Gremlins

Joe Dante, who got his start in show business cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, has always placed a premium on the momentary turbulence that exists between shots. As a student at Philadelphia’s College of Art, he helped create The Movie Orgy (1968), a four-plus-hour montage/corpus Frankensteined from a junk drawer of B movies, political ads, and other sundry slurry cast off by American mass culture. Under Corman’s sink-or-swim tutelage, Dante and collaborator Allan Arkush co-directed Hollywood Boulevard (1975), a Tinseltown satire that also leaned heavily on repurposed B footage. Two genre films later—Piranha (1978), taking a big bite out of the still-nascent Jaws mania, and The Howling (1981), reverently and maniacally fixated on how a human body is itself a bone and blood canvas to be edited into something else—his bona fides were ample enough to garner the attention of that fated Jaws director. Steven Spielberg, executive-producer-about-town, handed Dante a director’s chair and Chris Columbus’s script for something called Gremlins.

The main Gremlin of the title is Gizmo, known best to manufacturers as a merchandise-driver, an image reproduced ad infinitum on plushies, T-shirts, and wristwatches. Erstwhile inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) buys the creature—a mogwai, he’s told—on the sly from a Chinatown trinket shop. Before gifting Gizmo to his son (Zach Galligan), he’s warned about the three rules that a filmgoer of a certain age can repeat without flaw today: no bright lights, no water, and no food after midnight. Dante directs sublime horror in the language of punch lines, so it’s not long before the rules—of mogwais and the film itself—start breaking. After a litter of nasty-spirited mogwais spawn off Gizmo’s back (no water!), they promptly mutate themselves (no food after midnight!) into the leaner, meaner gremlins of a million imaginations, spreading anarchy over one long Christmas Eve in the Capra-by-way-of-Chuck-Jones town of Kingston Falls.

The contradiction of Gremlins mirrors the one found in Dante’s filmography as a whole: can studio-produced multiplex fare have a conscience? As much a flirtation with film form governed by anarchy over rigidity as it is a cackle-comedy about quitting work cold turkey to watch Snow White with your buddies all day long, Gremlins is popular entertainment saturated slimy with implications about making a living (or killing) in the American suburbs, that most silently violent reflection of an occupying empire. What other film was enlisting its small-town girl (Phoebe Cates) avatars to monologue about their Santa-costumed fathers dead and rotting in chimneys out of some familial-borne need to create the perfect holiday? When did you realize that the gremlins were less monstrous than a Wicked Witch landlord (Polly Holliday), a fatheaded bank vice president (Judge Reinhold), or a down-homely xenophobic neighbor (Dick Miller)? In an era when toy-company execs occupy the same table as filmmakers and no one seems to know or care how invested the Department of Defense is in funding blockbusters, “subversive” becomes the most abused descriptor in a critical dialogue. Gremlins proves that art can only subvert through actual transformation of commodity into anarchy. It’s a pop mutation that edits the forces that seek to pacify a public into that most liberating and looniest tune: bad taste on a big screen. 🩸