Film / Gremlins (1984)

What you see...isn't always what you get.

"So if your air conditioner goes on the fritz, or your washing machine blows up, or your video recorder conks out, before you call the repairman, turn on all the lights, check all the closets and cupboards, look under all the beds, 'cause you never can tell. There just might be a gremlin in your house."

— Rand Peltzer

Gremlins is a 1984 dark Horror Comedy film directed by Joe Dante, and executive produced by Steven Spielberg. It started the Gremlins franchise.

Inventor Randall Peltzer stops by Chinatown in New York City to pick up a gift for his son, Billy. He ends up getting a mysterious, yet undeniably adorable, critter called a mogwai. The creature comes with instructions, though:

• Don't let it near bright light.
• Don't get it wet.
• Don't feed it after midnight.

The creature, named Gizmo, is gentle and well-behaved, but after he accidentally gets splashed with water, more mogwai suddenly form, and this new, mean-spirited batch tricks Billy into feeding them after midnight. They all form cocoons, and then turn into ugly, frightening gremlins, who gleefully cause havoc and terrorize the town.

Followed by the 1990 sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and the 2023 animated prequel series, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.

This movie, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, is the reason why the PG-13 rating was created in the U.S. (and the 12 rating in the U.K.).

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This film provides examples of:

• Action Mom: Mrs. Peltzer turns unexpectedly and brilliantly badass when she kills three (pre-gremlin army) gremlins in one scene alone. Her weapons of choice: Blender, kitchen knife, and microwave.
  Mrs Peltzer: Get out of my kitchen!!
• The Alleged Car: Billy has a little Volkswagen Beetle that apparently gives him nothing but grief. He's introduced failing to get it started, forcing him to walk to work.
• Alone with the Psycho: After seeing the gremlin that had attacked Mr. Hanson, Billy immediately knows that his mother is in danger and quickly races back home.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: Mrs. Deagle's Establishing Character Moment involves her showcasing herself as a very vile woman in many ways, mentioning that she hates the Peltzers and culminating with threatening to kill Billy's dog in the most grisly way she can think of in retribution for it accidentally destroying her property.
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas: It falls under this when the town is invaded by monsters on Christmas Eve.
• Asshole Victim: Mrs. Deagle is shown casually evicting a poor widow with her children on Christmas Eve, while also threatening to kill the protagonist's dog by throwing him in the drying machine. A deleted scene leading to her death, which depicted her looking wistfully at a picture of her dead husband, was even cut because it made her look too sympathetic.
• Author Appeal: Director Joe Dante is a huge Looney Tunes fan. The gremlins of the film are a lot like Looney Tunes characters rather than the much darker and grislier version of the original script. Chuck Jones also makes a cameo.
• Bad People Abuse Animals:
  • On top of telling a woman and her children that she will not allow them so much as a day's extension in their delayed payment and she will have them kicked out of their home on Christmas Eve, Mrs. Deagle establishes she is a complete monster by threatening to snatch Billy's dog and toss the poor thing in her drier in revenge for the dog accidentally smashing her porcelain snowman. She is, however, shown to coddle her menagerie of rather wild and spoiled cats.
  • The Gremlins' extra-vicious leader Stripe isn't any better, even when he's still a fuzzy little Mogwai. One of the early amber flags (if not red flags) about the new Mogwai's true nature is that in the night, Stripe has Billy's dog strung up on the porch with Christmas lights and left hanging outside in the frigid winter air. The Peltzers don't piece together that it was the cloned Mogwai who were responsible, but to the viewer, it's clear.
• Batter Up!: For his final confrontation with Stripe, Billy grabs a baseball bat off the rack as a weapon. He uses it to block Stripe's chainsaw.
• Big Bad: Stripe, the first mogwai/gremlin born when Gizmo got wet, and the leader of the gremlins. He proves to be a much more dangerous threat than the other Gremlins, nearly killing Billy at several points.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Billy manages to decapitate a Gremlin choking his mother.
  • Gizmo exposes Stripe to sunlight at the end, just as the gremlin is about to shoot Billy and produce a new army of gremlins.
