Gremlins 1st Assembly, the wildest and most anarchic version

In the damp laboratory of 1980s sci-fi nostalgia, a small miracle has happened: a lost version of Gremlins has surfaced. And, of course, it was not inside an armored vault guarded by Spielberg himself, but on a dusty VHS. Not a director’s cut polished for the home-video market, but a raw film still on the editing table, full of joins, pauses, hesitations and living material.

The Joe Dante film received a secret screening in Los Angeles. Sources report a running time of around 2 hours and 35 minutes in accounts of the screening, while The Gremlins Museum describes the archival rough cut as material running 2 hours and 54 minutes, more than an hour longer than the theatrical version.

The Gremlins rough cut: longer, dirtier, nastier

The copy comes from Joe Dante’s personal collection: a VHS labelled “11/23/83 – Gremlins 1st Assembly,” entrusted to Ian Grant of The Gremlins Museum, an independent archive dedicated to preserving props, production materials and original puppets from the saga. Grant digitized and cleaned up the material, turning a relic from a sacred attic into something one can at least watch without summoning a video-tracking exorcist.

Inside are longer scenes, subplots later removed, temporary audio, provisional creature sounds, almost silent moments and VHS noise: in other words, cinema before the cosmetic surgery of final editing. In the rough cut, the characters breathe more: Billy moves through Kingston Falls, meets the priest, Pete, Mrs. Deagle; Mrs. Deagle herself appears more present and more threatening, almost a little real-estate deity of evil in a coat and a grudge.

And then there are them, the little monsters. According to accounts from viewers at the screening, the first Gremlin appears after about an hour, the bar sequence lasts more than ten minutes, and the Gremlins are even seen walking. Handmade special effects, not prompts.

The removed past returns just before Gremlins 3

This proto-Gremlins is interesting because it shows an even messier and more violent plot: the rough cut includes more graphic moments in Professor Hanson’s death, a more brutal kitchen scene with Mrs. Peltzer, extended gags in the tavern and additional details in the Montgomery Ward department store.

There is also one curious detail: Phoebe Cates’ famous monologue about why she hates Christmas does not appear to be present in this version. So one of the film’s most memorable scenes, mixing Christmas trauma and black comedy with the grace of a household accident, did not belong to the film’s first form: it was added later, to make the satire of Gremlins more digestible and family-friendly.

For now, no public release is planned: The Gremlins Museum notes that the material belongs to Warner Bros. and Amblin. But with Gremlins 3 set for November 19, 2027, with Chris Columbus directing and Steven Spielberg once again involved as executive producer, it is hard to imagine this discovery remaining only a curiosity for a select few: it could become perfect material for a docuseries, a making-of special, a celebratory extra or a rollout campaign capable of bringing audiences back inside the dirty, brilliant workshop from which the Mogwai were born.

And anyway, Grogu is clearly a gremlin.