Gremlins (1984) Gremlins

Hub page for the Gremlins wiki.

Gremlins is a 1984 American Christmas horror-comedy directed by Joe Dante and written by Chris Columbus. The film follows Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) in the small town of Kingston Falls, who receives an exotic Mogwai called Gizmo as a Christmas present from his father, and a chain of violated rules turns the town's Capra surface into a battleground.

The film opened June 8, 1984, the same weekend as Ghostbusters, and the two films' combined success — along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom earlier that summer — pushed the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating. Gremlins was instrumental in that change because its PG rating allowed children into a film with on-screen microwaving of a creature, a chimney-death monologue, and dozens of violent kills.

Analysis

• Plot Structure (Gremlins) — Two Approaches structure
• 40 Beats (Gremlins) — beat-by-beat breakdown (coming)

Setting

Kingston Falls is the canonical "small-town underbelly" film town — a Capra Christmas-card surface (caroling, snowfall, the bank, the diner) over a layer of meanness (Mrs. Deagle, the Futtermans' xenophobia, Kate's chimney monologue) that the gremlins literalize on Christmas Eve.

IMDb