Tools of Characterization

Characterization in Gremlins

Type of Being

Here's an SAT analogy for you. All gremlins are mogwai, but not all mogwai are gremlins. How do you tell the two apart?

Simple. The mogwai are the soft and furry ones. They may cause trouble, but they're ultimately harmless. The gremlins are the ones clawing at your window wanting to kill you and watch you suffer. Got it? Good.

We hate to think about this, but if someone force-fed Gizmo some food after midnight, would he turn evil too?

Physical Appearances

As we said, all gremlins start out as mogwai, but feeding them after midnight turns them into devious, deadly gremlins. After the chicken incident, there's a schism in the group. Once again, there's an easy way to tell the two apart.

Gizmo remains fuzzy and cute, a mogwai. The others turn into scary scaly nightmares, which are called "gremlins" from then on out.

The movie subscribes to the ideology that cute things are mostly safe. Both Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates are fresh-faced and adorable, like they just fell out of the Sears catalog. But just as the gremlins start off cute, even our human protagonists harbor dark secrets, like Kate's grim Christmas story.

Actions

We talked about Billy's blandness as a protagonist, but there's no denying that he makes some heroic decisions during the movie. Not everyone would keep going when the odds were so clearly stacked against them.

But the biggest character-defining action comes at the very end, when Gizmo pulls the blinds open and fries Stripe. It shows us that he's not secretly bad like the rest of the mogwai. He's willing to kill his own kind if there's no other choice. Gizmo might be the only good mogwai out there, so he needs to prove it.

And he does.