Synopsis

A young man receives a strange, furry creature called a mogwai as a Christmas gift, along with three strict rules for its care. When those rules are accidentally broken, the mogwai multiply and transform into mischievous monsters that overrun the town of Kingston Falls. As the chaos spreads, he and his friends must stop the creatures before they turn Christmas into a nightmare.

Factoids & Trivia

• The screenplay began as a spec script by Chris Columbus while he was a student at New York University's film program. It became his first produced feature and brought the project to Amblin Entertainment.

• Gremlins was the first film to display the Amblin Entertainment logo, following the company's formation in 1981.

• The creatures were created with puppets rather than computer-generated imagery. Chris Walas spent about seven months in preproduction developing foam-latex and mechanical designs, including twelve Gizmo puppets and fourteen puppets for Stripe.

• Gizmo was originally intended to become the film's main villain. The character was separated from Stripe during development so that the audience would have a clearly sympathetic creature to identify with.

• The film's blend of cute fantasy, comedy, and graphic horror caused controversy after its release with a PG rating. Along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it helped prompt the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984.

• The movie was released in the United States on June 8, 1984, despite being built around Christmas imagery. It became a major commercial success and quickly set a Warner Bros. record for reaching $100 million in box-office receipts.

• The theater sequence includes footage from Disney's 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The use of the footage is acknowledged in the end credits.

• More than fifty companies were licensed to produce Gremlins merchandise before or around the film's release, including manufacturers of books, cards, toys, games, clothing, and household items.

• Kate's dark story about her father's death was nearly removed because executives were unsure whether audiences would treat it as comedy or tragedy. It remained because the filmmakers considered the scene representative of the movie's uneasy balance between humor and horror.