• Big "NO!": Gizmo lets out one when he sees Stripe is about to jump into a pool.
• Bittersweet Ending: The gremlins are all dead, but Kingston Falls has been absolutely trashed and Billy has to return Gizmo to Mr. Wing, who delivers a withering The Reason You Suck to the family for the chaos they unwittingly unleashed. However, seeing the bond Gizmo has developed with Billy, Mr. Wing acknowledges that Billy may someday be ready to take care of him.
• Black and Nerdy: Mr. Hanson is a brainy biology teacher who wears a pocket protector, the ultimate sign of a nerd in the 1980s.
• Black Dude Dies First: Billy's biology teacher Mr. Hanson is the only black character in the film, and the gremlins' first victim. Possibly; the finished film walked back most other intended character deaths, so he may have only been injured and heavily sedated.
• Bungling Inventor: Randall Peltzer's inventions are nothing but disasters that leave tremendous messes behind and it's implied Billy is the primary bread-winner of the family because of this. He still insists in trying to make money out of them, even thinking it would be a good Get-Rich-Quick Scheme to start breeding and selling mogwais.
• Call-Back: Early on, Gizmo watches To Please A Lady and imitates the racing scenes. At the end of the film, Gizmo races a toy car, and dialogue from the film plays over the soundtrack.
• The Cameo: Chuck Jones is the man who compliments Billy's drawing skills at the bar early in the film. Jim McKrell (host and announcer of a few game shows, most notably Celebrity Sweepstakes) and a young Tom Bergeron (then a personality at WBZ-TV 4 in Boston) make appearances as TV news reporters.
• Captain Ersatz: Mrs. Deagle looks and acts a lot like The Wicked Witch of the West and her human counterpart Miss Gulch, right down to threatening the main character's dog.
• Captain Obvious: The old man at the bank when Mrs. Beagle gloats that she will kill Barney the dog by putting him in her dryer on high heat, "a slow and painful death". His response to that: "that would do it, all right."
• Chainsaw Good: Stripe attacks Billy with an electric chainsaw. When Billy manages to knock him back, the chainsaw catches on the floor and pulls Stripe away, acting like a tank tread.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: Stripe instantly shoots another Gremlin for trying to sneak extra cards into their poker game.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • At the beginning of the movie, the first rule explains that Gizmo's species hates bright lights and that sunlight in particular is lethal to them. At first, this just seemed like a necessary rule to care for Gizmo, but it ends up being the most important weapon in the fight against the gremlins, the former part allowing them to drive them off while Gizmo ends up using the latter half to destroy the gremlin leader.
  • The ornamental sword that keeps falling off the wall is used by Billy on the last gremlin that attacks his mother.
• Chimney Entry: Kate's father tried to surprise his family this way one Christmas. Unfortunately, he broke his neck and died in the process.
• Clock Tampering: One of the rules for handling mogwai is to never never feed them after midnight, since it turns them into gremlins. One night, the mogwai in the box are making noises like they are hungry. The alarm clock says it's about 11:30, so Billy feeds them some leftover chicken. The next day, Billy notices the clock reading the exact same time. Seems the extension cord had been ripped from the plug, the mogwai actually chewed through the electrical cord, so it was after midnight after all.
• Cooked to Death: Billy's mom is attacked in the kitchen by the initial batch of title monsters. She tosses one into a mixer and backs another one into a microwave, which she then activates.
• Crazy Cat Lady: After showing no mercy to a starving family and threatening a kill Billy's dog, Mrs. Deagle is revealed to have a dozen cats that run rampant in her mansion. She names them after currency and babies them sickeningly.
• Creator In-Joke: Two to producer Steven Spielberg:
  • The working titles for movies Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial were "Watch the Skies" and "A Boy's Life" respectively. Both titles are seen on the local theater when Billy walks past it.
  • Rockin' Ricky Rialto's billboard is in the style of Indiana Jones from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• Creator Cameo: Steven Spielberg is seen at the inventors' convention, riding a crazy-looking recumbent bike.
