Why Leprechaun Still Endures 32 Years Later

Every St. Patrick’s Day, he returns, green hat perched on his head, mischievous smile in place, looking for gold or a wife or just to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting populace. It’s been more than three decades, and still the title character (Warwick Davis) of the Leprechaun franchise can’t help but be a fixture of March viewing for horror fans everywhere. Not bad for a little creature inspired by a Lucky Charms cereal box starring in a film made for less than $1 million.

But how did the Leprechaun get here? In the years since his debut, the 1993 original Leprechaun film (now streaming on SYFY) has continued to gain fans, while devotees have also flocked to its sequels, and producers have even delivered a reboot of the character in recent years. The Leprechaun is a full-blown pop culture icon, so let’s take a closer look at how it all began, and why we keep returning to that original film all these years later.

Why Leprechaun endures

One of the most endearing qualities of horror fans is our collective willingness to give just about anything a try. There’s an element of daring to this kind of fandom, a sense that you’re testing yourself with the more extreme films, but also a sense that you just want to see how the horror in any given story works, or doesn’t work, as the case may be. We want to see exactly how scary you can make something, and that adventurous spirit is part of what drives the continued fascination with Leprechaun. Like a lot of low-budget horror films, it’s a concept that perhaps shouldn’t work as a feature film, stretched out to become one anyway, and our curiosity as a fandom keeps us coming to this film because we want to see if, and how, it all comes together.

But that’s just the very basic allure that comes with any novelty or gimmick-driven horror film, so let’s take a moment and dig a little deeper. When it was released in theaters in 1993, Leprechaun earned more than eight times its small budget at the box office, and quickly inspired a sequel, 1994’s Leprechaun 2. You can see the low budget in the film itself, because Leprechaun largely unfolds in a single location, a farmhouse in the country that just happens to be the hiding place of the title character’s pot of gold. It’s a stripped down film, but the key to its appeal is, perhaps, in what it evokes.

Leprechaun came at a time when two different, but aesthetically linked, kinds of films had just finished leaving a massive pop culture mark on the 1980s. In the horror world, the decade was a time for creepy little creatures to torment and murder humans, from Chucky in the Child’s Play films to Gremlins to Critters to Ghoulies. Driven by practical effects and fun, memorable creature design, these films terrified audiences while also retaining a certain darkly comic undertone (or overtone, depending on which installment we’re talking about), and made the creatures in the closet or under the bed into something tangible and unforgettable. In the fantasy world, the 1980s gave us adventures like The Neverending Story, Labyrinth, Legend, and more, all of which delivered their own memorable, and practical, creature designs and focused on building tangible, often frightening, worlds of their own. 

Leprechaun‘s legacy today

Even today, setting aside the nostalgic appeal of these films, there’s something special about them, a sense of honest, organic danger bubbling around the adventure and the made-up movie monsters. Leprechaun, with its focus on the title character and the design of Davis’ creepy makeup, evokes that same feeling, building on the previous decade of moviemaking to essentially transplant a fantasy villain into a contemporary American setting. The focus of the film is, of course, limited to a handful of characters and a couple of locations, but that doesn’t matter. The appeal of the mash-up is there from the beginning.

Then there’s the B-movie appeal of the whole thing, driven by Davis and his witty, impossibly energetic performance as the Leprechaun. Living up to the very premise that he’s a fantasy creature come to life to seek vengeance as he tries to recover his gold, he seems to float over the whole movie, fully and fiercely committed to the premise, having a ball with the whole thing. The key to Leprechaun‘s comedy tones is not that it’s making fun of itself. It’s that Davis is having his own kind of fun in pursuit of villainy, and the rest of the film falls in line behind him. His performance reshapes the whole thing in a very entertaining way. 

There are, of course, other reasons why people keep watching Leprechaun. Much of its horror takes place in broad daylight, so it’s a little more palatable for new and timid fans; it’s an early starring role for Jennifer Aniston; and so on. But the film’s ability to harness its star to such an entertaining degree, and the focus on the practical even with a low budget, are the real keys to what makes the film shine like gold all these years later. It’s a film that makes excellent use of what it has, and while it might not go down in history as a masterpiece, it remains a very pleasant way to pass a couple of hours around St. Patrick’s Day.

Leprechaun is now streaming on the SYFY Movies Hub.