If you has asked any of the main creative forces behind Critters if their film was inspired by the recent success of Joe Dante’s Gremlins, you would get in response an emphatic “no.” “It was certainly not something we were thinking about very much at the time, if at all,” said Rupert Harvey in an interview with Den of Geek.
Despite the fact that both films were horror-comedies about nasty, demonic, pint-sized critters who leave a trail of mayhem and murder in a small town, and Gremlins had cleaned up at the box office just two years before Critters’ premiere, the original screenplay for Critters was written by Domonic Muir a year before Gremlins went into production. “People who say there are similarities are just influenced by the fact Gremlins was such a huge success, but it was a much bigger budget movie,” Harvey clarified in the same interview.