• Dartboard of Hate: Poor Gizmo is himself strapped to the dartboard not long after the Gremlins emerge from their cocoons, who then proceed to chuck darts at him, showing how much their contempt for him has grown. The scene serves as a meta one for the filmmakers as well, who made it to express their own frustration in how difficult it was to make the small Gizmo puppet work alongside the much larger gremlins.
• Deadline News: Subverted with "Rockin' Ricky" Rialto's radio broadcast. We hear him believing the radio listeners calling to denounce the gremlin-caused chaos are pranking him and then his desperate screaming as the Gremlins attack him before the transmission cuts off but he comes back a few scenes later having apparently fought them off by himself.
• Destination Defenestration: This is how Mrs. Deagle meets her end, courtesy of the Gremlins.
• Disney Death: It appears that the Futtermans are crushed and killed by a snowplow-driving gremlin, but at the very end of the movie we hear a news reporter mentioning that he'd just spoken with the lovable old couple, who are still alive and well. Viewers who missed that often mistake their reappearance in the sequel as an Unexplained Recovery (although how they survived the encounter isn't shown, either).
• A Dog Named "Dog": "Gizmo" is the nickname Billy's father gives him. His true owner, Mr. Wing, calls him Mogwai, which is also his species.
• Dragged Off to Hell: When the Gremlins heckle Mrs. Deagle, she's convinced they're demons who've come for her. The irony is, in a sense, she's not entirely wrong, since the Gremlin sabotage of her stair lift chair gets her killed moments later.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Mr. Futterman is put out of a job, and then finds out his beloved Kentucky Harvester has foreign-made parts in it.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: The film was originally envisioned as a much darker horror film but was made into a more campy horror-comedy, rated PG. Still, its horror origins are very apparent, making it quite a bit more grisly and scary than most other PG films. It was this film, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that prompted the MPAA to create a rating between PG and R.
• Foreshadowing: When Billy accidentally sprays water on Gizmo and causes him to multiply, Gizmo looks incredibly sullen and shakes his head, because he already knows that the new Mogwai are going to cause chaos and actively want to become Gremlins.
• From Bad to Worse: After four of the original gremlins are wiped out^note the whereabouts of Earl, the gremlin from school, being unknown, Stripe, the last one remaining, flees. Billy and Gizmo track him down to the Y.M.C.A...where he jumps into a pool.
• Gambling Brawl: A group of Gremlins are playing poker in the bar when one of them tries to cheat. Stripe pulls out a gun and shoots the other Gremlin dead on the spot, which causes the rest of his ilk to burst into laughter.
• Get-Rich-Quick Scheme: One of these is what makes the whole mess happen — Mr. Wing's grandson sells Gizmo to Randall Peltzer because the store's location (and Mr. Wing's persnickety nature) have turned it into a money pit. It's also showcased that Peltzer's inventions are this and thus Billy is the primary breadwinner of the family. When he sees the way Mogwai reproduce, Randall briefly entertains the thought of selling the Mogwai as "the Peltzer Pet" (not thinking of how quickly demand will run out if all it takes to make more of them is any amount of water, and not knowing that all Mogwai but Gizmo are very vicious even before turning into Gremlins).
• Gift Shake: Billy starts to do this with his present, but is quickly stopped by his father since the box contains Gizmo.
• Green Aesop: After the mayhem in the first film, the Chinese shopkeeper returns to collect Gizmo, berating the Peltzers all the while. "You have done with mogwai what your society has done with all of nature's gift!" Definitely shoe-horned on, considering the causes for the mayhem was an innocent accident with water, followed by the mogwai tricking Billy into feeding them after midnight.
• Griping About Gremlins: For anyone who lived long enough to gripe about them, at least. The film features a monologue by Mr. Futterman about the typical Gremlin legend, which Billy later latches on to as a handy name for the critters. They do embody some elements of the mythical gremlins, notably being very adept with technology, usually to the detriment of human beings.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: The shots of the mogwai sloppily devouring the fried chicken Billy gives them.
• Hero of Another Story: Rockin' Ricky manages to survive a Gremlin assault on his radio station, and is back on the air at the end of the movie. In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line from his survival broadcast, he mentions Marines have arrived to keep the creatures away from his station. Armed with fire hoses.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: All of the events happen during Christmas Eve.
