Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Gremlins
1984 · Joe Dante · Gremlins on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen to the main theme lurch like a carnival march. (sound)
Jerry Goldsmith writes a ragtime-inflected march full of rattling percussion and plucked textures. It is not funny and it is not scary. It sits between, and it never settles.
Payoff: The score tells you how to sit in the film. You are cued to laugh and to brace at the same time.
Watch the Christmas lights become the only light at night. (light)
John Hora shoots Kingston Falls by day warm, wide and storybook, the backlot look of American small-town movies. After dark he switches to hard sources, colored practicals and deep black.
Payoff: The film quotes the look it is about to wreck, then hides its puppets in the shadows that quoting creates.
Notice how often a creature and a person share one shot. (camera)
Hora drops the camera low so the creatures sit in the foreground plane, with scaled-up sets and forced perspective selling the size difference. He holds both in frame instead of cutting between them.
Payoff: The trick holds because the film refuses to separate them. You keep seeing the contact, which is what convinces you.
Look at what is playing on the televisions. (setting)
It's a Wonderful Life runs in one room, Invasion of the Body Snatchers in another. Chuck Jones turns up as a character. Robby the Robot walks through. Dante builds the town out of other movies.
Payoff: Kingston Falls is assembled from film history on purpose, so wrecking it means wrecking something borrowed.
Count the three rules and watch each one get broken. (structure)
No bright light, no water, no food after midnight. The film states them early and repeats them, then breaks each through a leaking pipe, a misread clock, ordinary carelessness. Nobody here means harm.
Payoff: Knowing the rules in advance is the suspense. You wait for the mistake instead of being surprised by a villain.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the three rules. The film tells you what must not happen, then makes you watch ordinary carelessness do it.