Editorials
Celebrating ‘Ghoulies’ and Its Surprising Queerness at 35
Low budget creature feature Ghoulies is many things to many people: a crass and brazen rip-off of Gremlins, a second-tier franchise from prolific schlock producer/director Charles Band, and a mid-80s guilty pleasure that brings to mind popular children’s toy Boglins.
Revisiting the film for its 35th anniversary, Ghoulies is all of this and so much more. As Meagan discussed in her It Came From The 80s column, this is a franchise that lured prospective horror audiences in with its ridiculous cover art of a little green monster, dripping ooze, as it pops out of a toilet (the image was not even originally in the film and was added following reshoots). What audiences may not remember is that the goopy puppets barely even appear in the film, and they’re not even the main antagonists!
Ghoulies is actually about a cult headed by Malcolm Graves (Michael Des Barres), who opens the film attempting to sacrifice his son during a satanic ritual. When its mother protects it with a magical amulet, the child is saved and both parents die. 21 years later, the boy – Jonathan (Peter Liapis, aged 35 at the time of filming) – inherits the family’s palatial estate and slowly succumbs to his late father’s demonic influence. Much of the film focuses on Jonathan’s disintegrating relationship with girlfriend Rebecca (Lisa Pelikan), whom he ultimately resorts to controlling using his newfound powers. The entire last act is dedicated to an out of control dinner party wherein Jonathan and Rebecca’s friends are slaughtered by the Ghoulies in order to resurrect Malcolm, who is revealed to be the mastermind behind Jonathan’s obsession.
In many ways, Ghoulies is an unsuccessful film. The script from Jefery Levy, co-written by director Luca Bercovici, is filled with unusual narrative choices: voice over from Jonathan’s secret guardian Wolfgang (Jack Nance) that only appears at the beginning and end of the film, random appearances from bickering dwarves in medieval armour, and the early introduction of a half dozen of Jonathan and Rebecca’s friends before they are sidelined for 2/3 of the runtime.
Despite all of these issues, the film is eminently watchable. The creature design of the ghoulies – most of which have their own distinct visual aesthetic – is equal parts cute and gross. Accusations of stealing from Gremlins are unwarranted since the two films were in production at the same time (Ghoulies’ exhibition was delayed due to Band’s financial issues, which allowed the Joe Dante film to be released first). The reality is that Ghoulies is much more liberally stealing from 1982’s Poltergeist with its killer clown sequence.
What makes the film fascinating is its prescient underlying elements. Yes, the film is a lowbrow riff on escalating fears of satanism in the 80s, but it also features a significant amount of relationship abuse and, surprisingly enough, a healthy dose of not-so-subtle queerness.
The whole film is secretly predicated upon Malcolm gaslighting his son, Jonathan. Initially the College student is presented as a decent guy with an affection for his girlfriend and friends, but over the course of the film he becomes increasingly worse as he is corrupted by his father’s spell book. Rebecca gets the worst of it: initially Jonathan forgets her, then he begins to ignore her. The couple breaks up when he initiates sex in order to impregnate her with his own demon heir and, although he attempts to protect her with his mother’s amulet, he and the dwarves eventually hypnotize her to be his servant.
Alas Ghoulies doesn’t satisfactorily address these issues and the resolution is too simplistic and pat. Jonathan and Rebecca naturally wind up back together and Jonathan’s complicity is waved away because he was under the influence and not himself. Still, until the film’s overly cheerful ending, Ghoulies clearly empathizes with Rebecca and paints Jonathan as a toxic, entitled asshole whose desire for power literally kills every healthy relationship in his life.
One of the film’s relationships is between Jonathan’s friends Mike (Scott Thomson), whose defining trait is that he always wears sunglasses, and pretty boy Eddie (David Dayan). The pair are constantly at each other’s side, such that they rarely appear in a scene alone (except to die). Eddie, in particular, is very hands-on with Mike, touching and jumping on his “friend” regularly. The most telling sign that this is, in fact, a queer relationship occurs in the last act: all of the partygoers naturally brand off into couples, including Mark (Ralph Seymour) and Donna (Mariska Hargitay!), Dick (Keith Joe Dick) and Robin (Charlene Cathleen)…and Eddie and Mike.
This pairing, as the boys laugh and smoke a joint while intimately leaning against each other, is visually and narratively coded as a relationship on par with the heterosexual coupling of the other friends. Throw in the iconic scene where meathead Dick is lured into a deep kiss by Malcolm (in disguise as a seductive topless woman) and Ghoulies winds up being surprisingly queer.
Naturally the film doesn’t dig into any of the emotional fall-out of these events and even suggesting that Levy and Bercovici considered these issues when writing the screenplay is probably giving Ghoulies too much credit. Still, it is intriguing that all of these components found their way into a charming little B movie about demon puppets. Back in 1985, Ghoulies may have seemed like little more than a cheap rip-off of Gremlins, but 35 years later, this bizarre creature feature has a little more substance than viewers might expect.
Plus, you know, a demon in a toilet.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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