The Halloween season often brings cinema both creepy and campy to the top of the charts. October is the busiest month of the year for horror movies, and the demand for scary movies carries over to the living room. This year, the Halloween craving for a movie that makes us laugh as much as it makes us scream catapulted 1984’s Gremlins to the top of HBO Max’s list of most popular movies.
Written by Chris Columbus and with Steven Spielberg executive producing, Gremlins follows Billy Peltzer as he receives an adorable, strange new pet named Gizmo. Gizmo is a “mogwai”, and Billy is warned to never let it touch water or eat after midnight. The former causes more mogwai to spawn, and the former turns them into vicious, violent monsters called gremlins. As the gremlins wreak havoc all over town, Billy and Gizmo find a way to stop them. The film was an immediate hit, eventually earning $212 million against an $11 million budget, and its popularity perseveres to this day, as evidenced by Gremlins taking HBO Max’s top spot.
Gremlins Led to the Creation of the PG-13 Rating
While Grelmins was also popular with critics, earning an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, not everyone was happy with the many. A sizable group of parents were upset with the movies PG rating, as the violence of the frightening, creepy Gremlins was shocking to children who had gone in expecting a movie about a cute creature named Gizmo (who, at one point in the film, gets darts thrown at him). Another film Spielberg was involved with, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, had a similar backlash; at his suggestion, a new MPAA rating was added between PG and R, dubbed PG-13. The first movie released with the new rating was war movie Red Dawn.
Gremlins sparked a franchise that included sequels, toys, and even a cartoon. Gremlins 2: The New Batch also snuck into the top 10 of HBO Max’s movies, proving that despite the controversy, Billy and Gizmo’s creepy adventure still endures today.
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