Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television 9780992146337

Table of contents :
Ringing The Changes: Bob Clark’s Black Christmas
By Stephen Thrower

Christmas Shocking: The Silent Night, Deadly Night Controversy
By Michael Gingold

“Protecting (Not Punishing) Billy”: Gilmer McCormick on Silent Night, Deadly Night
By Lee Gambin

Christmas Evil and the Cultural Myth of the Foolkiller
By Florent Christol

An Interview with Christmas Evil director Lewis Jackson
By Amanda Reyes

“They’re Not Working For Santa Anymore”: An Interview with Elves director Jeff Mandel
By Zach Clark

Christmas Campout: a Q&A with Campfire Tales co-director Paul Talbot
By Eric Zaldivar

It’s The Most Cynical Time of the Year: Christmastime in Horror Anthology Television
By Amanda Reyes

Tales From the Crypt‘s “And All Through the House”: An Interview with Screenwriter Fred Dekker
By Kier-La Janisse

Why the Ghost Story at Christmas?
By Derek Johnston

Terror and Transformation: The Enduring Legacy of A Christmas Carol
By Leslie Hatton

Warnings to the Curious: The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas
By Kier-La Janisse

Robin Redbreast and BBC’s Play for Today: 1970s Folk Horror for Christmas
By Diane A. Rogers

A Hammer Film for Christmas: Cash on Demand

By Kim Newman

“Hello, Dave!”: The Joyful Misanthropy of The League Of Gentlemen Christmas Special
By Owen Williams

Our Best Tree Ever: When Experimentalists Tackle Yuletide Terror
By Caelum Vatnsdal

Santa Brought a Syringe: Robert Morin’s Petit Pow! Pow! Noël
By Ralph Elawani

All I Want for Christmas is You: Franck Khalfoun’s P2
By Alexandra West

Silent Night, Holy S*#t: Holy Terror and the Dark Side of the Nativity
By David Canfield

Won’t Someone Think of The Children?
By Andrea Subissati

An Interview with Alain Lalanne, the child hero of René Manzor’s 3615: Code Pere Noël
By Federico Caddeo (translated by Lee Paula Springer)

Santa Vs. Satan: How Santa Conquered Hell and Mars to Create Holiday Horror
By Zack Carlson

Surviving the Yuletide Season: Alcohol, Physical Affliction and Murder Down Under in The Evil Touch
By Andrew Nette

Apocalypse Sinterklaas: Santa Claus’ Horror Roots in European Folklore
By David Bertrand

Horns for the Holidays: The Krampus Conquers North American Horror Films
Paul Corupe

COMPENDIUM
(featuring over 200 Christmas Horror Film and Television reviews)

Citation preview

CHRISTMAS HORROR FILM AND TELEVISION YULETIDE TERROR ON

“A hugely informative compilation of studies of the shadows Christmas brings—a splendid gift for any horror film enthusiast, which will last all year round.” —Ramsey Campbell

For many, Christmas is an annual celebration of goodwill and joy, but for others, it’s a time to curl up on the couch in the dead of winter for a good old fashioned fright. The festive holiday season has always included a more somber side, and scary tales of childstealing demons to ghost stories told ‘round the fireplace go back to pre-Christian celebrations. These long-standing traditions have found modern expression in the Christmas horror film, a unique and sometimes controversial subgenre that cheerfully drives a stake of holly through the heart of cherished Christmas customs. Yuletide Terror delves into the world of festive fright favourites and obscurities, from American Santa Slashers (and the ensuing controversies) to British ghost stories and Eastern European folk horror, providing insight on these subversive film and television presentations that allow viewers to engage ISBN 9780992146337 in different ways with the complicated 90000 > cultural history of the Christmas season. Spectacular Optical is a small press publisher of film and pop 9 780992 146337 culture books based in Canada. www.spectacularoptical.ca $36.95 CAN | $29.95 US

