Holiday Horror 2: Gremlins and Christmas Trauma

“While everybody else opens up presents, they're opening up their wrists.” 

Whoa. What a buzzkill. This quote must be from Black Christmas or Silent Night Deadly Night...nope, it’s the ‘80s family movie, Gremlins. I love this movie. Gizmo is so precious that Baby Yoda would would lose his shit. The kills are creative and comically graphic. The saturated adorableness juxtaposed with gory violence makes this film a true holiday horror classic. 

The movie begins very kitschy and matches other cute, family friendly movies that Chis Columbus (Home Alone, Miracle on 34th Street, Jingle All the Way) has given us. Billy and his not so low key crush, Kate are discussing different emotions the holidays evoke. When he questions why anyone would ever be anything but merry and bright during the Christmas season, Kate rips into him. She releases an unexpected, swirling tirade of darkness in a film that had been mostly whimsical up to this point. When a piece of a movie puzzle so hilariously doesn’t fit the rest of the tone, I fixate on it. I became OBSESSED and started piecing together a theme of the film that maybe I’m stretching to see, but thought it was worth exploring and therefore worth writing a blog post. 

During Kate’s lesson, she says the quote listed above and probably the darkest turn of phrase in Christmas history: “While everybody else opens up presents, they're opening up their wrists.” Holy shit, Kate. She’s educating him about how the holidays are very painful for others and he needs to check his privilege and understand that his experience is not universal. The concept of the holiday season being depressing is nothing new. Loads of people experience seasonal depression, suffering from sunlight withdraw. Others struggle with past traumas surfacing, triggered by family gatherings or lack thereof. Many become aware that another year has ended and they are seeing no improvement as their life marches to its end. It’s reasonable to be depressed! I was, however, taken aback by how out of place Kate’s dark musings were. I imagine this dialogue is leftover from Columbus’s original, much darker screenplay. They lightened up the movie in later drafts, but I’m guessing that these abrupt u-turns into the macabre are remnants from the original. 

Kate’s main message is that even though you may not feel anxiety and depression during Christmas, many others do and it’s not up to you to question or negate those feelings. Her snapping at him feels uncharacteristic to her behavior in the rest of the film and you begin to question if this issue triggers an event from her past. This leads us to the most absurd scene of Gremlins. Lots of weird shit happens in this film. For instance the sadist, elderly woman Ms. Deagle fantasizes about torturing a dog to death, is prepared to pour water on caroling children in freezing temperatures, and meets a glorious end--being flung from the second story of her home when the gremlins tamper with her electric chair lift. All of that weirdness, however, cannot be topped by Kate’s monologue and the most out-of-place, bizarre scene in the film. If you want a refresher, check out the link here. 

Here’s the text:

“The worst thing that ever happened to me was on Christmas. Oh, God. It was so horrible. It was Christmas Eve. I was 9 years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. A couple of hours went by. Dad wasn’t home. So Mom called the office. No answer. Christmas Day came and went and still nothing. So the police began a search. Four or five days went by. Neither one of us could eat or sleep. Everything was falling apart. It was snowing outside. The house was freezing, so I went to try to light up the fire. And that’s when I noticed the smell. The firemen came and broke through the chimney top. And me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird. And instead they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He’d been climbing down the chimney on Christmas Eve, his arms loaded with presents. He was gonna surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck. He died instantly. And that’s how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”

...What? First of all, was her father very drunk when he made this decision? Who in their right mind would actually descend a two-story high brick tube? That is beyond dumb, of course he fucking died. This gruesome tale is never mentioned again and seems to bear no significance to the plot. For this reason, I became obsessed. How can these two scenes of jarring darkness be related to the central themes of this film? I took this as a challenge and have thrown together something that may be a bit of a stretch, but I had fun. 

Gremlins asserts that people cannot fully understand the weight of trauma until experiencing it for themselves. At the beginning of the film, Billy lives an idyllic life. Sure, his dad is a kooky inventor and his family has financial issues (even though the size and quality of their house argues otherwise), but he has two supportive parents and a life free of major traumas. With all this in mind, he can’t fathom the notion of anyone feeling blue on Christmas. He can’t sympathize with  the trauma and mental challenges others deal with during this time of year and therefore can’t relate to stories like Kate’s. He expects people to move past their previous pains, but like Kate’s dad jammed in a chimney, some memories are hard to unclog. 

Someone like Billy, who has been sheltered from these negative experiences is incapable of comprehending Kate’s grim, holiday mood. All of that changes during the course of this film. After the adorable Gizmo sprouts some less adorable Mogwai, they morph into the not at all adorable gremlins and start reeking havoc on Billy’s life. He discovers the body of his science teacher, a victim of one of the earlier gremlin attacks. He observes the remnants of how his mom survived a small horde of gremlins, using various kitchen supplies to kill them (Blender, microwave, butcher knife...The scene with Billy’s mom killing the gremlins is a masterclass is creative ways to survive a horror movie; use your resources!). Billy himself is frequently attacked by the monsters and barely survives the process. Even when the Gremlins leader, Stripe, is defeated, the process is graphic as the creature melts and sizzles until a skeleton is all that remains. I’m sure when Billy goes to sleep, that image is imprinted on his eyelids. 

All these events most likely leave Billy with a severe PTSD. Years later when Christmas rolls around, the images of Christmas decorations and the sounds of carols are triggering to that Christmas long ago when green, slimy monsters attacked him, his girlfriend, his mom, and killed a handful of people in the town. The colorful lights that once gave him glee now remind him of the time he found his down strung from them. The glittering evergreens that made him smile now force him to recall his mom trapped under one as a gremlin tried to tear her face off. Kate tries to teach him a lesson about how other people have experienced traumas that he can’t imagine, but now he can imagine them. He couldn’t conceptualize the trauma she was explaining, but he has a new perspective now that he’s lived it.

Well. How cheery. Happy holidays!