• Infantilization Retaliation: Gizmo gets water spilled on him, and promptly spawns several Gremlin eggs. While initially cute, they actually hatch into Mogwai, where the ominous music, Gizmo's pained screaming, and the malevolent gazes of the babies as they hatch lets the audience these new Gremlins are very different from Gizmo. Billy's young friend Pete thinks they're cute, and reaches towards one while saying "Hi Cutie". It promptly snaps at his finger.
• Informed Poverty: Billy is said to be supporting his family as a lowly bank teller, Billy's father is shown to be a rather inept inventor, and Billy's mother's crying is implied to be about the family's financial straits. However, the family lives in a large house, Billy's mother is a housewife, and Billy's father has $200 on hand to spend on an exotic pet. They must not be doing that bad.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Gerald tells Billy to his face that he'd have fired him over the fiasco his dog caused at the bank. He then proceeds to brag about his success. His criticisms of Billy for not doing more with his life, however, are pretty accurate.
• Karmic Nod: Upon seeing the Gremlins for the first time, Mrs. Deagle is convinced "they're" coming for her. Her breakdown into delusional sobbing before she activates her tampered stairlift and her own demise makes you cheer as she literally flies down to Hell where she belongs (the Latin American translation even adds "to go to Hell" to the line below).
  Mrs. Deagle: I'm not ready!!!
• Kick the Dog: In the Darker and Edgier original script, the gremlins killed the Peltzers' pet dog, and Billy would have returned home to see his mother's head roll down the stairs. In the final version, they just dangle Barney up with Christmas lights, and the mother survives with minor injuries.
• Kill It with Fire: Finding that the gremlins have gathered in a movie theater, Billy and Kate set off a gas explosion in the hopes of wiping them all out. It works, but Stripe survives because he had left the theater to get some candy from a nearby store.
• Landmark Declaration Gambit: Discussed when Kate mentions a petition to declare Dorry's Tavern as a landmark to stop Ruby Deagle from tearing it down.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: A Movie Within a Movie version when Billy and Gizmo are watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Miles Benell's mad rant at the end of the film regarding the pod people could be seen like it was aimed at Billy and Gizmo, warning them about the gremlins.
• Leitmotif upon Death: A rendition of The Gremlin Rag, the gremlins' leitmotif, plays when Stripe, their leader, melts in the sunlight.
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: Mr. Wing's shop is in a basement deep in Chinatown and his own grandson mentions that clientele doesn't arrive very often as a result.
• Mars Needs Women: Kate is the only young woman attacked by the gremlins, and she's the only person they abduct rather than try to kill. One gremlin dressed as a flasher "exposes" himself to her.
• Microwave Misuse: One of the eponymous monsters is killed in the microwave; going pop in a very spectacular fashion.
• My Car Hates Me: Played with. In the beginning, Billy's car refuses to start, forcing him to walk to work. In the middle of the Gremlin attack, it actually starts for him. But later, when he tries to drive it again, it won't start.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Billy unwittingly feeding the mogwai after midnight, though that can be forgiven as they had to trick him into doing it. Also implied near the end of the film where Rockin' Ricky can be overheard on the radio saying that the marines are planning to spray down the Gremlins with firehoses, though the main characters manage to stop them before that ever happens.
• Nightmare Face: The sight of the gremlin laughing evilly up close facing you after the deputy's car crashes is enough to give anyone a nightmare. Yeah, good luck trying to sleep after seeing this.
• Not Me This Time: Billy rightfully suspects Mrs. Deagle of abusing his dog Barney by stringing the poor thing up with a bunch of Christmas lights, since she had already made threats to do even worse. However, she's not responsible, it was Stripe and the other evil Mogwai.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Rockin' Ricky Rialto is heard being attacking by gremlins as they invade his studio. Later, we hear Ricky none the worse for wear, defiantly announcing that he's still on the air, having apparently fought off the gremlins.
