There are just three rules Billy (Zach Galligan) has to follow when he is gifted a Mogwai named Gizmo (voiced by Howie Mandel) from his mother Lynn (Frances Lee McCain) and father Randall (Hoyt Axton) for Christmas. After getting to grips with his new pet, a splash of water lands on Gizmo, spawning five more Mogwai’s. Instead of Gizmo being in the company of fellow cute creatures, the pack is led by an evil Gremlin known as Stripe (voiced by Frank Welker), who is hellbent on reeking havoc.

Gremlins has become an absolute staple across the entire movie board. Whether its festive frights or laugh out loud shenanigans, Joe Dante’s 1984 film truly has it all.

In this Movie List from The Film Magazine, we’re counting down the very best of this family film night staple, looking at the most exciting, most funny and most moving side-by-side to decipher the 10 Best Gremlins Moments.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

10. Meet Gizmo

Gizmo has become one of cinema’s most beloved creatures. The tiny stature, fluffy coat, and button nose are what make Gremlins the classic that it is.

Gizmo’s introduction may not bear the same intensity as the rest of the film, but it is the moment in which we immediately become invested and attached. When Billy first lays eyes on Gizmo as he peaks out of the box, it would be easy to assume that Gremlins is an easy made-for-tv family movie, little did we know that Gizmo’s introduction is the first in a long line of absurd events.

9. Santa Surprise

Gremlins had a major issue with censorship boundaries. Many scenes were cut, including the death of Lynn, which would have shown her decapitated head tumbling down the stairs to land at Billy’s feet. Instead of that pure nightmare fuel dominating the screen, producers stepped in to create the now beloved PG-13 favourite.

Somehow director Joe Dante managed to keep some disturbing elements intact, such as the seemingly out-of-place scene involving Kate (Phoebe Cates), Billy’s love interest, telling the daunting story of how her father’s corpse was found lodged in a chimney after a Christmas surprise went wrong. The abrupt image is a brief snippet into the dark underbelly of Gremlins that could have been.

Whether you think so or not, the action classic starring Bruce Willis and the late, great Alan Rickman proves that one can set a movie at the most magical time of year without packing it full of seasonal tropes. After all, Christmas isn’t fun for everyone. It can be a dark, gritty, dangerous time, especially if you’re a downtrodden bureaucrat, an alcoholic cop, or a kid who has just been gifted an apparently harmless and adorable mogwai.

In this Movie List, we here at The Film Magazine have scoured the annals of film history to put together this selection of 10 Excellent Non-Christmas Films Set at Christmas. Ten films we’re sure will add a different flavour to your holiday watch lists.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

1. In Bruges (2008)

10 Best In Bruges Moments

Martin McDonagh’s thrilling feature debut transports us to Bruges, the Belgian town that’s “like a fairy tale”, as Ralph Fiennes’ cockney villain constantly reminds us.

The plot, twisting like the canals of Bruges itself, features comedy, betrayal, love, blood, and guts, whilst Christmas lights just happen to gleam all around.

If you want to feel a little seasonal without being beaten over the head with Christmas spirit, this Irish dark comedy starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson may be exactly what you need.

2. Brazil (1985)

Terry Gilliam’s dystopian epic shows us what those shopping-mall Santas can be like off-duty. Much like the Christmas industry, every kind face has a nasty one beneath.

Very little is nice about Brazil, which tells the story of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) seeking love and freedom in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Cinematically beautiful and ultimately terrifying, Gilliam’s vision of the future mirrors much of today’s world. We see that, behind the shiny consumerism, there are systems upon systems upon systems of red tape, corrupt officials, and crushed dreams.

