A Very Alternative Christmas: Gremlins (Dir. Joe Dante, 1h45m, 1984)

Face it, we love being scared at Christmas; from the spectral visitations that haunt Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and its upteen cinematic versions (though, face it, the Muppets did it best), to the annual tradition of Christmas ghost stores on the BBC in the 1970s and beyond, best seen in Jonathan Miller's chilling masterpiece Whistle, And I'll Come to You, topped by Michael Horton's central performance, to the more-family centric fare of The Nightmare Before Christmas and the slightly more grown up (and fast becoming cult classic) Anna And the Apocalypse. This is without going into the upteen seasonal slasher, home invasion, and creature feature films taking place at the festive season (I personally recommend Finland's own Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale as a seasonal treat for those who enjoy a scare with their stocking.)

The big problem is that most of these aren't very Christmassy, certainly not in the way Die Hard and its ilk are, where Christmas isn't so much present as saturating every corner of the film-there are exceptions, of course, but things like Silent Night Deadly Night (the series most famous for one of the worst lines in cinema) are about as festive as films set at any other time of year, whilst the creature features may use the period's many figures, but soon descend into the usual hack'n'slash of this subgenre, before someone ventually bests them. (Seriously, though, how have we never had an Icelandic horror movie with the colossal Yule cat that eats people who haven't had new shoes, and the violent tricksterish Yule Lads?!). Where is the Christmas, in blunt terms, in Christmas-them)ed horror?

Oh, of course. It's in Gremlins. All of it. Gremlins is not only one of the best comedy-horror movies of the entire 80s (releasing scant months after the other film that could lay claim to that plaudit, Ghosbusters) as a horde of rampaging monsters borne a single creature essentially stolen from his previous keeper by human averice and turned monstrous by the breaking of the supernatural laws that govern the creature's care wreak havoc upon Middle America, not only a delightfully wicked satire of consumerism, of the corruption of the West, of the squabbling micro-cruelty of Middle America. It is a film that's not simply Christmas themed, but is positively steeped in a thick marinade of Christmas cheer. We begin, not with Billy, our central protagonist, (b-movie staple Zach Galligan), but with his father, a maverick inventor, stumbling across the mogwai, eventually dubbed Gizmo, in Chinatown.

Here, in barely three minutes, the film sets up the three rules that need to be followed (and thus absolutely assured that the film's characters will later break), the reluctance of Mr Wing, the owner of the antique store, to sell the creature, and the eventual cajoling and wilfully capitalistic forces that convince the old man, via his grandson, to part with the creature. What it also does, rather slickly, is to set up one of the lesser-talked narrative threads of Gremlins; its critique on western civilisation; Billy's father is practically enslaved to the barely working gadgetry he's created, whilst Mr Wing's view of television and technology is that of disapproval, whilst the film's baccanalia of chaos and destruction are a deliberately over-the-top critique of the slasher movie as much as they are bloody good fun.

The film's depiction of Chinatown and its population is also a lot more represenative and, in blunt honesty, positive, than most media of the period, with Mr Wing basically the film's moral centre, coming to rescue Gizmo from further corruption at the end of the film, whilst Christopher Columbus's script also sneaks a very neat bilingual bonus to its Cantonese speaking viewers as to exactly what Gizmo is barely five minutes in (mogwai, after all, being Cantonese for devil (and an excellent Scottish post rock band)). Certainly, the film is left in no doubt, as the small mogwai is corrupted by his time among the westerners into fearsome form, that the excesses of the American lifestyle corrupts anything good that comes into it

It's here, then, as the film introduces Billy, the town of Kingston Falls, and its residents, from the cruel and borderline sadistic Mrs Deagle to the curmugeonly Futterman, played by Dante stalwart Dick Miller, that it becomes clear that this film will absolutely be breathtakingly Christmassy; but more than this, it is Christmassy almost to a fault, and it's here that the film has its major split from so many of the Christmas-set horror films. So many of the the latter use their setting ironically, a deliberate juxtaposition of the Christmas trappings against gory fare to make it all the more jarring. Not so Gremlins. Take the film out of the season, such as the enjoyably anarchic and slyly metatextual, if overly derivative Gremlins II: The New Batch, and one is left with an enjoyably solid, but unremarkable horror movie.

