Gremlins were blamed for all kinds of cockpit chaos, engine troubles, weird accidents, equipment failures, and even crashes.

“A little monster did it,” is obviously nonsense, right? It’s the dumbest lie ever that a person might use in order to cover up their general ineptitude, and the kind of lie where it’s also obvious that the person telling the lie clearly has zero respect for the level of intelligence possessed by the person they’re telling the lie to, but maybe the craziest part of all of it is that “gremlins did it” seemed to be a pretty reasonably acceptable excuse.

It was a common idea, and one that stuck around.

Famous children's author, former RAF pilot, and well-known antisemite and racist, Roald Dahl published The Gremlins in 1943, based on RAF legends of the mischievous creatures. In the same year, Bugs Bunny battled a gremlin that was trying to destroy his plane in Falling Hare.

In the fifth season of the TV series The Twilight Zone, its third episode, titled "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” featured a gremlin. Based on a Richard Matheson short story, and directed by Richard Donner, it aired on October 11th, 1963, and is one of the most well-known and frequently referenced episodes in a well-known and oft-referenced series. The story follows Robert Wilson, played by William Shatner, as he boards an airline flight, and mid-flight, notices a hideous gremlin on the wing, trying to sabotage the aircraft, but no one believes him. This episode, more than anything else, is probably the most responsible for keeping the basic idea of Gremlins in the public’s mind.

And then finally, it was 1984, and the film was released.

Directed by Joe Dante, written by Chris Columbus (no, not that one, the other one), Gremlins started with an $11 million budget, and ended with a worldwide gross of over $212.9 million. In an industry where you’re only as a good as your last film, this thing was like a Golden Ticket, especially since ’84 was a hell of a year for movies in general. Gremlins was opened June 8th, 1984, which was the same day as Ghostbusters, but while it ended up taking second place that weekend, it only made one million less. It would go on to become the fourth highest-grossing film of the year, after Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

So, big winner.

That said, at the same time, it was heavily criticized at the time for its violent sequences, even if those same sequences seem ludicrously quaint now. And to be fair, most of the TV and print advertisements focused on Gizmo, giving the whole thing a cuddly family fun feel. Plus, Spielberg was just coming off the most family friendly film of the time, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and despite Gremlins being a Joe Dante film, with Spielberg only Producing, people believed it to be his movie—which is what’s happening with the new Supergirl movie right now, people are calling a James Gunn movie, even though it’s not—and these people all seemed to believe that Spielberg would only ever make family-friendly films.

And they got very upset when Gremlins wasn’t that.

Which is silly. I mean… maybe do some of that “research” you fuckers are so enamored with before dragging your snot factories to the mall and then blaming the world for not coddling your weird-looking progeny the way you expected? Even in 1984, there were still reviews in magazines, newspapers, and on TV too. Plus, all of the trailers and tv commercials before the film’s release had a menacing tone to them, clearly implying that the creature in the box might be bad news. How about maybe paying attention to the world around you? But of course, that’s too much to ask. It is an American tradition to always center yourself, to shift blame, and avoid responsibility, after all. So all these ridiculous middle class morons, determined to avoid being exposed as uninformed consumers and negligent parents, maintained that it was the film’s fault that they took their too-young child to a horror-comedy, and they just refused to take the L and shut the fuck up about it. So, as a result, we soon had the PG-13 rating that we all know and love to this day, claiming not just Gremlins, but Temple of Doom too, as responsible. That both of those films were considered to be Spielberg films makes me wonder how much of all this really was the result of angry backlash from mediocre people over the fact he didn’t make a super family-friendly follow-up to ET.

It’s all especially weird, because as I said, after watching films like this in the year 2025, it’s difficult to imagine people legitimately flipping out about because of the ”violence” on-screen.

Anyway…

This movie starts out with an awkward opening voice-over narration that feels like it was the result of a studio-mandated decision, after an early test-screening lucked out and pulled in a Burbank audience that was even more tasteless than usual.