Recommended for you: Katie Doyle’s ‘Movies I Had a Religious/Spiritual Experience with’ Part 3 (featuring Brazil & In Bruges)

The ‘50s were great for classic ghost stories, the ‘90s witty and self-referential, and for J-Horror the 2000s represent the peak – but in the end the choice for most would be the 1980s. You’d retain multiple iconic franchises (A Nightmare on Elm Street; Friday the 13th), the best horror anthologies (‘Creepshow’, ‘Tales from the Darkside’) and several kids classics too. Hell, you’d even get Hellraiser. But the abidingness of ‘80s horror goes beyond individual good films, many as there are, with ’80s horror being particularly worthy of celebration for offering a happy coincidence of an artistic, political and cultural context which saw the genre both establish itself and ascend to unsurpassed heights.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Firstly, 80s horror just looks good. The technology of the period was in just in the right place to profit from new developments in prosthetics special effects, and the rise of the synthesizer offered a piquant musical accompaniment. Even the film stock of the period has a disconcerting brightness. The best 1980s horrors, such as Hellraiser, The Fly and The Thing are design classics, their aesthetics perched perfectly between the homespun and the futuristic. In the 1970s pictures such as Jaws and Alien offered substantial advances in effects – and such extravagant curiosities as Zombi 2’s (1979) shark vs. zombie sequence – but it was the fact that impressive effects had become so established (and accessible to lower budgets) which saw them become so much of a part of the furniture for ‘80s horror; think of the twisted visions of Re-Animator, conjured up for less than a million dollars. Nothing is less scary than bad CGI, a bane of later horror, and in contrast to the reserve of earlier eras, 1980s horror fully embraces the possibilities of intricate gore, as the period’s ascent of the ‘body horror’ genre reveals. Much 1980s horror gets us through its inimitable style – a style that whole series such as ‘Stranger Things’ profit from today.

Yet there’s plenty of 1980s horror which now looks terrible and remains more interesting than the terrible-looking films of other eras (films like Critters or Creepozoids). Even when 1980s horror is bad, it’s memorable. Why then does your average 1980s horror flick still intrigue more than the misfires of other times? Here it helps to situate the films in the wider political context of the time.

The 1980s were, in the Anglo-American world at least, a time of political paranoia, with the rise of the AIDs crisis and a re-escalation of the Cold War. If horror as a genre is the exploration of unspoken terror through narrative, the 1980s offered an ideal background of repression and subjugation (even the era’s most famous monster, Freddy, literally haunts unconscious minds). One could even argue that the more reactionary an era’s politics, the better it is for horror as a genre – not least if paranoia and dread is coupled with increasing material wealth; Brian Yuzna’s Society, in its epochal closing debauchery, imagines what might grow in this gap. If Walter Mondale had won the 1984 US Presidential election, that film may not exist.

They Live (1988)

This unease can also be extended to the social culture of the time. The era’s often gratuitous female nudity is instructive in this regard; the female-attracted viewer can’t deny they enjoy the (almost always) female flesh on show, while also admitting it contributes to a generally sleazy and fevered atmosphere. The both satirically-appropriate and utterly gratuitous sex scene at the end of They Live is a good example of this; the scene both satirizes the female body as commodity and gets a cheap laugh and minor sexual thrill out of it. We’ll satirize capitalist exploitation, the director seems to be saying, but we also want to show off some breasts. And a lot of 1980s horror doesn’t even bother with the satirical element. Think about ‘The Raft’ sequence of the anthology film Creepshow 2, where the female protagonist is stuck between unsolicited groping from the main male character and suction death by underwater monster. For many of the 1980s’ Final Girls, there are no real safe spaces, and surviving the immediate horror means only going back to surviving the horror of the everyday.

