The R-Rated ‘Gremlins’ Movie We Never Got To See Made Its Hero the Villain

It’s hard to believe, but this year marks the 40th anniversary of Gremlins, the wild horror comedy from director Joe Dante about a small town overrun by scaly little creatures. The Warner Bros. film was a major success, coming in as the third-biggest box office moneymaker of 1984. There is so much that works about Gremlins, from its Frank Capraesque feel, the romance between Billy (Zach Galligan) and Kate (Phoebe Cates), and the boundary pushing creepy horror of the gremlins destruction (it’s one of the films that caused the creation of the PG-13 rating), but let’s face it, it’s Gizmo, voiced by Howie Mandel, who steals the show.

Gizmo’s cuteness is almost unbearable, and his character is so influential, that Furbys and The Mandalorian‘s Grogu are inspired by him. Gizmo rarely was, however. Chris Columbus‘ original script was an R-rated horror film without an ounce of cute. It was producer Steven Spielberg who pushed to change the unmade project to be more family-friendly, but in its original form, the Gremlins script was filled with death, and most shocking of all, an evil Gizmo who turns into a gremlin himself.

Gizmo is a Villain Rather Than an Adorable Hero in the Original ‘Gremlins’ Script

Chris Columbus is now the legendary director of Home Alone and several Harry Potters films, but in the early 80s he was a guy trying to get his career started. In 2020, Columbus told Collider that the idea for Gremlins came from hearing mice run around on the floor of his New York apartment and a friend telling him to write a monster movie. He said:

“I was thinking about these mice running around at night, they would scurry by my finger if my hand was hanging over the bed, it was really creeping me out and that’s how I came up with the idea of Gremlins. So I wrote it as a straightforward horror film.”

A straightforward horror film had no space for cute and funny. That meant there was no room for the cute and fuzzy Gizmo either. Columbus’ first attempt at Gremlins is a creature feature and nothing more. While it still has a hero named Billy working at a bank, he is portrayed as a bespectacled nerd, and his love interest is named Tracy instead of Kate. She and Billy also have her horrible boyfriend, a bank security guard named Gary, to contend with. In the final film, Gary becomes Gerald, played by Judge Reinhold, a cocky bank employee who quickly disappears from the plot. Billy’s mom, Lynn, remains, but instead of being a gremlin-killing badass, as portrayed by France Lee McCain in the movie, the Lynn of the original script is a thinly written woman with a Valium addiction. Billy’s father, Rand, played by Hoyt Axton in the movie, sadly, is no longer a quirky inventor, but just a bland guy working in business. It’s still him who gets the Mogwai for his son, but here, our future furry hero is treated much differently.

There is no emotional connection to Gizmo in the Gremlins script. In fact, he’s not even called Gizmo, but is a nameless, mischievous Mogwai whom Billy doesn’t show much interest in. Their adorable relationship in the movie is completely wiped away. In Gremlins, Gizmo isn’t like the evil Mogwai who come out of him when he gets wet, and he shows zero desire to eat the leftover chicken Billy accidentally feeds the rest of them. In the original concept, Gizmo is the ringleader that combines the character with Stripe, the antagonist from the movie. Additionally, it’s not leftovers they eat, but the freakin’ family dog! Thank you for sparing us that, Spielberg.

Dozens of People Are Killed in Chris Columbus’ ‘Gremlins’ Screenplay

Barney the dog is one of the best parts of Gremlins. Mushroom, who played him, treated the puppets like real creatures in every scene he’s in. He makes them come to life as much as anyone else did. Thankfully, he’s the first of many characters who lived in the final film but didn’t make it in the original screenplay. Arguably, Gremlins‘ best scene is when Lynn Peltzer discovers that the gremlin cocoons have hatched, sending her on a one-woman killing spree using the likes of blenders and microwaves. In the script, when Billy gets home to save his mother, her decapitated head comes bouncing down the stairs. It’s then Billy who kills off the gremlins like his mom did in the movie.

Shifting to Pete, Billy’s young friend, played by Corey Feldman — the film has him as the one responsible for Gizmo multiplying after accidentally spilling a glass of water on him. We later see him fighting the gremlins from his bedroom window, but he survives his encounter. Not so in the script! Here, he is a Christmas caroler who gets eaten. What plays out next is the same, with Billy chasing the gremlin to the YMCA, where it multiplies in the pool.As well as the chaos that follows with Murray and Sheila Futterman (Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph) nearly being run over by a tractor, the evil Mrs. Deagle (Polly Holliday) being shot out of a window on her chairlift, and the zaniness of the long Dorry’s Tavern takeover scene. Unfortunately, none of this happens in the first script. Billy still goes to the Sheriff to tell them what happened, but this time Billy is taken back to the Y to investigate, where the gremlins kill the Sheriff.

There are not two heroes in this screenplay, but four, with Gary (who is the Sheriff’s son) and antique shop owner Dorry (her name survives as the tavern name in the movie) joining Billy and Tracy. It leads to the most horrific scene when the foursome enters a McDonald’s in search of food. There they find a building filled with the remains of people, showing viewers that rather than going for the hamburgers and fries, the gremlins ate the patrons instead. Columbus’ choice to show the aftermath, letting us imagine how it all happened, is chilling. Three people die in the final film, but in the screenplay, the body count is in the dozens, and it’s not yet over.

The First ‘Gremlins’ Script Has a Different Ending and a Hint of a Sequel

The final act, with the gremlins hunkering down in the movie theater, still happens in the original script, but it’s not the creatures who put on Snow White. Instead, it’s our heroes who do it as a distraction while they work to blow the building up. Following its explosion, many of the gremlins escape, and when the sprinkler goes off, they multiply. Dorry is killed, and a cowardly Gary runs away, before turning on Billy. It’s then that the gremlins attack and kill Gary. Billy and Tracy flee in a car with a gremlin in the backseat, howling a call to his kind to follow. After the gremlin destroys their car, they manage to lock it up inside a toolbox, before fleeing to a greenhouse as the hoard closes in. The finale takes place here instead of a department store, and it’s not just one final Gremlin boss battle, but a war against all of them. Billy and Tracy climb a tree inside the greenhouse, but as the gremlins are about to take it down, the sun rises and kills them. It’s a flat finale compared to Gizmo in a Barbie car taking down a gun-holding Stripe.

It looks as if all is well, however, one last scene shows a worker cleaning up the greenhouse. He finds the toolbox and takes it with him, but when a strange noise comes from it, he tosses it out of his truck and into a lake. A gremlin laughs, and the movie ends as the horror is about to start all over again.

With horror, and gore especially, so popular at the moment, it would be fun to get an R-rated horror Gremlins should a third film ever happen. Still, it can’t be denied that Steven Spielberg was right. Usually, when an R-rated horror film is turned into PG, something is lost. For Gremlins, however, something is gained. Spielberg realized that it couldn’t just be scene after scene of monster mayhem. We also needed characters, strong ones especially, to care about. He also knew we needed a hero we’d never seen before; a big-eared, wide-eyed bundle of cuteness named Gizmo.

Gremlins is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.

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