Struggling inventor Randall “Rand” Peltzer visits a random Chinatown antique store to find a Christmas present for his son, Billy. Rand is a con artist, a grifter, and a terrible inventor, a three strike loser who doesn’t understand that he’s out of swings. Even worse, as an entrepreneur, he’s constantly on the hunt for the next big thing, which, when coupled with his door-to-door salesman’s attitude, means he's terrible and selfish, like a proto version of all those douchebag dot com guys, the ones constantly ”gifting” the rest of us with a new great invention that no one wants, needs, or asked for, and also destroys the planet, all while it fails to live up to its promises. But while Rand is browsing the shop’s curiosities, and trying to sell one of his crap inventions to the shop’s owner, he stumbles across a small furry creature called a Mogwai (which is Cantonese for “devil” apparently).

He wants it.

However, the old man proprietor, Mr. Wing, refuses to sell it to Rand, even after he offers the whooping sum of $200. But as $200 was apparently a life-changing amount of money back in 1984, Mr. Wing’s grandson secretly meets Rand outside and makes the deal.

The film then chooses to explain its central idea, the most important piece of information in the story’s whole set-up, in this strange and very rushed-feeling voice-over, where the kid can be heard warning Rand that taking care of a Mogwai will require a strict adherence to three very important rules…

1. Keep your Mogwai out of the light. Sunlight will kill him.
2. Never get your Mogwai wet. So, no smooth jazz and candlelight.
3. Finally, no matter how much your Mogwai might cry, no matter how much they may beg, never ever feed them after midnight. (This last rule has always created a few problems for me. Like, at what point after midnight is it safe to feed your Mogwai again? When does the clock reset? At sunrise? Which timezone? Does a Mogwai’s “Gremlin Trigger” adhere to daylight savings time?)

Rand assures the kid that they’ll follow the rules, and returns to his quaint suburban hometown of Kingston Falls, far, far away from the shadowy diversity of the Big City. Here, his wife Lynn keeps house, despite the daily chaos visited upon all of their lives by Rand’s plethora of homemade appliances and myriad modern-day conveniences, all of which are either breaking down, or are actively dangerous. Billy, meanwhile, works at the local bank, and lives in constant fear his dog Barney will be killed by the evil old local widow, Ruby Deagle. But when Rand gets home and gives Billy his gift, introducing the whole world to the Mogwai known as "Gizmo," it seems like it just might be the perfect little Christmas after all.

Gizmo is kind of creepy, sure, and it’s definitely not as cute as you remember, but it’s generally a friendly little thing, and it settles in pretty easily with Billy’s life of being a working adult who still lives in his parents’ attic. In fact, everything seems to be going pretty good as Christmas nears, and Rand hustles off to an “Inventors Convention” where we get a running gag of inventions on display there, including H.G. Well’s Time Machine and Robbie the Robot.

But when Billy's seemingly only, and also weirdly much younger friend, Pete Fountaine, accidentally spills water on Gizmo, the Mogwai has a seizure and five little hairy balls come firing off him. They uncurl into five new Mogwai, but these Mogwai clearly do not have the same disposition as Gizmo. They’re meaner and their pranks have a more dangerous edge to them. Also, these new Mogwai are led by Stripe, an especially mean little shit, so named for the white, mohawk-like tuft of fur on his head.

Billy brings one of the new Mogwai to his former elementary school science teacher, Mr. Hanson, and while he’s there, he demonstrates how Mogwai breed—something that seems like it might be a little problematic, maybe—spawning yet another Mogwai. Mr. Hansen then takes this new Mogwai and starts running tests on it, trying to figure out just what the hell it is.

Later that night, Stripe and the other Mogwai trick Billy into feeding them after midnight by setting his clock back an hour. Gizmo, who doesn’t have anything to eat, is like… oh shit, this again. But also, notably, Gizmo neither attempts to warn Billy, nor to dissuade him from feeding the others. Nothing. Not a squeak. This makes me think… Maybe Gizmo wants all this to happen? Maybe this is a kind of biological imperative for him? Maybe Gizmo actually hates people? Maybe he can only ever hear the long-repressed voice of the Gremlin caged in the recesses of his mind, straining at its bindings, driving Gizmo to crave the chaos? Maybe Gizmo just gets off on seeing people hurt? Maybe Gizmo views himself as a kind of divine instrument of karmic justice, the righteous hand of Shiva the Destroyer, a force of sanctified transformation? Maybe Gizmo believes that this is the sole reason why he exists, to bring with him death and destruction, but only to provide a path for a new beginning, that eliminating the impure, the ignorant, and the evil is to allow for a chance of new spiritual growth to bloom amongst those who remain, so that they may yet prove themselves worthy of the glories of Heaven? Maybe that’s why Gizmo stays a Mogwai, because as long as he’s he still exists, the holy cycle will continue, and the wicked, the impure, and the undeserving will be rightfully purged from the world, while the strong of mind, body, and soul persevere?

