The Two Deaths of Roy Hanson

a concession on carnage: Joe Dante’s delicate balance

Introduction

Roy Hanson, played by veteran actor Glynn Turman, teaches biology at Kingston Falls Middle School in Gremlins (1984). When we first meet his class, the students are distracted by an old reel of Hemo the Magnificent (1957), a filmstrip explaining the varying speeds of animal heart rates. The grainy documentary drones on, but Hanson’s attention is elsewhere.

On Hanson’s desk rests something far more unsettling: a box concealing a grotesque, pulsating pod—slick, alien, and unmistakably sinister—where the mogwai Earl had been the night before. For Hanson, the pod represents a scientific enigma worth examining. For the audience, however, it functions as a visual time bomb, a chrysalis not of nature but of horror, poised to rupture and unleash the film’s first true monster.

As the box topples and the students file out, Hanson’s focus shifts entirely to the pod’s ominous presence. What follows heightens the suspense: we hear the newly hatched gremlin burst free and scurry across the classroom, while Jerry Goldsmith’s score swells in the background, its sharp cues and unsettling rhythms merging seamlessly with the mounting terror.

The death of Roy Hanson represents a pivotal moment in Gremlins, serving as the first on-screen victim of the creatures and signaling the tonal shift from dark comedy into outright horror. Yet the version of this scene that reached audiences was notably softened from its original conception.

In the final cut, Turman’s encounter unfolds with a degree of restraint: he kneels to investigate the noises under his desk, offers the creature a candy bar, and is suddenly attacked off-camera. Much of the violence is implied rather than shown, leaving the specifics to the imagination of the viewer.

In September 2025, The Gremlins Museum acquired Joe Dante’s extensive archive of behind-the-scenes slides from Gremlins. Among these materials were several unique production photographs that vividly document the originally filmed version of Hanson’s death, revealing just how much more graphic the scene was before it was altered for the final cut.

Hanson's battle here was not entirely off-screen; rather, he's captured being actively stabbed with a syringe as he struggles for his life—a far more visceral depiction of the gremlin’s brutality than shown in the restrained theatrical release.

As the scene continues, Billy arrives at the classroom expecting to meet Hanson and examine the gremlin’s cocoon, only to discover his teacher lying dead on the biology lab floor. In the the theatrical release, Hanson is shown with a single syringe in his body. However, in the originally intended sequence, Hanson’s corpse was shown riddled with syringes, a gruesome tableau that suggested the gremlin exacted violent revenge for the earlier blood test Hanson performed on him.

“We previewed the movie with this shot of Glynn Turman lying dead on the floor with several syringes sticking out of his face. Although it was a fabulous preview, there were two controversial items—one was the Santa Claus speech (I won that one) and the other was Mr. Hanson’s demise."

"So it was decided to tone it down via a reshoot with a double, this time with a single syringe protruding from his butt. Having won the Santa argument I felt I had to go along with the reshoot.” (Dante, interview with The Gremlins Museum, October 2025)

According to our copy of the Gremlins shooting script, the sequence was filmed between May 11 and May 13, 1983, on a specially constructed classroom set located on Stage 15 of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California. The scene also called for the gremlin to be eating, but it is not known if that was actually filmed.