• Off with His Head!:
  • In the Darker and Edgier original script, Billy returned home to see his mother's head rolling down the stairs.
  • In the film itself, Billy decapitates a gremlin with a sword and kicks the severed head in the fireplace, and it screams as it's on fire.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Billy's reaction after the last gremlin, Stripe, jumps into a public swimming pool. Gremlin Army ensues.
  • When he's lying on the ground gasping in pain from Stripe shooting a crossbow bolt into his arm, and then he hears the sound of an electric chainsaw whirring to life.
  • The Gremlin choking Billy's mom, just before Billy chops his head off. "Uh-oh."
  • Billy when he gets the phone call from Mr. Hanson saying that "It just hatched."
  • Again when he finds Mr. Hanson's dead body.
  • Billy's mom when she hears the Gremlins upstairs, then goes up to Billy's room and sees the hatched cocoons.
  • Billy calling his mom to warn her that "They've hatched, get out of the house!"
  • Billy and his mom as the phone call gets cut off, then "Do You Hear What I Hear" starts playing downstairs.
  • Billy's Mom when she sees the Gremlin eating one of her gingerbread men.
  • Billy, when he hears Rockin' Ricky saying that the marines are standing by with fire hoses to deal with the gremlins should they return.
  • Stripe when he sees the theater explode with all his gremlin minions inside.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Mrs. Futterman is a cheerful and doting wife to her depressed and sour husband. When they're about to be crushed by his plow, however, she turns on him and starts screaming at him. This is likely an artifact of the original, darker version of the script, in which the couple is killed.
• Out of Focus: Mrs. Peltzer has one Action Mom scene and then disappears for most of the movie. Possibly because in the original script the gremlins killed her.
• Parents as People: Billy's handling of Gizmo in his defense is pretty responsible, the two bond very closely, and he does try to follow the rules for caring for the Mogwai. Unfortunately, he never anticipates other forces breaking the rules instead, like his friend clumsily spilling water on Gizmo, or the resulting Mogwai intentionally sabotaging his clock so he will feed them after midnight. Mr Wing at least seems to acknowledge Billy's efforts in the end, noting he might be ready "one day".
• Police Are Useless: Joe Dante probably defines this trope best in the commentary track: "Whenever you have a sci-fi film, and police, you always have to have a scene with the police, and it's always the same scene." Which ends with the police, still not believing Billy despite seeing Gizmo with their own eyes, leaving to investigate the Futterman's "freak accident" with the snowplow, seeing Mrs. Deagle and a guy playing Santa getting attacked by Gremlins, then getting their brake lines cut and presumably dying in the ensuing car crash.
• Properly Paranoid: Mr. Futterman's crazy drunk talk about gremlins had some truth to it. During the climax, Billy even says that he was right.
• Pupating Peril: It's eventually discovered that Mogwai who are allowed to eat after midnight end up encased in creepy, Giger-esque cocoons as they begin metamorphosing into Gremlins. This is played for much ominousness when Billy discovers that five of his six Mogwai are now cocoons clustered around his bed; it eventually results in an especially nightmarish moment in which the newly-metamorphosed Gremlins begin clawing their way out of their cocoons while a terrified Gizmo tries to hide.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: All Gremlins have them. Although they don't normally glow, there's a very striking moment when Mrs. Peltzer slashes open Billy's Christmas stocking thinking there's another Gremlin hiding inside (which turns out to just be a motorized toy robot), only to find out a second too late that a pair of red lights in the tree behind her are not part of the decorations.
• Shirtless Scene: Billy gets one after his father's orange juicer explodes on him, forcing him to change shirts.
• Shout-Out:
  • There's a Doctor Moreau who works at the animal clinic.
  • When Billy is hunting down Stripe in the department store, he walks past a row of plush dolls. Not only is Stripe hiding amongst them (a direct reference to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) he pushes away an actual doll of E.T. while poking his head out.
  • Another E.T reference comes when one of the gremlins says "Phone home"...right before ripping out the phone line and disconnecting Billy's call with his mother.