And that’s just in terms of the heteronormative, and heterosexual relationships. In LGBTQ+ terms, a lot of 1980s horror has astoundingly reactionary sexual and cultural politics, like the gobsmackingly transphobic ending to Sleepaway Camp or the confused homophobia of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2. Both of these films equate having a minority sexual or cultural identity with being a serial killer. Cruel politics that, along with the era’s dated attitudes (with of course honourable exceptions) to gay people, trans folks and women, make up a distinctive part of why ‘80s horror is so creepy. The sheer moral panic around difference makes ‘80s horror so compelling in this regard – frankly, Tetsuo the Iron Man, who fuses himself into a gigantic scrap-metal testicle in order to realize his queer desire, needs therapy. And looking back even the era’s children’s film like The Goonies or Gremlins are also noticeably nastier; they present horrible worlds in which horrible things happen, even to children, and don’t offer us bromides of liberal piety to guide us through as a lot of our horror does today. Even Stephen King’s great contributions to horror in the decade (The Dead Zone; The Shining) are noticeably less sentimental than his later ones. To put it facetiously, ‘80s horror is good because the 1980s were horrible.

The Shining (1980)

However, as befits a reactionary time, the ’80s were also a decade where countercultures sprung up all over the place – in music, lifestyle and print culture. Horror is no exception. Just as there is great mainstream horror with dated politics, the 1980s is also home to brilliant subversive horror from independent filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and John Carpenter (aforementioned gratuitous nude scenes aside). Perhaps it is actually simple; in the 1980s an awful lot of very talented people thought that horror was a genre worth bothering with, and one in which there were still new things to be done. Decades later, we’ve seen multiple horror films for every permutation of fright and even Human Centipede levels of perversity don’t summon much more than a ‘That’s nice dear’ for the modern horror devotee. Indeed, much of the most acclaimed horror of recent years, such as It Follows or Hereditary, has been sharply indebted to 1980s horror; as enjoyable as these films are, they are inevitably less scary than their precursors – they are at worst horror films about horror films rather than innovative works. The scariest horror films of recent years, such as Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song, are those located entirely in a contemporary world and not dedicated to the perfect recreation of an already achieved aesthetic tradition. Indeed, the most influential horror forms since the 1980s, such as the found footage genre, are notably ones unrelated to the period.

In fact, of all genres it is horror that suffers most from connoisseurship and established markers of quality; something we are certifiably aware of, as a ‘prestige’ horror film can no longer surprise us enough to scare us. And, above all, 1980s horror was very scary. Even some of its most comically-dated films contain moments of genuine terror. Indeed, so much so that even after decades of watching it horror fans are still establishing new classics and curiosities perhaps both best forgotten and unforgettable. (Pumpkinhead springs to mind.) Arguably the years that followed have suffered as a result of the 1980s’ legacy and struggled to expand on the benchmark for horror and repository of horror tropes the decade bequeathed. Can the period really be surpassed? Certainly no decade will ever again create films so uneasy with suburban paranoia, fear of sexuality and unexpected explosions of gore, and no horror filmmaker could or should attempt to adopt the era’s sexual politics today. Right now modern horror can be influenced by ’80s horror or it can deviate from it entirely. What it can’t do is beat the ’80s on its own terms, problematic as they are. One thing the era shows though is that, for the horror genre, ‘problematic’ can be good.

Written by James Harris

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Twitter – @jamesharrisnow

Frozen II continues to shine at the UK box office!

As we get closer to some of the biggest film releases of the year, with Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, Cats, Little Women and 1917 still to grace our screens, the UK box office continued to boom this week.

This was thanks in no small part to Frozen II which still stands strong in the top spot, taking another £4.3million this weekend (6-8th) alone and totalling in at a whopping £33.6million at the UK box office overall.

In contrast, the North American box office delivered a new record setter of a different kind with Playmobil: The Movie, the animated/live-action hybrid based on the popular toy brand, not dissimilar to that of The Lego Movie, being reported as the biggest US box office flop of all time; opening to more than 2,000 screens but only grossing £509,000 over its first three days of release. This brings the average takings per screen to the lowest number of all time for a wide release in North America and a certified box office bomb in the region.

Up and down the UK this week, cinemas have been showing traditional Christmas films for audiences of all ages to enjoy. Gremlins (1984) is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year and thus getting multiple special screenings in cinemas to celebrate. Upon its original release, Gremlins opened as a box office hit, earning $12.5 million back in 1984, and still has fans worldwide today.

