Gremlins is a perfect holiday movie for those all out of Christmas cheer
You already know the 12 Days Of Christmas, with its drummers drumming and partridges and gold rings, but we here at The A.V. Club like to take everything one step further, for your reading pleasure. Hence, 13 Days Of Christmas, a collection of essays on a handful of beloved holiday classics and a few that have sadly fallen through the cracks. Up today, Joe Dante’s Gremlins.
In 1984, Golden Books, the home of the Poky Little Puppy and the meta classic The Monster At The End Of This Book, published a pair of Gremlins tie-in volumes: A New Friend and To Catch A Gremlin. Both are short, with big, full-color illustrations and sentences like, “Billy thought Gizmo had enough excitement for the day, so he tucked him safely in bed.” The first book tells the story of Billy Peltzer getting a special present for Christmas, an adorable creature he names Gizmo. The second book tells how Gizmo, Billy, and Billy’s wannabe girlfriend Kate work together to defeat a group of horrible monsters called Gremlins that are destroying the town.
The story, as it stands, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Billy gets a pet! There are monsters to kill! But then, there’s a lot that’s strange about these books. Like the drawings, which almost, but not quite, capture the actors’ faces; or the way A New Friend describes every part of Billy’s day—his car won’t start, mean old Mrs. Deagle yells at him, his dad’s inventions are terrible—but without any purpose or context; or, strangest of all, the matter-of-fact terrors of To Catch A Gremlin, which, in a panel that could have been taken from a page of Tales From The Crypt, has a man getting pulled into a mailbox so far that all the reader can see is one shuddering leg.
It’s clear from the selective editing and “See Dick run” prose that these books were intended for younger children; sixth-graders and up could see the movie themselves in theaters, but for the little ones, this was as close as it got. And even this was probably too close. Picture-book novelizations were big business for Star Wars, E.T., and other kid-friendly franchises, but Gremlins is a horror movie. There’s gore and scare scenes, nasty beasts and jumping skeletons. Someone uses a blender in a way not encouraged by the instruction manual. Murderous creatures roam the streets. There are consequences all over. People die.
Yet for the first half-hour, Gremlins plays more like a Spielberg knock-off than a movie made by Joe Dante, a director at that point best known for his work on The Howling. Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan, whose main job is to be nice and act well with puppets) is just a regular guy, living with his parents, working at the bank, feeling too nervous to ask the girl of his dreams out on a date. He lives in Kingston Falls, an idyllic, Bedford Falls-inspired small town. (The movie makes this debt explicit when it shows Billy’s mom watching It’s A Wonderful Life in the kitchen; she’s crying, but only because she’s cutting onions, which is probably a tip-off.) His life is the sort of pleasant but not quite satisfying existence that serves as the starting point for so many modern comedies. Billy is in a rut, content to draw sketches and hang out with the neighborhood kids, but not quite ready to make the step into real adulthood. Galligan seems just a little old for the part, too, like he’s wearing clothes that he grew out of a few months ago. When his dad (Hoyt Axton) brings Gizmo home, it’s nice, but sort of random. Is he so out of touch with his son’s life that the best gift he can think of is a bizarre animal semi-stolen from an old Chinese man’s junk shop? Billy starts bonding with the Mogwai faster than you can say “Phone home,” which is adorable, but again, slightly off. Where is this going? Who does Gizmo need to call?
All of this would make sense for a children’s book, and it makes sense as a Christmas movie, too. Gremlins is saturated with Christmas, from the song off of Phil Spector’s Christmas album that rings in the credits to the fake snow coating every inch of the studio lot. Kingston Falls is aggressive in its good cheer. Pine trees for sale! Lights everywhere! The evil rich lady down the block has a special snowman she imported from Bavaria! This is what small towns are supposed to do during the holidays. It goes back to that short scene from It’s A Wonderful Life. Almost everyone is in it together; nearly everyone gives a little and gets back so much more. Sure, there’s a woman who’s losing her house because her husband is out of work, and the neighbor, Mr. Futterman (Dick Miller, the best That guy! ever), is a sweetly xenophobic drunk who can’t go 10 minutes without complaining about foreign cars, but this is December. Everyone has to be happy in December, because that is the rule.
That mask starts to slip a little when Billy walks home from work with Kate (Phoebe Cates, who between this and Fast Times At Ridgemont High had the Most Crushworthy Girl Next Door title locked down). It’s nothing untoward, and only really obvious in retrospect, but the two pass a group of carolers, and in the midst of that awkward I-like-you-but-do-you-like-me small talk that happens between developing couples, they get to talking about the season. Billy is firmly in the pro-Christmas corner, so much so that he’s openly shocked when Kate takes a contrary position—so shocked that he makes the rookie mistake of trying to argue her into enthusiasm. In response, Kate tells him how the holidays are actually a really difficult time of year for a lot of people. For those without loved ones to keep them warm, the start of winter is a cold, lonely, harrowing time. I can’t verify her stats on suicide rates rising during the Noel, but it sounds right, doesn’t it? The older one gets, the harder it is to face a Christmas morning with a bare carpet floor and last night’s beer in the fridge. Nothing makes a bad day worse than knowing you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself.