Gremlins

Joe Dante’s 1984 picture opens with a father buying his son an odd Christmas present: a creature with three rules, and all three get broken. Chris Columbus wrote it as straight horror. Dante cut a decapitation of Billy’s mother, the gremlins eating the dog and a fast food raid. The bigger change came from producer Steven Spielberg, who threw out the original plot in which Gizmo turns into Stripe: he wanted Gizmo cute and on screen throughout. The good one staying good is a producer’s note, not the writer’s design. Phoebe Cates’s Santa Claus monologue survived a studio that wanted it cut after a strong preview. Dante refused: the speech, he said, encapsulates the film’s whole tone. If it feels imported from another film, that is the film you bought. Gizmo is scarce for a hardware reason: Chris Walas wanted the mogwai puppets built larger, Dante kept them small for cuteness, and the small ones broke constantly. The town square is Universal’s Courthouse Square, reused a year later as Hill Valley in Back to the Future. A good fit if you think the Santa Claus speech belongs in the film, not in the studio’s bin. Not for a parent recruited by the fluffy creature on the poster: it went out rated PG, and the complaints helped create PG-13.