  • Robbie the Robot and The Time Machine (1960) appear (or disappear, in the latter's case) in the inventor convention attended by Mr. Peltzer.
  • At Dory's when talking with Billy Gerald orders a martini shaken not stirred.
  • Rockin' Ricky Rialto's billboard is a reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with Rialto's name in the same font as the Raiders poster and Rialto's likeness dressed as Indiana Jones.
  • Mr. Wing's son is dressed like Short Round.
  • The gremlin cocoons bear a resemblance to the eggs from Alien.
  • In Billy's bedroom you can see a Twilight Zone: The Movie title marquee in the background. The film featured a segment Joe Dante himself directed: A radically different remake of the episode It's A Good Life.
  • The iconic Gremlin Rag was recycled from the segment that was a remake of the episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Both the episode and the remake featured a gremlin, making it a clever nod to the story that popularized gremlins.
  • Billy mentions he got a comic book from "Dr. Fantasy's". Dr. Fantasy is the nickname of movie producer Frank Marshall, a regular collaborator with Spielberg.
  • One of the gremlins in the bar is doing the dance from Flash Dance. Michael Sembello, who did the song "Gremlins...Mega Madness" for this movie, also did the famous "Maniac" song.
• Soft Glass: The Gremlins (mostly Stripe) have no problem breaking through windows seemingly by just running through them. Possibly justified by their scaly skin giving them enough armor to protect them from such minor injuries.
• Stepford Smiler: Billy's mother is introduced cooking in the kitchen and spontaneously breaking into tears, most likely due to the family's financial woes. She blames it on the "sad movie," but she's watching the end of It's a Wonderful Life, perhaps the most famous feel-good movie finale of all time. When her husband returns home, she puts on a smile and says she'll talk about it later.
• Stuck in a Chimney: Kate's father tried to surprise his family by Chimney Entry one Christmas. Unfortunately, he broke his neck and died in the process. Kate's family didn't find this out until later when they broke through the chimney to discover why there was a bad smell coming from it.
• Surprisingly Functional Toys: When the heroes track down Stripe to a department store, Gizmo finds a toy car sized for him, which he can drive around by the steering wheel, and even has a functioning horn, and soon the good Mogwai is driving around in the store looking for Stripe.
• Sympathy for the Devil, the second Gremlin Billy's mom kills is stabbed to death with a butcher's knife. Or so you think until you see it behind her pinned to her cutting board wiggling around trying to pull the knife out! Sure they are nasty little monsters but being pinned to the ground with a knife through the gut is a horrible way to go. Finish the little bugger off at least.
• Tagalong Kid: Billy seems to have an older brother type of relationship with a kid called Pete who hangs out with him.
• Technicolor Death: It's not enough for sunlight to just kill Gremlins. It has to melt them alive.
• Theme Naming: All of Ms. Deagle's cats are named after different currencies: Dollar Bill, Kopeck, Drachma, etc.
• Too Dumb to Live: Kate's father had to have been a very stupid man. Jumping down your own chimney while overloaded with presents like Santa Claus is only asking for trouble. To quote CinemaSins, "Christmas didn't kill your father, Kate, stupid did."
• Tower Defense: Pete is seen defending his room's window against invading gremlins.
• Troublemaking New Pet: Even before turning into Gremlins, Gizmo's offspring demonstrate their cruel and rambunctious streak to the Peltzers' other pets, tormenting Gizmo multiple times, and tying Barney up with Christmas lights. They easily get away with the latter due to Billy's suspecting Ms. Deagle, who vocally hated Barney.
• Uniformity Exception: Both Gizmo and Stripe have a distinguishing feature that sets them apart from the other Mogwai/Gremlins' "standard" design: Gizmo has a white patch over his right eye, whereas Stripe has a mohawk of white hair on his head which he retains as a Gremlin.
• Vague Age: Billy and Kate. They both look like teenagers, and Billy still lives with his parents, but they both seem to be out of high school and have full time jobs. Billy even receives a lecture from Gerald about how he's wasting his life, implying he's been out of school for a while.
• Villains Out Shopping: Late in the film, the gremlins take a break from their usual mischief to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the theater.
• The Voice: The DJ at the town radio station, "Rockin' Ricky Rialto". Gremlins are heard breaking into his studio, but as noted above he survives.

