If you exist in American society, you’ve likely picked up a little bit about the Gremlins through cultural osmosis. I was familiar with Gizmo's Furby-like (or Baby Yoda-like) face. I'd seen GIFs of the post-metamorphosis Mogwai singing Christmas carols. And, of course, I knew the three essential rules: no bright lights, don't get them wet, and never feed them after midnight.
But until last week, I hadn't actually sat down and watched Gremlins. It wasn't a staple in my house growing up, and despite enjoying director Joe Dante's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, I hadn't sought it out as an adult.
When you primarily know a piece of media through the zeitgeist, you can sometimes get a wildly skewed view of what it's actually like. I wrote last year about watching Friday the 13th for the first time and having the realization, late into the movie, that Jason Voorhees wasn't actually the villain in the first one. I had a similar lightbulb moment while watching Gremlins; not about the plot, but about the tone.
I always assumed that the Mogwai were mischievous, more than malicious; troublesome, but merry pranksters. But while watching the movie for the first time, I was surprised that, after their transformation, they're actually just straight up homicidal little evildoers. The film's reputation has been defanged somewhat in the 39 years since its release, and I think that's partially because it's a Steven Spielberg-executive produced creature feature that came out just two years after E.T. That movie has real peril, but it's the kind of peril you would see in a ‘boy and his dog’ movie. Other members of E.T.'s species don't crash land on Earth and start gunning down the neighbors.
So I was surprised when I watched Gremlins and saw the Mogwai start murdering people. But, what's more shocking is that, before the Mogwai commit vehicular homicide by driving a snow plow through the Futtermans' living room, mild-mannered mom Lynn Peltzer defends herself against a Mogwai attack in her kitchen with the intensity of Laurie Strode fending off Michael Myers. She shoves one critter face first into a stand mixer, stabs one through the heart, and microwaves another until he bursts. As we see what the Mogwai can do, Lynn's all-out violence seems more and more justifiable. But, when it happens, it's a bit of a shock to see the mother in a family film go Rambo on creatures that were household pets a few scenes earlier.
What's really surprising is that the movie has a real body count. The science teacher gets murdered by the Mogwai he's observing once it hatches. The Futtermans get run over by that snowplow. And most of the Mogwai get torched in the movie theater like the Nazis at the end of Inglourious Basterds.
But the most shocking death happens off-screen. Throughout the movie Phoebe Cates' Kate Beringer alludes to her mysterious hatred of Christmas. Around the climax, we finally learn the reason. Her father went missing on Christmas day, and she and her mother looked for him but couldn't find him. Eventually, they smelled something foul coming from the chimney, looked inside, and found that he had gotten stuck while trying to play Santa Claus, his sack of presents wedging him tight against the bricks. When Kate first says that she hates Christmas, I rolled my eyes a bit. A Holiday Skeptic is a stock character in Christmas movies. But, the payoff was so unhinged that the movie won me over.
Spielberg used a twist on the "boy and his dog" metaphor himself, calling the movie a "gremlin and his boy story." That makes it sound more wholesome than it is, though. If Gremlins is a "boy and his dog" movie, for every Lassie there are nine Cujos.