As well as Gremlins, other holiday classics such as; Elf, The Santa Clause, Home Alone and Miracle of 34th Street are showing all around the UK in the lead up to Christmas. Elf also made its way into the UK top ten this weekend, taking £148,489 – proving that the British audiences still love a classic Christmas flick.

Check your local cinema listings to see which of your Christmas favourites are showing near you!

“Les Miserables” live in concert was hugely popular with UK audiences too. The showcase of the sold out production from London’s West End earning a comfortable number 4 spot with an opening of £946,785, meanwhile number 11 in the UK Box Office this weekend was a celebration of 25 years of ‘Friends’; proving that it isn’t always high budget films that grab the biggest audiences.

The top 10 films at the UK Box Office for the weekend of 6-8th December 2019:

1. Frozen 2 (Walt Disney Studios) – 3 – £4,397,903 (£33.7m)
2. Knives Out (Lionsgate UK) – 2 – £1,637,525 (£6m)
3. Last Christmas (Universal Pictures) – 4 – £1,318,062 (£12.5m)
4. Event Cinema: Les Miserables (Universal Pictures) – 1 – £946,785 (£3.2m)
5. Blue Story (Paramount) – 3 – £378,589 (£3.7m)
6. Le Mans ’66 (Walt Disney Studios) – 4 – £184,898 (£5.6m)
7. Gremlins (4K) (Warner Bros.) – 1 – £162,528 (£163k)
8. Motherless Brooklyn (Warner Bros.) – 1 – £153,821 (£154k)
9. Elf (Park Circus) – 1 – £148,489 (£148k)
10. Charlie’s Angels (Sony Pictures) – 2 – £142,369 (£942k)

A new contender in the box office this weekend was Ed Norton’s crime thriller Motherless Brooklyn, which he both directs and stars in. Falling in nicely at number 8 in the top ten, grossing £153,821 in the UK against its US opening weekend $3.5mil, it’s safe to say that this one has had more appeal to US audiences – the film even being nominated for a Golden Globe.

This week is the first weekend since it’s release that Joker no longer graces the top 10, as it falls down to number 13 with takings of just £71,944 over the Friday to Sunday period.

The top 5 worldwide box office hits of 2019 to date: 

1. Avengers: Endgame (Walt Disney Studios) – 25th April 2019 – $2,797,800,564
2. The Lion King (Walt Disney Studios) – 19th July 2019 – $1,655,955,981
3. Spider-Man: Far From Home (Sony) – 2nd July 2019 – $1,131,928,519
4. Captain Marvel (Walt Disney Studios) – 8th March 2019 – $1,128,274,794
5. Toy Story 4 (Walt Disney Studios) – 21st June 2019 – $1,073,366,308

This weekend we see the release of the festive horror re-make Black Christmas, directed by Sophia Takal and starring Imogen Poots. Black Christmas follows a group of college students who find themselves caught up in a stalker situation during their Christmas break. All is uncovered when the sorority come together to discover the truth about their stalker. Undoubtably full of girl power moments, a bit of slapstick horror and jump scares galore, Black Christmas will likely be a hit with horror and Christmas fans alike. In cinemas from December 14th.

In a year where climate change is becoming the most important thing on everyones minds we are seeing lots of documentaries highlighting the wonders of our beloved Earth and this week’s next release is among them. Directed by Viktor Kosakovskiy, Aquarela makes its way into select cinemas this weekend. Opening on December 13th Aquarela showcases water and ice around the globe in its most powerful and mesmerising forms.

This week is a quiet one for box office openings with most studios looking to avoid 2nd weekend competition with Rise of Skywalker (released on the 18th), but hang on to your butts, because next week is a big one with exciting releases of some huge blockbusters, animated adventures and more.

You can support Charlie in the following places:

Twitter: @funnyoldworldx
Website: Funnyoldworld

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