The Christmas Classic With A Traumatic And Ridiculous Urban Legend
Christmas movies tend to be feel-good, heartfelt films about the real meaning of Christmas or a small-town girl who moved to the big city to become a high-powered attorney has to come back home for some reason and meets her old high school crush who has now grown up and sculpts Santas out of ice imported from Sweden, and they bond over their love of Christmas. But one Christmas movie stands on its own, and nothing for 40 years has approached its perfect mix of Yuletide joy and black comedy: Gremlins. The 80s horror-comedy is still part of pop culture today thanks to the mischievous gremlins themselves, but it’s a dark and traumatic monologue that makes the film impossible to forget.
Roast Santa
Gremlins is about Gizmo, a mogwai, given as a Christmas present to Billy Peltzer by his dad, and after violating the first rule that the mysterious Mr. Wang imparted upon his father, “don’t get him wet,” disaster ends up engulfing the town of Kingston Falls as a horde of evil gremlins wreak havoc. But no matter what the evil Stripe and his cronies do to the townsfolk, from crashing a prized truck into a bedroom to turning a chairlift into a launchpad, nothing compares to the horrible tragedy that Billy’s friend, Kate, shares a little over halfway into the film.
Played by Phoebe Cates, years after the infamous Fast Times at Ridgemont High scene, Kate launches into a monologue about when her father went missing when she was nine. He missed Christmas, and the family had no clue where he was until a few days later, they started a fire in the fireplace, and the smell alerted them that something was wrong. Her dad, dressed as Santa, tried to come down the chimney with presents but broke his neck and was stuck, dead, inside their chimney. The story relies entirely on Cates in a monologue that makes it seem like Kate is fighting to finish once she starts. It may seem out of place, but it’s the perfect summation of Gremlin‘s dark humor.
The Thin Line Between Tragedy And Comedy
The first time I had ever heard this story was while watching Gremlins, and it’s haunted me ever since, but it predates the film. Urban legends of Santas getting stuck have persisted ever since Coca-Cola invented the modern Santa, and while some tellings are tragic, like Kate’s, others poke fun at large men getting stuck and having to be rescued. Director Joe Dante stuck this story into the middle of the film to provide some background to Kate and her PTSD around Christmas, but it’s a perfect fit for the film, as it’s something that’s so absurd people may chuckle nervously over it and find some dark amusement out of it, but if it happened to you, it would be devastatingly tragic.
Dancing between comedy and horror like no other film before it, Gremlins pushed the envelope so far that it, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, caused the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating. Most of the deaths not only take place off-screen, but in the film, there are only 15 humans that die, and most of them are nameless background extras. You could argue the most horrific moment of the entire film is the death of Kate’s dad, who only wanted to make his daughter happy and paid for it with his life.
A One Of A Kind Christmas Movie
Joe Dante’s masterpiece has stood the test of time thanks to the extreme risks he took in bringing the script, written by Home Alone and Harry Potter and the Sorcerors’s Stone director Chris Columbus, to life with the encouragement of Steven Spielberg’s production company. Gremlins is such a singular success that Dante never wanted to make a sequel, and when he did, he made the most absurd, bonkers, franchise-killing film possible by jettisoning the black comedy for straight-up slapstick comedy. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is also an amazing film and remains one of my favorites to this day, but it’s significantly more lighthearted.
Gremlins may not be what comes to mind when you think of offbeat 80s Christmas movies, that would be Die Hard, but it’s been a Christmas classic for decades. Just be careful if watching it with kids, not because of the violence or murders, but because of Santa breaking his neck in a chimney.
Gremlins is currently available to stream on Max.
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