Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984)
Imdb
Date Watched: 11/27/18
Cinema or Home: Home, with filmmaker commentary track
Reason For Watching: I am a stubborn bitch who must always be right
Rewatch: Yes, many times over.
*SPOILERS*
With all the drama surrounding the upcoming MoFo Horror Countdown, I gave
Gremlins yet another look. When I watched it about two weeks ago, I was mostly amazed at how funny I still found it to be after having not seen it in many years, but I was also surprised by the amount of violence and gore it contains.
In tonight’s rewatch, I paid closer attention to those darker aspects and now I am absolutely sure that
Gremlins is horror. It’s “sanitized horror,” as Captain Spaulding put it, but still very much deserving of the horror classification. I forget which of the filmmakers in the DVD commentary track said it, but one of them described the film as “
It’s a Wonderful Life meets
The Birds.” I think that’s pretty accurate. Only instead of an avian attack, we get a horde of demonic looking creatures (not toys, as Nostromo would have you believe) that do things like rig a stair lift to eject an elderly lady through a glass window and catapult her to her death, take revenge on a science teacher by killing him with a hypodermic needle, jump out of a Christmas tree and choke a woman, chew through the brake lines of the sheriff’s car, and drive a snow plough straight through a man’s house. In the battle of gremlins vs humans, we also see a gremlin get exploded in the microwave and another ground to bits and splattered everywhere when it gets caught in a juicer. And then, of course, there’s the gruesome demise of Stripe, the leader of the gremlins, who melts into a bubbling, moving puddle of sickening greenish goo.
The movie is certainly a comedy, too, especially in its earlier scenes. It’s funny as hell, but in a very dark way and the farther along we get in the film, the more balanced the horror and comedic elements become, with the comedy taking a back seat to the horror in many scenes – often to a much higher degree than a lot of what is found in many of the more widely acknowledged horror comedies. If any of you in the “
Gremlins is not horror” camp are reading this, I urge you to watch it again and reconsider.
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