If you haven’t seenGremlinsin a while, you may have forgotten just how gnarly of a movie it is. Yes it’s a horror-comedy set during Christmastime, and yes Gizmo is adorable, and yes there’s a fluffy dog. But the bad gremlins also straight-up murder some folks, and try to murder others in disturbingly violent ways. But as dark asGremlinsgets, the original script for the now-iconic film was even darker.
I recently spoke with filmmakerChris Columbusfor an upcoming episode ofCollider Connectedtimed to his new Netflix movieThe Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, and during our discussion of his career thus far, I had to ask about his original script forGremlinswhich I’d heard was incredibly dark. Columbus shared the story of howGremlinscame to be and confirmed that yes, the original script was a hard R-rated affair:
“I was living in New York at the time with these mice running around the floor, and I was watching old Universal horror films on TBS and my friend said to me, ‘You love monster movies so much, why don’t you write a monster movie?’ I was thinking about these mice running around at night, they would scurry by my finger if my hand was hanging over the bed, it was really creeping me out and that’s how I came up with the idea ofGremlins. So I wrote it as a straightforward horror film. Hard R, mom’s head comes rolling down the stairs, Billy and Kate go into a McDonald’s and none of the food is eaten but all of the people are eaten (laughs). So it was very dark.”
Columbus continued by explaining how a spec script by a young aspiring filmmaker landed in the hands ofSteven Spielberg, who would go on to produceGremlins:
“My agent sent it out to about 50 producers, and only by luck – I was gonna do a movie withPaul Newmanat one point and he said to me, ‘This business is 50% talent and 50% luck.’ And the lucky part ofGremlinsis Steven Spielberg was leaving his office and he just glanced to his assistant’s desk and he saw the title, and he was like ‘That’s an interesting title’ so he picked it up and read it over the weekend. I got a call from him like three days later. So that’s howGremlinshappened.”
But how did it turn from a hard R-rated horror movie into the PG-rated horror-comedy we know and love today? You can thank Spielberg for that:
“Steven was very instrumental because I was a young writer and I was like a kid in a candy store getting to work with Steven Spielberg, and he steered me into – he said, ‘This needs to reach a wider audience.’ He goes, ‘What you’ve done could be great, but it’s an R-rated horror film. There’s a way that what you’ve written can reach a much wider audience.’ So we worked on several drafts of the script.”
The rest is history, but I would still seriously love to see Columbus make an R-rated version ofGremlins, or maybe even just tackle a horror film at some point. He revealed during our conversation thatGremlins 3is still very much in the offing, so fingers crossed.
Catch the full new episode of Collider Connected on Collider Thanksgiving Day.