Either way, as a result, the other Mogwai form cocoons that look like the eggs of Species XX121, and when they emerge, the furry little Mogwai are gone, and in their place, there are fanged reptilian monsters. Feeding Mogwai after midnight apparently releases their full power, allowing them to assume their true form, all so they can start fucking some shit up.

The Gremlins have arrived.

Mr. Hanson is almost immediately murdered by the gremlin he was experimenting on, while Stripe and the others at the Peltzer house, first take some time to torture Gizmo, and then they go after Billy’s mother, Lynn.

But Lynn isn’t interested in taking any shit from any Gremlins, especially once they start trashing her kitchen. She goes for blood, there’s no fucking around. Lynn puts one Gremlin through the blender. She stabs another to death. One she blows up in the microwave. She solemnly draws two knives from the Knife Block for the fourth Gremlin, but that one uses the well-known holiday hazard that is the family Christmas tree in order to get the jump on her. Luckily, Billy managed to behead the fourth Gremlin with a decorative sword, and then knocking the head into the fireplace. Together, mom and son watch as the meat of the Gremlin’s face bubbles and blackens and turn to charcoal.

Stripe, seeing what a bloodthirsty bad-ass mom is, he nopes out of there with a quickness. This is where we learn that apparently frozen water does not cause the gremlins to reproduce. Anyway, Stripe is like “fuck this” and heads straight to the YMCA, but not to get himself clean, or to have a good meal, but to do whatever he feels… That means jumping in the pool.

Oh shit, now there’s lots of gremlins.

With tons of Gremlins now loose in Kingston Falls, the crappy locals of Kingston Falls all find themselves on the receiving end of well-deserved karmic retribution. The police, meanwhile, all run for it, as the Supreme Court ruled that they do not have a constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm.

Meanwhile, Billy rescues his co-worker and girlfriend, Kate Beringer, when the gremlins attack the bar that she also works at. Afterwards, Kate discloses that her father went missing on Christmas Eve when she was nine years old, but was found dead in the chimney of their house several days later. Apparently, he had planned on surprising his family as Santa Claus, but slipped and broke his neck while in the chimney. Because of this, Kate hates Christmas. Billy, clearly hoping to make-out later, nods along like it was totally reasonable for her to bring up this crazy-ass story unprompted, and not weird at all.

Meanwhile, the gremlins have all gathered in the local movie theater to watch Snow White, and are all really enjoying themselves. Billy and Kate and Gizmo are like, “fuck that” and blow up the building, and any of the Gremlins that survived the explosion, soon die in agony in the fire.

Except Stripe.

Stripe had wandered into the Montgomery Wards across the street during the movie. Montgomery Wards was a store like Sears, but not as good. Sears was a store like Target, but much less racist. Billy, Kate, and Gizmo all follow Stripe into the store, where he attempts to use a fountain to spawn more gremlins, but after crashing a Barbie Dream Car, Gizmo opens a nearby skylight, exposing Stripe to the new day’s sunlight, killing him.

As the town of Kingston Falls picks up the pieces and buries their dead, the Peltzer household listens as the local news reports on the whole debacle. That’s when Mr. Wing appears in their house and reclaims Gizmo, no refund offered, and tells them all how shitty they all are, before leaving with the Mogwai.

But not before Gizmo has one last chance to be cute.

Gremlins crawled so that Minions can run.

Shot on the same Courtyard Square set as the film Back to the Future, Gremlins revolves around an incredibly incurious family. Sure, there’s no internet obviously, but they don’t even go to the library to take advantage of its many encyclopedias, its collection of microfiche, or the myriad books listed in the library’s card catalog and arranged using the Dewey decimal system, and maybe try looking up what the holy hell a Mogwai is. Gremlins is set in a world where, when faced with a clearly alien creature, an unnatural bipedal monkey/bear thing that seems like it might actually be sentient and self-aware, and can also kind of talk, no one goes… “what the unholy fuck is that god damned thing.”

