By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
Why Watch This Movie With Your Students
Here's what your students naturally take away from the movie, whether through themes, values, ideas, or perspectives.
🐉 A simple set of rules drives the entire plot. Three rules, three violations, one escalating disaster. The structure is easy for students to follow and even easier to analyze afterward.
🎄 It subverts the cozy Christmas movie setup. Kingston Falls looks like a postcard small town at the start. Gremlins uses that familiar, comforting setting to make the chaos that follows land harder.
🏭 It takes aim at consumer culture and human overreach. The shopkeeper's closing warning about what society has done with nature's gifts is the clearest statement of the movie's actual point, delivered after the chaos rather than before it.
😱 It blends horror and comedy in a way students will recognize from modern movies. Gremlins helped establish a tone that mixes real scares with dark humor, a combination that still shows up across horror comedy today.
🎬 It has a well documented place in movie rating history. Gremlins was one of the movies that led the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating, giving students a real world example of how audience reaction can shape industry standards.
👩👦 Its human characters carry real stakes. Billy, his mother, and Kate all have to take direct action against the gremlins rather than waiting to be rescued, giving the movie more than just special effects to hold a student's attention.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Contains fantasy violence including stabbing, decapitation, and characters exploding, played for dark comedic effect rather than realism.
- A science teacher character is killed off screen by a gremlin.
- A brief line references suicide in a joking context.
- Mild language includes one use of a mild profanity.
- No sexual content beyond a single suggestive gremlin gesture and no drug use involving human characters.
📋 A free editable parent permission slip is available for this movie. It explains the educational benefits of watching movies in class and includes a space for parental consent. → Download Free Permission Slip on TpT (Free resource)
Note for educators: Movie details and age ratings in this post are sourced from IMDb, Common Sense Media, and Wikipedia to help ensure accuracy.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
📚 English Language Arts Teachers. The guide's comprehension questions track the plot in chronological order, while the creative writing tasks push students further: a reporter's account of the chaos in Kingston Falls, and a two part profile documenting the Mogwai's transformation into a gremlin. Together they cover factual recall alongside narrative and descriptive writing.
🌐 Social Studies Teachers. Gremlins doubles as a snapshot of 1980s anxieties about consumer culture and unchecked ambition, visible in how quickly the town's adults reach for destruction rather than understanding. The guide does not include dedicated social studies activities, but the comprehension questions give students a structured way to follow the story while a teacher builds discussion around those themes separately.
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons. The guide hands a substitute a ready made session: 30 chronological comprehension questions with answers included, plus two creative writing tasks that need no additional setup. A substitute can run the full lesson without having seen the movie beforehand.
🏠 Homeschool Parents. Gremlins works well as a single student session built around its rules and consequences structure. The comprehension questions and the two creative writing tasks, the reporter account and the Mogwai profile, both work fine for independent completion without needing a group setting.
🌟 Supporting All Learners Movie guides can be a wonderfully calm fit for students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities. The structured format gives every student a clear purpose during viewing, easing uncertainty and allowing them to engage at their own pace. If you teach in a special education or learning support setting, you may find this guide a gentle and practical resource. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 5-page classroom-ready resource.
Part 1: Comprehension Questions
30 questions in chronological order covering the movie from start to finish, with answers included.
Part 2: Creativity
Two writing tasks. Students write as a rookie reporter covering the aftermath in Kingston Falls, then document the Mogwai's profile in its normal state before describing its transformation into a gremlin.
“The students enjoyed the worksheets and creating their drawings of the Gremlins. They are proudly displayed on the walls of the class.”
— Leslie P.
“My students enjoyed filling in the movie guide as they watched. It kept them focused on the movie.”
— Terri S.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
A movie is not a break from learning. It reaches students through sight, sound, and story at once, engaging the brain in ways text alone does not, and the structured work around it is what turns the viewing into a genuine lesson. You can read the research behind this on the Why Movies Work page.
- A Teacher Notes and General Directions page opens the guide with a brief overview of everything inside: what the movie is about, then each part of the guide in order with a short description of what it entails. You know what to expect from the whole resource before you hand out a single page, so you can pick up the guide cold and teach it the same day.
- Answer keys are included for the comprehension question sets, so grading is quick and you are not rewatching the movie to check answers. Some guides also include example answers for the creative and written activities.
- Print and go: classroom ready, with no additional preparation needed. Print one the morning you need it and the lesson is ready.
- Substitute and first-timer friendly. A guide can be handed to a substitute or picked up by a teacher covering the topic for the first time. Nobody running the session needs to have seen the movie.
- Differentiated comprehension sets. Most guides include two or three question sets at different difficulty levels, and most include a multiple-choice option that works well for ESL and ELL students. One class set covers your strongest readers, your strugglers, and your language learners without separate prep.
- Activities that go beyond recall. Each guide includes structured activities that ask students to engage with the movie, not just watch it, ranging from creative and written tasks to discussion and critical thinking questions depending on the guide. That variety matters in a mixed classroom: a student who freezes on a written question set may show real understanding through a drawing or a creative task, and a confident writer gets room to go beyond recall. For the teacher, it turns a movie session into work that can actually be assessed: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
