Chris Columbus wanted to kill the dog in Gremlins

Before Chris Columbus was known for some of the turn of the millennium’s warmest family adventures, he was a twentysomething with an idea for a movie about mysterious pets that turn to monsters if you get them wet or feed them after midnight. That movie, of course, is Gremlins, and if you’re like this writer, it’s a movie you saw way too young and were slightly scarred by just how violent it turned out to be. (In this scenario, your mom borrowed it from the library thinking it was going to be, like, The Muppets or something.) But Columbus actually wanted the movie to be even more violent than it ultimately wound up being, to the point that he was going to break a cardinal rule for some audiences: he was going to kill the dog. 

This is per a new interview with Vanity Fair, where Columbus reflects on his more horror-oriented past in a discussion of Nosferatu, which Columbus co-produced. As far as Gremlins goes, he says it was Steven Spielberg who convinced him to tone down some of the more gratuitous violence in the script. While Columbus says he doesn’t “quite remember” whether the dad survived the movie, “The mom certainly didn’t.” He continues, “Billy [played by Zach Galligan] ran into the foyer of his house, and his mom’s head came rolling down the stairs. So there were some deaths. And Barney the dog was not so lucky to just be hung up in the Christmas lights. He was actually hung up by his neck and died. We killed the dog!”  

It actually gets worse for Barney the dog, believe it or not, and you might want to stop reading if a fictional dog dying is something you’re sensitive to. “They ate him!” Columbus said of the Gremlins’ reign of terror. “Then they went into McDonald’s and ate the people—but not the food. We had a lot of things that didn’t make the final script.” Columbus goes on to explain that he wanted to make the film as violent as possible, but didn’t have the experience to tell Spielberg he was wrong. Ultimately, he’s glad he listened, and that Spielberg had the good idea not to turn main gremlin Gizmo into one of the monsters. “That was one of Steven’s best ideas—that Gizmo remained by Billy’s side,” Columbus said. “He knew this and I didn’t: The audience needed someone to relate to in terms of the gremlins, and that was Gizmo.”