Horror has always helped us establish the boundaries of acceptability by giving a name and shape to what transgresses them. Much of what constitutes horror stems from childhood, a time when boundaries and ideas of transgression are first being set.

Children can often encounter the world as a frightening place, full of unseen, mysterious powers. Any child who has been told that the monsters under the bed aren’t real knows just how little that reassurance helps their very real sense of fear.

Read more: Scary stories for kids: Watership Down made me aware of my mortality at age four

It is the adult attitude to monsters that is harder to understand. As a society, we largely no longer believe in sprites and demons. However, we still fear the possible bad influence they could have on children’s minds. The 1984 film Gremlins is a good example of this.

Gremlins is about a young man who receives a new pet for Christmas. Billy’s father hasn’t bought him a cat or a dog but a cute little creature known as a mogwai, which he procured from a mysterious seller in Chinatown. Billy, who names the mogwai Gizmo, just has to follow three essential rules: do not expose him to light, he must be kept away from water, and, most important of all, he must never be fed after midnight.

This article is part of a series of expert recommendations of spooky stories – on screen and in print – for brave young souls. From the surprisingly dark depths of Watership Down to Tim Burton’s delightfully eerie kid-friendly films, there’s a whole haunted world out there just waiting for kids to explore. Dare to dive in here.

Gizmo is cute. He has big round eyes and chubby cheeks and a bashful smile that looks up expectantly at Billy, as if Billy is the centre of his universe. He babbles but can’t speak, snuggles softly and plays. Gizmo is, in other words, a representation of a child.

Billy spills water on Gizmo and finds out that this breeds a litter of littler mogwais. The more rambunctious of the new litter, Stripe, manages to trick Billy into feeding them after midnight, at which point they form into cocoons and then hatch into gremlins.

Gremlins are violent, sadistic, destructive pleasure-seekers, and their principle pleasure is mayhem. They have teeth and claws and scaly skin, and eyes that look with gleeful hatred at those who get in their way. Gremlins are, in other ways, also a representation of a child.

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud discussed the roots of the uncanny in the familiar, something that is altered just enough to become horrific. A pet, a toy, a bedroom at night, a child, have a comforting familiarity. But they are also classic sources of terror.

We are not scared of that which is different from us; we are scared of what is close to us – something that we thought was familiar, that is suddenly made strange.

What could be more familiar and yet more strange than a child? At once, both an idealised figure of helpless innocence and an unrelenting force of energetic indiscipline, a child is the most deeply human and the most deeply alien of creatures.

The Gremlins destroy Billy’s house, swing from the lampshades and take his mother hostage, all with the television constantly on. The scenario is surely familiar to many a parent, even more so given that the film takes place at Christmas.

Through various ever more ingenious methods – you may never look at a food blender the same way again – Billy, his mother, and his co-worker Kate (who is traumatised by Christmas after her father broke his neck trying to descend a chimney), manage to kill the gremlins off. The owner of the Chinatown emporium comes back to reclaim the mogwai (the word is Chinese for “evil spirit”), but not before chiding the family, and westerners in general, for their inability to take care of nature.

The film suggests that various rules have been transgressed. Our crazed desire to accumulate ever more things is done without thinking of the consequences. The films also poses the question about the limits of knowledge.

When Billy takes his new pet to school his teacher wants to experiment on it, a Gothic figure of the amoral scientist that goes back at least to Frankenstein. At the same time, the gremlins rampaging around the American suburb clearly reference moral panics over immigrants.

The discovery of the mogwai in Chinatown draws on a long tradition of orientalist fantasies of a magical, exotic but dangerous East, grafted onto a more modern association of east Asia with cheaply manufactured consumer goods.

The violence of Gremlins led American theatres to introduce a special PG-13 certificate. Here in the UK, I saw it in the cinema, aged five. I am not sure it was the children’s film my mother expected when she got me a ticket. But I loved it – and I think your kids will love it too.

Gremlins is suitable for children aged 13+

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Louis Bayman, University of Southampton

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Louis Bayman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.