A Christmas classic with a traumatic and ridiculous urban legend

According to Jonathan Klotz
| Published 20 hours ago

Christmas movies tend to be cheerful, heartfelt movies about the true meaning of Christmas, or a small-town girl who moved to the big city to become a high-profile lawyer has to return home and meet up with her old high school for some reason. crush, who is now grown up carving Santas from ice imported from Sweden, and they share a love of Christmas. But one Christmas movie stands on its own, and in 40 years, nothing has come close to its perfect blend of Christmas cheer and black comedy: Gremlins. The 1980s horror comedy is still part of pop culture today thanks to the malevolent gremlins themselves, but it’s the dark and traumatic monologue that makes the film unforgettable.

Baked Santa

Gremlins is about Gizmo, a mogwai given to Billy Peltzer by his father as a Christmas present, and after breaking the first rule instilled in his father by the mysterious Mr. Wang, “don’t get him wet”, disaster eventually engulfs 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 townspeople, from crashing an expensive truck into a bedroom to turning a chairlift into a launch pad, nothing compares to the terrible tragedy that Billy’s girlfriend Kate shares a little more than halfway through . film.

It stars Phoebe Cates, years after the infamous Fast times at Ridgemont High Kate launches into a monologue about when her father went missing when she was nine. He missed Christmas and the family had no idea where he was until a few days later when they started a fire in the fireplace and the smell alerted them that something was wrong. Her father, dressed as Santa, tried to climb down the chimney with the 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 struggling to finish once she starts. It may seem out of place, but it sums it up perfectly Elf‘with dark humor.

A fine line between tragedy and comedy

I first heard this story while watching Gremlinsand it’s haunted me ever since, but the movie precedes it. Urban legends of stranded Santas have persisted since Coca-Cola invented the modern Santa, and while some accounts are tragic, like Kate’s, others poke fun at big men who got stuck and had to be rescued. Director Joe Dante inserted this story in the middle of the movie to give some background to Kate and her PTSD around Christmas, but it’s a perfect fit for the movie because it’s something that’s so absurd that people can laugh nervously at it and find some dark entertainment. 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 along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doomcaused the MPAA to create a PG-13 rating. Not only do most of the deaths happen off-screen, but only 15 people die in the film, and most of them are nameless background extras. It could be argued that the scariest moment of the entire film is the death of Kate’s father, who only wanted to make his daughter happy and paid for it with his life.

A unique Christmas movie

Joe Dante’s masterpiece has stood the test of time thanks to the extreme risk he took in bringing the screenplay he wrote Alone at home and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone director Chris Columbus to life with the support 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, franchise-killing film, ditching black comedy for straight-up slapstick. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is also an amazing film and remains one of my favorites to this day, but it’s significantly lighter.

Gremlins might not be what comes to mind when you think of offbeat Christmas movies from the 80s, it would be Die Hardbut it’s been a Christmas classic for decades. Just be careful if you’re watching it with kids, not because of the violence or the murders, but because of Santa breaking his neck in the chimney.

Gremlins is currently available for streaming Max.