Christmas is an absolutely key part of Gremlins; it is a film that plays itself as a Christmas film, for all its gore and violence, absolutely straight. From its colourscheme outward, its saturation of reds and greens, to its soundtrack practically stuffed with Christmas music, and imagery-it's not by accident that A Wonderful Life, and caroling gremlins, and carols are part and parcel of the experience. From here, Billy quickly becomes aquainted with the mogwai, which he names Gizmo, and it's here, as Billy and Gizmo get to know each other better (and Howie Mandel begins to really come into his own as the voice for the charming animatronic), that the film masterfully begins to show its darker side, with not only the breaking of the first rule that governs the fluffy creature, but the main heft of the film.

For, as water affects Gizmo, producing yet more mogwai, so the film begins to show its true colours as an all-out attack upon commercialism, greed, and conspicuous consumption. The new mogwais, led by Stripe, (voiced by Frank Welker), soon develop a mean streak, bullying Gizmo, and being aggressive to Billy, whilst one of their number is taken to his previous teacher, Mr Hanson (Glynn Turman), and subjected to experimentation. Even before their transformation, the film wastes no time in showing them as a very different breed to the sweet Gizmo, a corruption of the innocent into unpleasant, greedy troublemakers that slouch in front of the television in Billy's room, and devour any food that they come across, so that it's narratively inevitable that they eventually trick him, get fed after midnight, and begin their transformation into the titular gremlins.

It is here that the film begins to show its fangs, and, with it, the gleeful sense of destruction at the utter-tear-down of the paraphanalia of Christmas. As the gremlins break loose, so they come into contact both with Billy's mother in, undoubtedly the film's most violent and thriller-ish, as she does battle with the creatures in her kitchen, dispatching them in undeniably impressive and brutal ways, leaving only Stripe to escape, dunking himelf into a pool, and thus breeding a veritable army of gremlins, who begin to wreak havoc across the town. And it's here that, arguably, Gremlins' hits its key theme, of rapatious materialism and violence slowly corrupting Christmas. It is, in blunt terms, nothing short than consumerism red in tooth and claw stalking not only small-town America, but the very spirit of Christmas, consumerism running rampant.

We see the Gremlins wreak havoc, sing carols, and engage in, frankly, some of the most inventive action scenes and deaths in cinema, as the Gremlins off Futterman and Deagle, crashing his beloved digger through the wall to impale him in the former, and launching her out of a window in the latter. They're enjoyably ghastly, over-the-top deaths, and the film relishes in them, in their outlandish weaponising of the season and its trappings against the hapless people of the town. But more than this, it is practically the personification of the dark side of the season, of those who struggle with Christmas as a season-later in the film, we see Kate recount the-incredibly dark- disappearance and death of her father; it is consumerism pitted against the heart of Christmas. It is a Christmas movie that at once manages to be saturated with the season and rail against its excesses, up to its final moments, without ever missing a beat.

Gremlins is many things. A social satire, an attack on capitalism and consumerism, on the very nature of a Christmas movie. It is at once gleefully violent and surprisingly saccarine, at once a violent creature feature in which rapacious market forces masquerading as green proto-teenagers wreak havoc, and a film utterly in love with the musical and cinematic trappings of the season. In other hands, Gremlins would be too schmaltz or too sadistic, but, in the hands of the singular Joe Dante, it is a singularly entertaining film, soaked in as much Christmas cheer as bloody joyful carnage, like a colossal Christmas Pudding, placed in front of its audience and gleefully set ablaze. No film has been as jolly, no film as bloody, as Gremlins.

Rating: Highly Recommended

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