GREMLINS is a classic holiday movie. It’s not always brought up in the same discussion as MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET and HOME ALONE or A CHRISTMAS STORY, but it’s a Christmas feature at its core. At the same time, it’s a very dark take on the holiday. Of course, that’s all part of its charm.

With this film, Joe Dante gave us the perfect amount of salt to balance out the sweet of the holiday season. It’s a feature that can get mean-spirited, but is also genuinely funny, with moments of sincere Spielbergian warmth. That’s my favorite thing about GREMLINS. It’s a tonal roller coaster. It’s never quite the same thing from one moment to the next.

So, while it’s a family film and a comedy/adventure, GREMLINS is also without a doubt a horror movie. It’s rooted in that genre and I think the other genres it encompasses all stem from that springboard.

Many people don’t like to consider GREMLINS as a horror movie because it’s PG-13 and because it works on a different level from what most fans are used to seeing. But it definitely fits within that genre, I think. Here are my attempts to explain why.

Every horror movie has rules

One of the things we take to with every horror film we see as a young kid are the rules. As a child with an overactive imagination, I tried to learn as much as I could about the monsters on the off-chance I would ever encounter them in real life. I knew that Dracula couldn’t come in unless I invited him, I knew that Chucky wouldn’t try to take over my body unless I was the first person he revealed his secret too, and that Freddy couldn’t get me unless I was a child of the parents who burned him.

The Gremlins have more specific rules than any other horror monster of the past thirty years. They’re mythology is much more deeply woven into the horror genre than adventure or fantasy because these are the sorts of rules you’d have for vampires or werewolves. They’re a big red flag right out of the gate that things are going to go wrong at some point in this film.

It was originally written as a straightforward horror movie

The original draft of GREMLINS by Chris Columbus was an R-rated, no bones about it horror film. It was Spielberg who stepped in and said that the only way to get it made on the budget they were looking at was to turn it into a more family-friendly adventure. But even if some of the more extreme deaths are taken out, so many of the horrific elements of the original script are still intact in the finished product.

The showdown between Billy’s mom and the Gremlins

This scene, which is where we’re introduced to the Gremlins for the first time, is 100% horror. There’s no attempt at comedy or wacky hijinx. There’s just a woman slowly realizing that there are monsters loose in her house and that she is going to have to fight back. And she does! In the original script, Billy comes home to find his mother’s head bouncing down the steps, but here she actually kicks a fair amount of ass. And the Gremlins are dispatched in pretty gruesome ways, from one getting stuffed in a blender to another exploding in the microwave.

The Gremlins are scary

When you’re a kid, there’s something about the Gremlins that makes them unnerving. Yes, they’re funny and rambunctious and they cause all sorts of mayhem, but something can be funny and scary at the same time. Especially when you’re young. They’re demonic looking. Their green color looks much darker in the film and their eyes are blazing red. Plus, all those teeth. Stripe in particular creeped me out as a kid.

But the thing that really makes the Gremlins scary for younger viewers would have to be the last line of the film. When the narration ends with “You never can tell, there just might be a Gremlin in your house,” that creeped the hell out me.

Mrs. Deagle’s death

I know, I know, Mrs. Deagle’s death is the high point of the whole movie, right? The old bat got what was coming to her. But the first thing I’m using this death to do is that like all good horror, Gremlins has an honest-to-goodness body count. Sure, Billy’s mom might not die like in the original script, but plenty of other people do. And there was no one we wanted to see kick the bucket like Mrs. Deagle, who literally wanted to kill Billy’s dog with her bare hands.

And her death is funny. She goes zooming out through the window when the Gremlins mess with her chair lift. But there’s a moment before that happens, just after she sees the Gremlins outside, where she thinks that she’s being taken to hell because of how terrible she’s been to people. And just before she goes out the window, she’s saying “I’m not ready” over and over again. That adds a whole new horrifying layer of context.

Kate’s Christmas Story

I know, I just wrote about this one, but it’s a haunting scene. It’s also, in many ways, the scene that defines GREMLINS. Some people call it one of the most out-of-place moments, but I would say it’s the most necessary scene in the film in order to establish what GREMLINS is. It’s in many ways an anti-Christmas move. It’s about taking this perfect commercialized holiday and tearing it to pieces. The root of Christmas, besides Santa and toys, is still intact because GREMLINS is still very much about family and coming together as a group. But this is a film that can be warm and sweet one moment and pitch-black the next and nothing encapsulates that better than Kate’s monologue about her dead father. It’s the most horrifying scene in the feature.

Let’s indulge! GREMLINS Trailer:

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