Leprechaun (1993) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 25

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They’re always after me lucky charms!

A week of film anniversaries continues with the 30th Anniversary of Leprechaun, a little film that struck gold. This horror film created a new franchise for fans while sending one of its actors into super stardom.

Before Viewing

This high concept trailer has a demonic leprechaun being shipped in a crate to North Dakota. It merges elements of popular slasher and horror films, like The Evil Dead or Critters, with a group of young people having to avoid a midget monster. Oh and Jennifer Aniston is in this as well. This looks scarier than Troll the other week, so let’s see if we get lucky with Leprechaun.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

Dan O’Grady ( Shay Duffin) returns to his house in North Dakota one evening in a limousine, drunk. His wife (Pamela Mant) berates him for spending money they don’t have. He shows her that he has a whole bag of gold coins which he stole from a leprechaun. Mrs. O’Grady falls down the stairs, pushed by the Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) who has come to collect its gold. O’Grady pulls out a four-leaf clover which scares the creature, allowing him to shoot it and nail it into a box before O’Grady collapses of a heart attack.

Ten years later, JD Reding (John Sanderford) and his overprivileged teenage daughter Tory (Jenifer Aniston) arrive at the O’Grady farm, having rented it for the summer. Tory meets three guys working on painting the house: hunky Nathan (Ken Olandt), feeble-minded Ozzie (Mark Holton), and 11 year old Alex (Robert Hy Gorman). While working, Ozzie hears something singing in the crate. He accidentally knocks the withered four-leaf clover off the top and the Leprechaun escapes.

Ozzie and Alex wander the property and find a bag of gold coins in a beat-up old pickup. Ozzie accidentally swallows one while trying to test it, by biting the coin. Something scratches Tory’s leg by the house. When JD investigates, thinking it’s a cat, his hand is bitten. The group takes him into town to the emergency room. Nathan and Tory wait in the diner while Ozzie and Alex get the coin appraised at a collector’s shop. The Leprechaun follows them and kills the owner of the antique store (John Voldstad) to get its coin back.

On the way back to the farm, the Leprechaun is stopped (because it’s driving a toy car on the highway) by Deputy Tripet (David Permenter), who it kills. The diminutive being breaks into the O’Grady house looking for its gold, but is distracted by some shoes which it must stop and polish. That night after the kids have all returned to the house, Nathan investigates something they saw, but is injured in a bear trap. The Leprechaun attacks them, so they fend it off and shoot it with a shotgun.

Realizing it’s after the gold, Tory retrieves the hidden bag from the well. But when the Leprechaun counts it he notices one piece is missing and thinks the kids are trying to trick it. The Leprechaun attacks them, and Ozzie realizes it’s coming for the piece that he swallowed. Ozzie mentions that Mr O’Grady, who’s in a nearby nursing home, may know how to stop the creature, so Tory drives across town to ask.

The Leprechaun gets there before she does and grievously injures the older man, but not before he can tell her about four-leaf clovers. Returning to the house, they find a single four-leaf clover in a patch near the well. Alex fires a wad of gum containing the clover using his slingshot into the Leprechaun’s mouth allowing Nathan to shoot it with the shotgun. It falls into the well, apparently dead. But moments later its skeletal body begins to climb out. Nathan pours gasoline in the well blowing up the Leprechaun. The group huddles together as the sun rises and the police show up.

“Look on the bright side, Tory. The worst is over.” – Nathan

Originally, Leprechaun was placed in this year’s 31 Days of Horror to serve as a compare-and-contrast film to Troll, which was reviewed over a week ago. If you go read that article, you’ll understand why I scrapped that idea. In short, Troll was less of a horror film than anticipated. So, here sits Leprechaun as the undisputed champion of magical fantasy creature horror films, at least for now. This was the first directorial film for Mark Jones, who had been a television writer since the mid-70s, working on shows like The A-Team, Riptide, and Superboy. He was reportedly inspired by (unsurprisingly) the Lucky Charms’ breakfast mascot and the sci-fi horror movie Critters, which was a not-too-scary film about a family at a remote ranch house threatened by small alien creatures.