  Rockin' Ricky: Hey wait a minute, you're not Rockin' Ricky fans!...

• We Sell Everything: The store where Billy has his final fight with Stripe sells toys, boomboxes, chainsaws, crossbows, and firearms, and it also has an entire garden center.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Billy's friend Pete is last seen firing his slingshot at a few gremlins. Then later we hear him calling into the radio station trying to give a warning out about them, and then he gets cut off. Pete doesn't appear in the sequel (Corey Feldman was in rehab at the time), nor is he even mentioned.
  • Judge Reinhold's character Gerald is seemingly introduced as an (unsuccessful) rival for Kate's affections, and disappears from the movie after appearing in two scenes. A deleted scene shows that he was hiding out in the bank vault while the Gremlins ran wild, and is losing his sanity.
  • The two cops flip their car after a Gremlin cuts their brakes, and don't appear for the rest of the movie. It's unclear whether or not they survived.
  • Mr. Hanson get his hand chewed/clawed up and a syringe in the butt, but it's never outright stated that he's been killed, and he's never mentioned again.
• When the Clock Strikes Twelve: Do not feed Mogwai after midnight.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The first film takes care not to mention where Kingston Falls is located or which "Chinatown" Rand visited. Most of it was shot on the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles, using the same small town sets as Back to the Future. However, according to the script, Kingston Falls is located somewhere in Pennsylvania and the sequel establishes that Mr. Wing's shop is in New York City.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: One particular Mogwai, stated as Earl in official media, is hinted in the film and novel as being one of the few Mogwai blessed with a more docile personality similar to Gizmo, that is until he is taken to the middle school to be experimented on and then happening on that sandwich, condemning him to become another psychotic Gremlin and (presumably) suffer the same ill fate as all his other brethren.
• You Are Not Ready: Although it is hinted that Billy may be one day.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: There are three rules to properly care for Mogwais. Billy goes far enough as to break two of those rules so that the movie can really set in full gear in favor of the Gremlins. However the third rule is used to finally thwart Stripe.
• You Have to Believe Me!: Billy is trying to convince the local sheriff that thousands of vicious little monsters spawned from his one tiny, fuzzy friend are terrorizing the town. He starts off acknowledging how insane he sounds and trying to be reasonable, but considering the damage the Gremlins can cause, that doesn't last long.
  Billy: Sheriff! Sheriff, will you listen to me?
  Sheriff: You listen to me, kid! Go on home, take little Gizmo there, sit by the fireplace, and open your Christmas presents, huh? Attaboy.

Tropes exclusive to the novelization:

• Adaptational Karma: The novelization explains that Mr. Wing's Grandson was severely punished by his grandfather for the back alley sale of Gizmo.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the novelization, Mrs. Deagle was selling the evicted tenants' land to a chemical company (named "Hitox" of all things), so one can assume she was going to turn the town into a toxic waste dump.
• All There in the Manual: The Novelization has a prologue that claims that Mogwais were genetically engineered by an alien scientist called the Mogturmen as the perfect companion. However, the vast majority of Mogwais turned out to be dangerous, not to mention the unforeseen Gremlin problem. Gizmo is one of the few Mogwais to turn out right (labelled 'Eternals').
• Automatic Door Malfunction: The novelization mentions that the Gremlins messed with automatic doors in some stores by making them open normally but then slam shut with enough speed and force to injure people.
• Death by Adaptation: The novelization, based on an earlier draft of the script, reveals the survival of the Futtermans to be a last second addition in the film. They're explicitly stated to have died in the book.
• The Con: Mrs. Deagle evicting tenants is revealed to be a deliberate part of a real estate scam (a mall in deleted scenes, a company that was going to use the land to dispose of toxic waste in the novelization).

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