Sam on Gremlins
DAD: Well, now you’ve seen Gremlins.
SAM: Yay! That means I never have to see it again!
Not the violence against humans, mind you — he disliked the violence against the gremlins. From the moment the mother takes on the gremlins in the kitchen, blending one, microwaving another, he was disgusted and horrified. Not by the movie taking a sudden left turn into the horror genre, but by the mother killing creatures who were, despite their faults, her son’s pets.
DAD: But they’re trying to kill her, dude!
SAM: It doesn’t matter! You can’t kill them even if they’re evil monsters!
When Gremlins opened in 1984, I was working in a twin cinema that showed it on both screens — one showing every hour, for 24 hours, for the entire first weekend. It was quite an experience to see how different audiences would react to the movie. For the matinee audiences, there was a point in the movie in every screening where parents and their children would go dashing for the exits — and strangely, it was always the children leading the adults, saying things like “Mommy, take me away from this movie!” The 3am audiences, on the other hand, saw it for what it was — a sly, genre-bending comedy, a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking.
The mid-80s Spielberg productions Gremlins, Goonies and Roger Rabbit were all marketed as childrens’ movies and all contain mountains of profanity and important story points relating to suicide, alcoholism, sex, gunplay, drug use and birth defects. What struck me about Gremlins today was its sourness and brutality, aspects that never seemed apparent to me until I was watching it with my 7-year-old son, who generally enjoys both scary movies and violent movies (which he prefers to refer to as “actiony” movies). Even the mega-brutal Temple of Doom has a lighter tone and goofier spirit than Gremlins.
SAM: Did Steven Spielberg work on this movie?
DAD: Yeah, this is one of his movies.
SAM: Boy, he really likes that weird, ugly violence, doesn’t he?
DAD: Gosh — does he? I guess I’ve never really thought about him that way. (Or, rather, I’ve never heard anyone complain about it before.) But you know, when this movie, Gremlins, came out, parents were really angry about it. Because they all took their really little kids to see it, thinking “Hey, it’s Steven Spielberg, he made E.T.!“
SAM: Yeah, and he also made the, you know, the melting faces and the guy getting his heart pulled out of his body and the guy dissolving into a skeleton…
God knows what he’s going to think of Saving Private Ryan.