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Spectacular Optical Book Four: YULETIDE TERROR: CHRISTMAS HORROR ON FILM AND TELEVISION First edition published November 2017 Spectacular Optical Publications 53 Delaney Cres. Toronto, Ontario M6K 1P9 Canada www.spectacularoptical.ca Text copyright © 2017 Copyright lies with the individual contributors. The moral rights of the author(s) have been asserted. Editors: Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe Cover and Illustrations: Alisdair Wood Layout: Kier-La Janisse Pre-Press Advisor: Josh Saco Publicist: Kaila Sarah Hier Frontispiece from Tales from the Crypt (1972) Stills and illustrations in this volume are copyright © their respective copyright holders and are reproduced here in the spirit of publicity, with due acknowledgment to the following companies and individuals: Lawrence Gordon Clark, Andrew Tweedie, Cinet, Columbia Tri-Star, Vincent Guastini, CBS Television, BBC, William Cooke, Warner Bros., Amblin Entertainment, Robert Morin, Coop Vidéo de Montréal, Rick Trembles, Michelle Winer, Phantom City Creative, Luca Etter, Steve Wilkie, AF Archive, Matt Nettheim, Marie L. Manzor, Rod Adlercreutz, Momentum Pictures, Marie Zellerland, Storm Vision Entertainment, Bev Rockett, Associated Press, Bill Sellier, Acot Entertainment, Live Entertainment, Anchor Bay, Bernard Fallon, John Perry III, Laurel Entertainment, Bruce McBroom, ITV, John Shannon, Cinema Center Films, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Walt Disney Productions, Trevor Henderson, David Pickthorne, Tom Edwards, Nick West, Myung Jung Kim, Simon Woodcock, Roy Patterson and American International Pictures.

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World Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission from the publisher. Printed in Canada

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Ringing The Changes: Bob Clark’s Black Christmas By Stephen Thrower | Page 6 Christmas Shocking: The Silent Night, Deadly Night Controversy By Michael Gingold | Page 24 Protecting Billy: Gilmer McCormick on Silent Night, Deadly Night By Lee Gambin | Page 40 Christmas Evil and the Cultural Myth of the Foolkiller By Florent Christol | Page 44 You Better Watch Out: An Interview with Christmas Evil director Lewis Jackson By Amanda Reyes | Page 58

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“They’re Not Working For Santa Anymore”: An Interview with Elves director Jeff Mandel By Zach Clark | Page 64 Christmas Campout: a Q&A with Campfire Tales co-director Paul Talbot By Eric Zaldivar | Page 78 It’s The Most Cynical Time of the Year: Christmastime in Horror Anthology Television By Amanda Reyes | Page 84

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Tales From the Crypt‘s “And All Through the House”: An Interview with Screenwriter Fred Dekker By Kier-La Janisse | Page 98 Why the Ghost Story at Christmas? By Derek Johnston | Page 106 Terror and Transformation: The Enduring Legacy of A Christmas Carol By Leslie Hatton | Page 114 Warnings to the Curious: The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas By Kier-La Janisse | Page 136 Robin Redbreast: Folk Horror for Christmas By Diane A. Rodgers | Page 156 A Hammer Film for Christmas: Cash on Demand By Kim Newman | Page 170 “Hello, Dave!”: The Joyful Misanthropy of The League Of Gentlemen Christmas Special By Owen Williams | Page 178 Our Best Tree Ever: When Experimentalists Tackle Yuletide Terror By Caelum Vatnsdal | Page 188 Santa Brought a Syringe: Robert Morin’s Petit Pow! Pow! Noël By Ralph Elawani | Page 200 All I Want for Christmas is You: Franck Khalfoun’s P2 By Alexandra West | Page 210 Silent Night, Holy S*#t: Holy Terror and the Dark Side of the Nativity By Dave Canfield | Page 222 Won’t Someone Think of The Children? By Andrea Subissati | Page 240

Right: Jack Frost (1997). Photo: courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome.

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Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag: An Interview with Alain Lalanne of René Manzor’s 3615: Code Pere Noël By Federico Caddeo and Paul Corupe (translated by Lee Paula Springer) | Page 252 Santa Vs. Satan: How Santa Conquered Hell and Mars to Create Holiday Horror By Zack Carlson | Page 264 Surviving the Yuletide Season: Alcohol, Physical Affliction and Murder Down Under in The Evil Touch By Andrew Nette | Page 274 Apocalypse Sinterklaas: Santa Claus’ Horror Roots in European Folklore By David Bertrand | Page 284 Horns for the Holidays: The Krampus Conquers North American Horror Films Paul Corupe | Page 306 COMPENDIUM | Page 326 CONTRIBUTOR BIOS | Page 460 ADDITIONAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | Page 466

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CHAPTER 1

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he first stone-cold classic of Yuletide horror, Black Christmas (1974) takes place at a college sorority house winding down for the Christmas holidays, subverting “the season to be jolly” and reconfiguring it as the perfect setting for murder. Although not well-reviewed during its initial theatrical release, it has since grown considerably in stature due to its unsettling atmosphere, sardonic humour and numerous genuine shocks. The film is now widely regarded as a classic of the horror genre, and a likely influence on John Carpenter’s pivotal Halloween (1978).

