“I don’t think for a minute we, as filmmakers, pretend they’re anything else other than entertaining popcorn movies,” Davis would say in 2014. “I get tweets daily and they refer to Leprechaun. It’s amazing. The Leprechaun films are cheesy, they’re low-budget, but they have a serious following.”

As he says, Leprechaun and its sequels will never be mistaken for classic cinema. The first instalment is nonetheless a fascinating piece of early Nineties pop culture – a sort of Godfather Part I of Celtic-themed camp horror. And not just because it features a scene in which Davis’s Leprechaun pushes an elderly lady down a stairs or chases a screaming  woman around a hospital. 

Screams and crunching limbs are, without question, part of the appeal. However, Leprechaun also represented a landmark in the lives of three people – Davis, its director Mark Jones, and its female lead, an obscure young actress with amazing hair named Jennifer Aniston. 

Davis would go on to a hugely successful career, appearing in the Harry Potter series and in Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short. Back in in 1991, Leprechaun was a chance to demonstrate that he could still carry a film. And to distract himself from the heartache of the death of Lloyd. 

“I didn’t have any work for quite a while,” he said in 2014. “It started to dawn on me that perhaps my good fortune of the Eighties was drying up and I would have to look for a proper job. Then the script arrived and after a couple of pages I was like, ‘I want to do this’.”

If Davis was trying put his life in cinema back on track, Jones was attempting to get his off the ground. He’d got into show business writing for the A-Team in the Eighties. His dream, though, was to direct features. The best way to break into cinema, he decided, was via low-budget horror. One day at breakfast a lightbulb went off as he munched his favourite cereal. “The Lucky Charms commercials had the cute little leprechaun advertising cereal,” he said. “I said, ‘We could turn this into something evil.’”

Creating a Leprechaun-based horror franchise from scratch would be impossible in 2022. In the late Eighties, however, “cutesy” horror was all the rage, with hits such as Critters and Child’s Play (with Chucky) enjoying huge success, especially on video. If a psychopathic doll such as Chucky could become a star, why not one of the “Little People” from Irish myth?