Gremlins (1984) (with Catherine Lester)

Mogwai and monsters after midnight are the focus of Episode 88, as Chris and Alex take a closer look at the part-horror, part-Christmas feature Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984) with special guest Dr Catherine Lester, Lecturer in Film and Television in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. Catherine’s work focuses largely on the intersections between children’s culture and the horror genre, and she is the author of Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021), and several articles on popular animation and children’s horror cinema. She is also currently putting together an edited collection on the controversial animated film Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978), based on the The Legacy of Watership Down: Animals, Adaptation, Animation conference held in 2018. Topics for this episode include the fuzziness of children’s horror as a critical category, and how the genre itself has traditionally understood the role and presence of the child figure; the industrial impact of Gremlins within North American cinema and the subsequent introduction of the new PG-13 rating; the implications of horror, fear and monstrosity for theorising the child spectator; the materiality of the film’s animatronic effects and how this connects to a 1980s context of consumerism and merchandising; the citational practices made by director Joe Dante and screenwriter Chris Columbus towards popular Hollywood film history (particularly its reference to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and evocations of film noir); animation’s potential role in exaggerating, diluting and modulating horrific content; and what Gremlins might have to say about the suitability of horror’s dominant tropes when presented to - and (re)framed for - children. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**