The Gate (1987) Starring Stephen Dorff, Louis Tripp & Christa Denton Directed by Tibor Takacs Written by Michael Nankin

“There is a passageway...
a gate, behind which the demons wait...
for the chance...
TO TAKE BACK...
WHAT IS THEIRS!”

Revisiting childhood favourites is often a fascinating pastime. There are some that never went away, that everyone remembers and reveres to this day: say, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. There are those you adored at the time, but on revisiting you realise range between mediocre and outright shit: there was once a time I thought Willow and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves were masterpieces. But, sidestepping for now the question of quality, as an adult looking back on what you watched as a kid, you pick up on a hell of a lot of stuff you didn’t at the time. You see things from a different perspective; particularly if, like myself, you’ve become a parent, you have notions about what is and is not appropriate for children.

I touched on this before in my Monster Squad article last month: the eighties were a bit of a weird time for child-oriented movies, and the birth of the PG-13 in many respects only made things weirder. But as much as movies like Gremlins, Critters and of course The Monster Squad may have pushed the envelope for violence and gore in films for the young, they did so with a certain lightness of touch: a cartoonish approach, an emphasis on humour. But there was another ‘kiddie-horror’ movie of that period which had none of that. It confronted the dark side head-on in a very surreal and confrontational fashion. It had dozens of fluttering moths, a dead dog, a zombie in the walls, an army of tiny minions of Hell, one mighty beast from the pit, and not one but two instances of eyeball stabbing.

How in Jupiter’s holy name The Gate got away with a PG-13 I will never know.

Our hero is Glen – played, in his first movie role, by Stephen Dorff. (No sharp cheekbones or five o’clock shadow here: he’s got regulation child actor bowl-cut hair, a bit of puppy fat, and is almost completely unrecognisable.) When an ancient tree is felled in his garden, he and his best buddy Terry - Louis Tripp, who I’ve never seen in anything else but I understand is in the sequel – discover a large crystal geode in the hole. Presumably hoping to find some trade in the new age market, they go digging in search of more – and find that the ground beneath where the tree had stood is hollow. And that’s when things get a bit weird. Bizarre, occult looking words suddenly appearing on an Etch-A-Sketch. Levitation. And all manner of nightmarish visions come to life...

And all the answers, it seems, are in the liner notes of a European black metal band.

The gateway to hell is opening.

It sounds like a ridiculous premise, and it is. Add to the equation hordes of miniature demons, and you’d be forgiven for expecting another Gremlins/Critters-style little monster-fest. But The Gate stands apart in that it approaches the subject matter entirely seriously. It’s coldly lit, has a truly creepy score, and has no qualms about showing kids in peril and distress. And I suspect the older one gets – again, particularly for parents - the more potential The Gate has to disturb. Just imagine, for real, that the fate of mankind was in the hands of a couple of kids: that two twelve year old boys and an almost-sixteen year old big sister were the only thing standing between the world of the living, and the hordes of darkness, and that no one was coming to help them. It’s pretty far from a funny thought.

Those who haven’t seen the film, be warned that I’ll be getting into spoilers now...

A recurring theme in The Gate is that of children in mortal danger, without even the protection of their parents. Glen’s parents are away for the weekend, leaving his sister Al (Christa Denton) in charge. And when the gate begins to open, the forces within want nothing more than to mess with the heads of their young adversaries. First there’s Terry, with his dead mother and absent father, and no true parent but his metal albums. So how to the demons get to him? They show him his mother, calling out to him in angelic form. Naturally the bereaved boy runs to embrace her, only to find she is in fact the dead family dog. Even creepier is the sequence later when, just when things are getting bad, Glen’s parents appear on the doorstep. Again, the son naturally runs to embrace them, only for his father to intone in an atonal voice not his own (several voices, in fact, at several different pitches), “you’ve been bad!” and proceeds to lift Glen by the throat. Defending himself, Glen shoves his fingers into the face of his father, which breaks open, spilling gallons of puss; and as Mom laughs like a wicked witch in the background, Dad’s head falls straight off. (Seriously, Monster Squad’s Dracula roaring at a four year old girl “Give me the amulet you bitch!” was nothing compared to this.)

As my fellow BTZ-er Dustin remarked to me recently: is this a kid’s horror movie, or a horror movie that happens to be about kids?

These evil forces know the minds of the children, and use their own thoughts against them; hence we have the dead workman, a product of Terry’s imagination, bursting out of the wall to get them. And then there are those little demons. You might think that a bunch of monsters of comparable stature to a Ken doll, realised via old-school stop motion animation, would look a bit silly. But The Gate makes it work. There’s never anything remotely cute about them. Their eyes are cold and black, and when they bite they mean business. And they are used to such wonderful nightmarish effect, never more so than when the zombie workman falls forward and on impact with the ground breaks apart into numerous little beasties.

Sadly, there are some points where the film concedes to kid flick convention. Despite the overall bleak tone, a little comic relief is attempted through Al’s bubblehead best friends the Lee sisters. They’re never anything but an irritation, and they’re laden with some of the most inane lines: “Demons? What kind?” Oh-kay... indeed, while the script does have the balls to plunge the kids headfirst into all manner of scariness, it sadly doesn’t go to the trouble of giving them decent dialogue while they’re at it. Schoolboy insults like “suck my nose ‘til my face caves in” threaten to turn things camp. The horrendous eighties fashions don’t help in that regard; with all those day-glo mallrat rags and o-zone shredding hairdos on display, you can’t wait to see the demons blow it all away.

But once the final act kicks in, and the terrified young Glen has to try to defeat an angry god single-handed, it’s no laughing matter. And while sentimentality may slime its way into climax, it’s still a thrilling, chilling spectacle.

Still, I do find it hard to believe that The Gate got made at all, let alone that it got away with a PG-13. (Incidentally, it was quite rightly rated 15 in the UK.) Enough people were up in arms about The Dark Knight’s rating, but even the Joker’s disappearing pencil trick stopped short of actually showing where the pencil went. Thank God for the eighties. Thank God for the days when film makers weren’t so paranoid about protecting kids that they had to digitally remove shotguns and make Greedo shoot first. Yes, surely The Gate is way too intense, dark and graphic for the young. But horror is not about being appropriate. Horror is not about playing nice, clean or safe. It’s precisely the opposite, in point of fact.

And The Gate is a pretty good little horror movie, however young or old you may be.