It's 2025 And I Just Watched Gremlins For The First Time – These Are My Honest Thoughts

I know. I know. "Dani, how are you 30 or 40 years old and have never seen 'Gremlins'?"

Look, sometimes these things just happen. There are even people who only just watched "Jaws" for the first time in 2025. (Not that I would know anything about that.)

What matters is that this December, I finally sat down to watch director Joe Dante's gonzo 1984 Christmas tale about Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton), a down-on-his-luck inventor who buys a strange creature called a Mogwai from a shop in Chinatown for his son Billy's (Zach Galligan) Christmas present. The Mogwai, which Rand calls Gizmo, comes with three rules: no direct light, no water, and absolutely no food after midnight. While I thought I had absorbed quite a bit of "Gremlins" via pop culture osmosis, I really had no idea. This film is a whole lot meaner than I expected (though, apparently, its original script was even darker) and slyly subversive, with a smart anticapitalist bent. Oh, and Gizmo is freaking adorable. Grogu, eat your heart out.

There have been quite a few "Gremlins" competitors over the years, and while I have an immense amount of love for "Critters" and can't help but respect the weirdness of "Ghoulies," finally seeing the original "cute killer puppet" movie makes all of it make a whole lot more sense. "Gremlins" is a bonafide classic, and other than the story's beginning and end (which involve some insensitive Asian stereotypes), it's more than stood the test of time.

The puppets in "Gremlins" are the real stars of the show, and they're easily some of the best of the 1980s. Gizmo is so well done that he almost feels real, and while he is absolutely precious, Dante seems to know not to overplay his hand with Gizmo's cuteness. He's a perfect baby angel, but there isn't much in the way of sentimentality, which makes for wild tonal shifts that somehow work. It was executive producer Steven Spielberg's idea to keep Gizmo a good Mogwai throughout the events of the film, and it's that mixture of more traditional Amblin family entertainment with Dante's pitch-dark humor and horror sensibilities that makes for such a wildly fun watch. "Gremlins" as a full-out horror movie without Gizmo wouldn't be nearly as good, but it also wouldn't work without its bite. 

Gizmo has to be as incredibly cute as he is because when "Gremlins" gets nasty, it gets nasty, which was a lovely Christmas surprise. Once the Mogwai eat after midnight and transform into the titular gremlins, things get super gooey and gross, and there's a shocking amount of violence for what is ostensibly a kids' flick. However, there's so much love put into the design of each and every Gremlin, and they get into so much mischief that they become a bit less scary and a little more funny, which kids love. Aside from an incredibly bleak scene where the movie's love interest explains that she hates Christmas because her dad broke his neck trying to come down the chimney as Santa, everything is cartoonish enough to be friendly to kids and grotesque enough to actually get a reaction from their parents. 

It can be tough to find family movies that get the same kind of reactions from kids as adults, but "Gremlins" manages to do that surprisingly well. When it's trying to be scary, "Gremlins" is legitimately scary — I was actually worried about both Billy's mom and his awesome dog Barney getting killed by the reptilian-looking baddies! Similarly, when it's trying to be funny, it's hilarious. The cinematography is also fun because it uses the film's Christmas setting to create horror elements like colored lighting feel more natural, while the score by Jerry Goldsmith is absolutely phenomenal. When the gremlins are partying at a bar or hanging out in a movie theater watching "Snow White," the music is jubilant and genuinely bops, but it mixes with classic Christmas carols and more traditional whimsical 1980s family film sounds beautifully. 

"Gremlins" is a masterpiece when it comes to its tonal tightrope walk and even manages to sneak in a few messages about consumerism and Americans' lack of responsibility for their actions and impact on the planet. It's also hard not to identify with the gremlins a little bit, as I too am a weird little guy who likes to eat after midnight and loves classic Disney animated films. There's a little bit of a gremlin inside of each of us, and it's a delight to watch them wreak havoc even as we're rooting for Billy to stop them. Unlike many 1980s movies I missed as a kid that just don't work as an adult since I lack the nostalgia, "Gremlins" is a total blast, and I look forward to adding it to my yearly Christmas rotation. Now, onto "Gremlins 2: The New Batch," because I heard Gizmo somehow gets even cuter.