Since its release in 1984, Gremlins has become a cult classic – a surprisingly dark horror-comedy originally released under a PG rating, despite numerous grisly deaths and a bone-chilling Santa story that it’s hard to believe ever made it into a ‘family friendly’ movie.
While the franchise technically lives on in the animated Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, recent comments by original writer Chris Columbus suggest a full-blown Gremlins 3 is still a long way away. However, one fan-created prequel recaptures what made the original movie great while adding the gore that grown-up fans want to see. Indeed, it even manages to take the Gremlins back to their real-life roots.
Gremlins’ Unofficial Prequel Is a Genius Pitch
The First Movie Set Up a Twisted Concept That ‘Gremmens’ Embraces
The prequel in question is Gremmens – an unofficial comic prequel created by What If? Stories. What If? Stories specializes in unapproved sequels to ’80s media, with projects like Goonies Never Say Die and Die Hard of the Dead. While these concepts are interesting (the ‘real’ police officer who inspired John McClane takes on a zombie apocalypse), the pitch for Gremmens is pure gold.
In the original 1990 movie, protagonist Billy Peltzer is first warned about Gremlins by paranoid neighbor and WWII veteran Murray Futterman (played by Dick Miller.) Futterman claims that he encountered the creatures during his military service, and is one of the few people who know they’re a real threat, even though he initially seems like a fantasist. The second movie sees Futterman traumatized by his experiences in the first movie, and out to settle the score, helping to save New York in the progress.
What If? Stories creates the perfect Gremlins prequel by paying off the tease of Futterman’s first encounter with the Gremlins, showing how Futterman survived the Gremlins back in WWII, when a group of American and Nazi soldiers face off against the horrifying monsters.
The comic is significantly gorier than the original movie, as the ‘Gremmens’ claim severed heads and drag soldiers to be torn apart, but as revealed by the comic’s online preview, the project exhibits the same gleeful approach to horror as the original movies.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch steered into satire on the big screen, thinking up imaginative ways to do something new with the Gremlins. However, Gremmens goes in the other direction, taking the original movie’s horror even more seriously, and finally encountering the Gremlins on their home turf, where even machine guns and tanks are no guarantee of survival.
While Gremmens’ art falls short of professional comics from big publishers like Marvel and DC, the concept of exploring Futterman’s backstory – established in the very first movie, but overlooked ever since – is a great one, especially in how it returns to the franchise’s pre-movie origins.
Gremmens Takes the Gremlins Back to Roald Dahl’s Original Story
The Monsters Were Born Out of WWII
While Joe Dante’s original movie wasn’t a direct adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins, the two have the same roots, and Dahl is often credited with popularizing awareness of the monsters. Gremlins started life as an inside joke of the British Royal Air Force during WWII, acting as shorthand for unexplained electrical glitches. Pilots imagined goblins clambering around inside their planes, explaining how seemingly reliable mechanisms could inexplicably fail.
Serving in the Royal Air Force himself, Dahl wrote a book starring the Gremlins in 1943. The story sees RAF pilot Gus first fall afoul of – and then ally with – a group of Gremlins, turning the anti-tech imps against Hitler’s war machine. The book is one of Dahl’s lesser-known projects, and was his first published novel, before iconic novels like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr Fox.
In fact, Dahl’s book was published by Walt Disney Productions, with plans for an animated feature film that sadly never came to be. Fans missed out on seeing Disney’s take on Gremlins and Widgets (their child forms, equivalent to the movie’s Mogwai), but more importantly missed out on seeing the Gremlins in the setting and context that actually inspired their semi-folkloric origins. Despite being a fan work, Gremmens is the only Gremlins project since Dahl’s novel to actually take them back to WWII.
Any Disney or Dahl fans who want to see what they missed out on can check out The Gremlins: The Lost Walt Disney Production, published by Dark Horse Comics, which includes illustrations from Walt Disney Studios, showing what the animated version would have looked like.
Could ‘Gremmens’ Have Inspired the Upcoming Gremlins 3?
Chris Columbus’ Sequel Has Been Cooking for Almost a Decade
While the concept of Gremmens is a perfect prequel concept to finally turn the original movies into a trilogy, it’s unlikely to be what comes next for the franchise. While a recent report from Deadline confirmed that Gremlins 3 is still in development, Chris Columbus recently shared more disheartening news, telling Total Film/Games Radar:
There’s a bunch of scripts for Gremlins. I mean, nothing has been approved. We’re working on something, but we’re always [working on something]. Gremlins is a never-ending writing assignment.
The movie has been stuck in development for 8 years at this point, and yet Warner Bros. has repeatedly confirmed it’s going ahead, apparently with puppet and animatronic monsters rather than CGI creations. (Ironically, Warner Bros. also confirmed its own version of another What If? Stories comic, announcing an official Goonies sequel.)
However, from what little we know so far, Gremlins 3 isn’t a prequel, with Billy Peltzer actor Zach Galligan hinting at a story where Gizmo faces execution to avoid the creation of any more Gremlins. It’s essentially a given that Warner Bros. would never use a fan-work for inspiration given the legal troubles that would result, especially on a project that’s been underway for almost a decade at this point.
Of course, if finding the right story for Gremlins 3 becomes an intractable problem, then it’s at least possible Warner Bros. could decide to license the unofficial prequel – just don’t hold your breath. The closest that fans are ever likely to get is if Disney chooses to revisit Roald Dahl’s story – itself an unlikely situation, but not beyond the bounds of possibility, given that the Gremlins movie didn’t officially have any links to the ’40s book, and so a separate project based on its story could theoretically be made without much legal wrangling.
Of course, there’s an argument that fans are actually getting the best of both worlds – a new Gremlins sequel that Warner Bros. at least appears unwilling to drop and an already-existing fan comic that pushes the franchise’s horror even further than any big-screen follow-up reasonably can.
