Today the impish creatures known as gremlins are best known from Joe Dante’s 1984 horror hit Gremlins and its 1990 sequel. Though their origin begins in the deep reaches of Western mythology, they really distinguished themselves during the first half of the 20th century, when they came to represent everything that could and would go wrong with modern technology.
“Gremlins are part of the little people folklore,” says author and folklorist Peter J. Dendle of Penn State Mont Alto. “When a door is open when it should be closed, or you’re missing something that should have been there that you know you placed there, that would’ve been imparted to little people.”
According to Emily Zarka, host of Monstrum on the PBS Storied Channel, and a professor at Arizona State University, these little people, or “fae folk,” were complicated creatures that often evolved with the times and weren’t always bad. “Fairy folk were dangerous, but might help you out, usually with a price,” she says. “In Britain, by the 16th century, fairy lore was everywhere, arguably coming from more of the elf tradition.”
Elves, imps, fairies, whatever form these mischievous characters took, they were long used to explain away the unexplainable and the unfortunate, and were firmly cemented in the cultural dialogue of Western Europe by the early 20th century. Unsurprisingly, with the advent of new technology, the traditional mayhem makers followed us wherever we went. And at that time, we took to the skies.
As aviators navigated new, uncertain technology and an unfamiliar environment, lots of things could and would go wrong. It was perhaps comforting to have a mystical scapegoat take the blame for the myriad disasters that could befall a pilot, especially during wartime.
“The first military airplane was invented in 1909,” Zarka says. “Flying is a really complex process, let alone under the stress of war.… I think that in a lot of ways it might’ve been easier, not even just to explain away the mechanics, but to explain away human error. It would be hard to take responsibility for the death of another pilot in your group.”
The first rumblings of what we now know as the gremlin came from members of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) during World War I. According to the British magazine The Spectator, in 1917 British forces … “detected the existence of a horde of mysterious and malicious spirits whose purpose in life was … to bring about as many as possible of the inexplicable mishaps which … trouble an airman’s life.”