P R OD U CT IO N A N D IN IT IA L R E C E P T I ON When Black Christmas went before the cameras in Toronto, in April 1974, there were no other Canadian horror films currently in production. David Cronenberg’s groundbreaking Shivers was still a year away, and previous flirtations with the genre, such as The Reincarnate (1971) and Cannibal Girls (1973), had already been and gone. Black Christmas’s director Bob Clark was the closest thing Canada had to a “horror auteur” but even that was a bit of a stretch. For a start he wasn’t Canadian, although he became a “landed immigrant” when he moved there in 1972. Furthermore, he viewed horror as a way of getting a foothold in the film industry rather than a life-long vocation. Nevertheless, Clark built up strong professional connections in Canada, and three of his previous credits—Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) and Deathdream (1974), which he directed, and Deranged (1974) which he produced—were horror pictures. (Two primitive earlier projects, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1966, and She-Man: A Story of Fixation (1967), so embarrassed Clark that until the internet made secrecy more difficult he usually omitted them from his filmography.)

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Left: Black Christmas’ first murder victim, Clare (Lynne Griffin) (Photo: Bev Rockett)

Initial press response to Black Christmas was as frosty as the film itself. When U.S. trade paper Variety posted a review from their Canadian correspondent it was little more than a sneer, delivered from the assumed vantage point of “quality cinema”:

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This kill-for-kicks feature exploits unnecessary violence in a university sorority house operated by an implausibly alcoholic ex-hoofer. If it was made to play less discriminating situations, Black Christmas will succeed, but if its aim is to run anywhere else the venture can be marked as a failure … Black Christmas does no one connected with it proud. It has tension, but that of an artificial nature.

Reviews such as this highlight the problems faced by Black Christmas in its homeland. Success in a commercial context (“less discriminating situations”) was not real success, while the very raison d’être of the horror genre—to horrify and/or strike fear in the audience—devalued it a priori in the eyes of the cultural establishment. (Frankly, if the restrained depictions of murder in Black Christmas constitute “unnecessary violence” one has to wonder how the genre was meant to survive at all.) A few weeks later, The Ottawa Journal poured scorn on the cast (“Miss Kidder … dies far too late for my money”; “Miss Hussey stays alive, sort-of. You can’t really tell from her acting”; “The housemother Marian Waldman is a not-sosecret drunk and her performance is embarrassing”) before declaring, “The killings here are for cheap thrills and the variety of the deaths is the only thing to keep your mind from going into neutral for the duration.” Luckily, Canadian filmgoers ignored the bad reviews and flocked to see the film. Figures published by Variety at the end of 1976 showed that Black Christmas was the second highest-grossing domestic picture of the decade to that point (having made $1.6 million in two years), just behind the 1974 hit comedy drama The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (which made $1.8 million over roughly the same period). Evidently those “less discriminating” audiences were now a force to be reckoned with in Canadian cinema...

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Black Christmas first played the United States under an alternative title, Silent Night, Evil Night. Slipped onto the circuit in May 1975, with little fanfare from distributors Warner Bros., it received few reviews and little enthusiasm (“The movie was shot in Canada where its film industry is depressed artistically and commercially: Silent Night, Evil Night demonstrates why,” sniffed the Syracuse Herald-Journal). Re-released in August as Black Christmas, however, it found a wider audience, and fair though unspectacular box-office takings. The reviews were still hostile, but at least this time Warner Bros gave some thought as to how to sell the film. Realizing that one of the film’s strongest elements was the

obscene caller and his terrifying rants, a phone line was advertised for curious filmgoers to ring. Variety explained what happened next, under the priceless headline “Weirdo Response Ties Up Phones At Warners”:

“

To hype the opening of Black Christmas in New York last Friday (10th) Warner Brothers pulled a vintage ballyhoo stunt out of the vaults and wound up overwhelmed by the response. Stunt involved the listing of a phone number for the public to call and get a “weird” message plugging the horror exploitation pic. Ploy had been used in conjunction with out-of-town dates on the pic, but the N.Y. response was far beyond expectation. Some 7,000 calls came in on Wednesday night (15th) and an additional 3,700 Thursday morning, tying up the entire WB exchange and making incoming and outgoing calls virtually impossible. Situation was so confused that the N.Y. Telephone Co. asked Warners to stop running the promotion on Thursday (16th) and the distributor complied. Warners also cancelled plans to send two girls dressed in Santa Claus outfits out on the streets of Manhattan to distribute 50,000 cards bearing the phone number.

