Although Critters was released two years after Joe Dante’s Gremlins, director Stephen Herek maintains that the script for the film was originally written by Dominic Muir far before Dante’s film entered production; Gremlins did, however, serve as a catalyst to greenlight Critters: Herek unsuccessfully attempted to sell his project to various studios, but it was only after the release (and considerable success) of Gremlins that New Line Cinema was willing to produce it. Herek thus had to heavily modify Muir’s script in order to significantly decrease the similarities between the two stories.

Read the rest of this entry →