Gremlins is also a movie about people who almost immediately break the very clearly-stated, very easy to follow rules, mostly because they don’t care, resulting in not just a huge amount of property damage, but multiple violent deaths, who then, in the end, basically escape all punishment, whether it be legal, societal, or karmic.

Most of all, Gremlins is an oddly-paced film, filled with scene changes that feel like built-in commercial breaks, featuring a story that is basically It’s A Wonderful Life, but… y’know, with Gremlins, and despite being only an hour and twenty minutes long, it really takes its sweet-ass time getting going. But on the upside, it also features a young Corey Feldman, as well as Mike from Breaking Bad.

Designed to look like a mix between a cartoonishly-proportioned tarsier and a puppy dog/teddy bear, the film decided to use puppets and marionettes after an early attempt to use monkeys to play the gremlins was abandoned, as monkeys tend to panic when made to wear gremlin heads.

Howie Mandel provides the voice of Gizmo. Frank Welker, the voice of everyone’s favorite Decepticon, Soundwave, is the voice of Stripe. Otherwise, the majority of the rest of the gremlins were voiced by either Optimus Prime himself, Peter Cullen, and by Michael Winslow, the 80s preferred sound effect guy, who is mostly known from the Police Academy movies.

So, basically, this film is voiced by the spirit of the 1980s.

This is a crazy movie, a weird artifact of 1980s American culture, but the craziest part, hands down, is Kate’s random-ass story about her father dead in the chimney while dressed as Santa, which she then explains is why she now hates Christmas. It is so god damn ridiculous, it‘s such an out-of-left-field turn into darkness, and is so incredibly silly, both in subject matter and delivery, that it’s not only impossible to take seriously in the moment, it’s impossible to take seriously as an insight into the character. That they would include this ludicrous backstory in this film is insane to me. Does it inform her character? Does her hating Christmas have anything to do with the film’s plot? Does she learn that Christmas is actually wonderful by the end of the film? No. None of that. So why the hell is it in there?

Basically because of Joe Dante.

Studio executives tried to get it removed, because they felt it was “too ambiguous as to whether it was supposed to be funny or sad,” which is a nice way of saying its really bad, just an absolute failure of a scene. Spielberg wanted it gone too, because he has eyes to see and ears to hear and a soul to feel. But Dante refused, apparently feeling that, with its combination of horror and comedy, the scene represented the film as a whole. I imagine that this excuse probably left the whole room in stunned silence, because how do you respond to that? “No… No, Joe, that’s not true. It’s just really bad. That’s all.” I mean, that‘s not going to foster a healthy working environment.

One of the funniest part about how the film’s frankly almost non-existent violence resulted in the creation of the PG-13 rating, is that Columbus’ original draft was much darker than the final film.

Linda was going to be decapitated during her fight with the gremlins, with her head thrown down the stairs when Billy arrives. The Gremlins were going to eat Billy's dog too. The Gremlins were also supposed to attack a McDonald's and eat the customers instead of the burgers, which doesn’t seem as crazy of a decision in the year 2025, given how McDonald’s burgers don’t even pretend to taste like food anymore. Also, Stripe being a mogwai who turns into a gremlin was a late addition. Originally, Gizmo was supposed to get fed after midnight, and then turn into Stripe the Gremlin. Apparently, this was a step too far for Spielberg, because Gizmo was too cute, and he knew that audiences would love him. And they did. For a brief time, Gizmo was everywhere.

Now, all these years later, when I rewatch this film, it’s fun, and fun to look back and remember a different time, but for me, I mostly just love how the gremlins at the movies are basically what most midnight movie showings are actually like.

Overall, Gremlins is a good time, the kind of easy popcorn flick that everyone can enjoy. It’s not deep, and it won’t ever change the world, but that’s fine. It’s fun, and that’s all that it needs to be. Plus, it’s always fun to revisit a big mainstream genre film like this, and see the weirdly patchwork way Hollywood used to tell stories like this. All that said, I bet kids today will still be mildly amused by it.

It’s the perfect Christmas movie.