Common Sense Media Review
By Jose Solis
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
Demonic gore, kids in peril, slurs in '80s creature horror.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 12+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Watch
Videos and Photos
The Gate
Parent and Kid Reviews
What's the Story?
THE GATE opens with workers hauling a dead tree out of the backyard of 12-year-old Glen (Stephen Dorff), which leaves a hole in the ground and a geode nobody expected. His parents go away for the weekend and put his teenage sister Al (Christa Denton) in charge, so she fills the house with friends. Glen and his best friend Terry (Louis Tripp) crack the geode open and read the words inside out loud, and the hole in the yard turns out to be a gate. Demons start coming through it. The kids have the house to themselves and nobody who will believe them, so they have to work out how to shut it before whatever waits on the other side gets all the way out.
Is It Any Good?
Stop-motion demons and a noble kid hero make this an ideal first horror movie despite a dated look. The Gate gets its power from the effects, where Randall William Cook and his team work in stop-motion and forced perspective to build creatures that hold up decades later. Nothing in the result suggests a small Canadian production. It looks like Hollywood in 1987, which is some trick on this budget. Stephen Dorff plays Glen at 13 and he's adorable, sweet, and worth rooting for from his first scene, a hero for the ages in a film that asks a 12-year-old to save everyone he loves.
Director Tibor Takács knows that nobody listens to kids. Glen ends up on his own, not because his parents neglect him or want him out of the way, but because parents leave sometimes. The trouble a kid finds in an empty house supplies most of the horror. The film runs on the stranger-danger anxiety of its decade, down to the demonic invocation printed inside a heavy metal album, which reads as funny now but played as terrifying then. The images do what '80s horror images did: sending children of any generation into their parents' bed for the night. Mostly it offers simple entertainment for kids, and it delivers that beautifully.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about how The Gate treats grownups. Who do Glen and Terry try to tell, how do the adults respond, and what does the film suggest happens to kids nobody listens to?
Terry tries risky things without weighing them while Glen keeps asking what could go wrong. How does a person tell bravery apart from recklessness, and which one does the film end up rewarding?
Kids in this movie say "retarded" and use a homophobic slur, which passes without comment in 1987. How should a viewer hold a film's casual cruelty alongside the rest of what it does, and what has changed in the decades since?
Movie Details
- On DVD or streaming : January 1, 1987
- Cast : Stephen Dorff , Christa Denton , Louis Tripp , Kelly Rowan
- Director : Tibor Takacs
- Studio : Alliance Films
- Genre : Horror
- Topics : Fantasy ( Ghosts , Monsters ) , Friendship
- Character Strengths : Communication , Courage , Teamwork
- Run time : 85 minutes
- MPAA rating :
- Last updated : October 7, 2026
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