Dante’s first choice to bring the Gremlins to life was make-up/creature VFX maestro and his “The Howling” collaborator Rob Bottin, who’d just scored a gory, gooey coup via his wild creations for John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Alas, Ridley Scott had poached Bottin for “Legend,” so Dante turned to his “Piranha” make-up artist Chris Walas.
Walas had just done phenomenal work on Matthew Robbins’ “Dragonslayer,” and, like most of that post-“Star Wars” group of f/x wizards, seemed like a behind-the-scenes miracle worker. And he was! But he was also a practical man aware of the budget Dante had been given. $11 million wasn’t chump change in 1983, but it wasn’t anywhere in the ballpark of what they’d need to bring the Gremlins to life as Dante envisioned them.
While Walas was thrilled at the prospect of getting to create all kinds of nasty looking creatures, he had to wave Dante off his preferred method of moving them around. As Walas told The Ringer in a 40th anniversary oral history for the 1984 classic:
“Joe wanted to do everything stop-motion at first because he’s a huge stop-motion fan, which I am as well, but I’m just like, ‘Joe, do you understand how much stop-motion you’re talking about?’ And he did. He understood.”
So, Dante did what anyone else would do in this situation: he decided to put monkeys in Gremlin suits.
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