Knowing that an inspiration for this film was Critters explains a lot about the plot and the pacing. Leprechaun, which was rated R, seems like it could be more of a PG-13 film, like Critters. The horror is superficial and the gorier scenes could easily be cut, toning the violence down without losing anything in the way of the story. The characters are all lighter in tone than a more traditional horror film. In fact, none of the main characters are killed in the film. Everyone, except the youngest, Alex, gets some kind of injury. Both films take place at an out-of-the-way farm where the characters have to improvise against the forces that attack them. Police officers that come to investigate are both killed by the antagonists, and the creatures in both films are vanquished just before dawn. Only Leprechaun has a more engaging and potentially scarier villain.

It seems obvious that another inspiration for Leprechaun, at least with Warwick Davis’ character, was Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. By the time Leprechaun was released, Freddy’s film series had run its course, with the seventh film, Wes Craven’s A New Nightmare, getting released two years earlier, leaving room for a new character to take over his schtick. Davis’ portrayal of the Irish imp seemed to take a number of cues from these other films. While this film started off as scarier, only showing the Leprechaun in shadow and hinting vaguely about its power, the remainder of the film had things getting goofier. Whether it’s making a joke about killing one of the characters, or rollerblading so fast down a hill he leaves a Leprechaun-shaped cutout in a fence he crashes into, this character had a sense of humor and style that is meta, and similar enough to Freddy Krueger to be popular. In fact, Warwick Davis would return as the Leprechaun for five out of the film’s seven sequels.

Warwick Davis was already known to sci-fi genre fans as Wicket the Ewok from Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and its Ewok spinoff movies. But his big, and unmasked, breakthrough came with 1988s fantasy film Willow, where he played the titular character. Leprechaun marked his return to a new franchise after five years. He would continue to appear in Star Wars related films, as well as make appearances in all of the Harry Potter films. All of the other actors had some layer of recognition to them as well. Ken Olandt was a constant actor on popular television series of the time, with his biggest hits being the films Summer School and April Fool’s Day. Mark Holton often played comedic sidekick characters as seen in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure or Teen Wolf and its sequel. Robert Gorman made an impression the previous year as the younger brother in Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead. But the obvious star of the film was Jenifer Aniston.

Aniston had been acting for a few years, having appeared in guest spots on television shows, and being in a couple of series that didn’t last more than a season. Leprechaun was her first film role, and one that she has often ignored and rejected as embarrassing. She would become famous for her role as Rachel Green on the sitcom Friends in the following year. A role she would play for ten years. Her performance here is a definite highlight, given the material. Her character Tory seems to have been written as a counterpoint to the Leprechaun character. Both characters are materialistic, as Tory complains about being “not in L.A.” for the whole summer and she tries to pay Nathan money when she bumps into him. She seems very much like a spoiled princess. The Leprechaun too has a strong attraction to his money as it is the thing that drives him throughout the film. However he does kill at least one person that does not have any of his gold, the police deputy. And later he follows Tory to the rest home when Ozzie, and his gold coin, are at the farm house. Either way, he can’t let go of the need to possess his gold, while Tory eventually learns to “believe” in the magic around her as she finds the four-leaf clover. It’s trite, but at least it’s something for the character’s arc.

Leprechaun proved to be a big hit, and a new franchise was born. As of this writing there have been seven sequels, between 1994 and 2018, of which Warwick Davis played the Leprechaun in the first five: Leprechaun 2, Leprechaun 3, Leprechaun 4: In Space (possibly aping Jason X), Leprechaun in the Hood, and Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood. There was also Leprechaun: Origins and Leprechaun Returns, which ignored all other sequels and focused on Tory’s daughter 25 years after the events of the first film. For such a prolific series, only the first two Warwick Davis films were released theatrically, with the rest heading straight for video. Origins received a limited theatrical release with Returns getting released via the Syfy Channel. Leprechaun is not the scariest film being viewed this month, but it provides a nice change of pace to the assorted slasher films and psychological dramas. It definitely has left its mark in the world and reigns supreme as the scariest film about a small fairy tale creature.

Assorted Musings

• The film addresses a number of the myths about leprechauns including finding their gold at the end of a rainbow and their past as cobblers. In one of the more humorous moments, the antagonists toss shoes towards the Leprechaun in order to distract it. His OCD required that he polish each shoe he came across.
• When searching the cabin for his gold, the Leprechaun finds a box of “Lucky Clovers” cereal, an obvious nod to Lucky Charms.
• This may be the first horror film which includes a cell phone. After the power and phone to the farm house are cut, Tory makes a call to the police on her flip phone, before it runs out of battery.
• Tory channels Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner from Terminator 2: Judgment Day in one scene where she cocks a shotgun menacingly.