Warner Bros. executives stole the Gremlins 2 audience for this hilarious interactive experience

To state the obvious up front: cult film legend Joe Dante’s 1990 monster comedy, “Gremlins 2: The New Batch,” is one of the best films ever made. On a simple slapstick level, “Gremlins 2” is already sublime, and we can also be impressed by its technical prowess; it contains some of the best practical monster effects in cinema history. But more than that, “Gremlins 2” is a deconstruction of cinema itself, a film about the agents of chaos that can reach the very art of cinema. The term “gremlins” was popularized during World War II as a colloquial means of explaining inexplicable technical problems in aircraft. If an engine was broken, a gremlin would sneak in and break it.

For “Gremlins 2,” Dante imagined the machinery sabotaging World War II-era imps like movie invaders. What if the Gremlins united to destroy the cinema itself? They are punk-like Godardian agents of deconstruction. They use 35mm film to assassinate film critic Leonard Maltin while he was reviewing the first “Gremlins.” The film is a brilliant work. Also, he has a spider gremlin.

The best example of the film’s deconstructionist tendencies comes from a sequence midway through the film in which Dante stages a false film break. The image shudders for a moment, then burns. It appears that the theater’s projector failed in real time. But then gremlins appear on the screen in silhouette, as if they were in the projection booth, after having torn up the copy of the film. “Gremlins 2” destroyed “Gremlins 2”.

In a 2020 oral history published by Consequence, Dante revealed that he wanted to take the projection booth sequence even further. He had a practical idea, inspired by William Castle, to include physical gremlins in the theater.

William Castle is one of Dante’s favorite filmmakers, as evidenced in Dante’s 1993 film “Matinee,” a film about a Castle-like filmmaker. Castle was known for his gimmicks in cinema, often hiring actors to scream during his films or equipping cinemas with pulley systems to animate living skeletons during screenings. Dante felt that the projection booth sequence in “Gremlins 2” would have been improved with the insertion of real-world gremlins into the windows of movie theater projection booths. As he described his desired gadget:

“My original idea, which the studio didn’t pursue, was that I thought if the audience thought the Gremlins were in the spotlight, then they would turn around and look into the projection booth. And then I thought if you had cardboard cut-outs on springs that you could put in the window, then they could turn around and see the Gremlins in their projection booth. I thought that was a great idea, but the studio just didn’t want to worry about it.”

This sounds like a lot of fun, although putting together cardboard cutouts would require a lot of logistics and organization on the part of movie theater staff members, which is a whole new set of headaches. Additionally, it would be expensive to make gremlin cutouts the right size for all theaters; Not all projection booth windows are the same size.

Eventually, Dante got his wish. In 2025, at a screening of “Gremlins 2” at Vidiots in Los Angeles, California, the projectionists were given rubber gremlins to play puppeteer during the projection booth sequence, and it played like gangbusters. Footage from the live event can be seen on the Vidiots Instagram account. In 1990, this was not practical. In 2025, it’s genius.