Above Top: Olivia Hussey on a Black Christmas lobby card Above Right: The notorious ‘phone number’ ad as depicted in the press kit

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“HO HO HO S H IT ” Black Christmas is often lumped in with the slasher genre, and to an extent that’s fair enough, but what’s striking when you watch the film is how different it really is. For a start, the murder of the first victim, Clare, sets off immediate alarm bells with her friends and family; within the first half-hour of the film they’ve been to the police station to report her disappearance. This is not the sort of slasher film where multiple characters get murdered without anyone suspecting foul play or bothering to raise the alarm (although, to be fair to the original Friday the 13th (1980), it provided more plausible explanations than many of its successors). Secondly, although the film is set in an allgirl sorority house, there’s no nudity whatsoever. No lingering camera observes the girls stripping off in their bedrooms, no point-of-view shots spy on them in the shower. Sex as a physical presence is off the menu, diverted instead into lewd dialogue, and of course the twisted verbal excesses of the obscene phone-caller.

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By 1974, the horror genre’s “new wave,” initiated by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), had updated the genre and placed Above: Alcoholic sorority mother Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman) (Photo: Bev Rockett)

it firmly in everyday settings and contemporary life. Compared to Romero’s grisly zombie opus, Black Christmas was the soul of restraint, but that wasn’t the issue for American reviewers. Instead they zoomed in on a different transgression: profane language. Among the ten contemporary American reviews I’ve seen, eight refer disapprovingly to the film’s frequent swearing. “From the standpoint of coarse language, Black Christmas deserves its R rating and then some. Every gutter expression is used constantly, and hits the ear as all the more offensive because uttered by beautiful, educated, and supposedly refined ladies who should be above its use,” opined the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Unfortunately, the makers of this film, like kids entering adolescence, seem to think that dirty words are terribly funny,” chimed The Albuquerque Journal. “We expect obscenity from an obscene phone caller, but what’s the point of the housemother’s four-letter language?” complained the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The first of these quotes perfectly expresses the reason for all this critical prissiness. Never mind that the obscene phone caller uses the word “cunt” seven times in one minute; the girls are using bad language! Such was the impact of modern horror in the 1970s, as the genre turned away from the foggy reaches of the Carpathians towards the modern-day streets of Anytown North America. With this new emphasis on real life came facets which critics were simply not accustomed to finding in the horror genre. Girls were meant to scream as they were menaced, not swear like a Brooklyn cabby. In an interview published posthumously in Fangoria shortly after Clark’s death in 2007, the director expressed his views on the topic:

“

We’re talking about college students, boys and girls, and one of my main objectives was to show how sexual girls were, how often they used the “f” word, because people simply hadn’t done it yet: they were still doing Beach Blanket Bikini [sic]… Black Christmas was [my] first opportunity to show a college milieu and have the characters act like real people.

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As befits a chiller set during the run-up to Christmas, Black Christmas is a “cold” film, artfully so, in which the approach to characterization matches the iciness of the winter setting (in comparison, Halloween is as warmly creepy as the orange glow of a jack-o’-lantern). This frostiness is not simply a matter of visible breath and ice on the windows, it’s something that creeps into the marrow of the receptive viewer through a process of association and suggestion. Clark (via scriptwriter Roy Moore) develops the idea of coldness with clever stylistic decisions utilizing a range of resources: from sound mix and mise-en-scène to the traits and attitudes of the lead characters.

The film begins with an exterior shot of a large gabled house at night. Through the window we see a party taking place indoors; Christmas carols can be heard emanating from within. The presence of a “Pi-Kappa-Epsilon” sign by the door tips us off that this is a college sorority house. A young woman seen in long shot enters the building through the front door, but instead of joining the revels indoors we (and our proxy the camera) stay outside. The camera wanders around the exterior of the building, its wide-angle lens adding eeriness to the images of stone walls, garden balustrades, wintry bushes and window ledges. On the soundtrack is a low rumbling sound which straddles the divide between environmental sound effect and music (is it distant traffic or electronic music?), before the addition of more tonal synth effects signals that this is indeed music. (Further strangeness is added when the voices singing “Jingle Bells” slide into eerie modernist glissandos redolent of György Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna”). The presence of a silhouetted human head in some shots reveals that we’re seeing the house through the eyes of an unknown person spying on it, at which point we cut to the first indoor shot, with a young woman (Barbara, played by Margot Kidder) closing the front door which was left slightly

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Above: Andrea Martin, Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder in a Black Christmas publicity still (Photo: Bev Rockett)

ajar by the new arrival. Her first line of dialogue cues up the insecurity that we’ll feel throughout the movie—“Hey, who left the goddamn door open?”—before we cut back to the exterior, where the shadowy observer (still represented by a subjective camera) climbs a flower-trellis at the side of the house to gain entrance through an attic window. A warm cheerful interior, seen from outside, from a night-time vantage point of incipient psychosis: this is our introduction to Black Christmas. Essentially, our first point of view is that of a shadowy unknown whose intentions are coded as malevolent. We don’t meet the other characters until their lives have been “framed” by this threatening presence. Right from the outset, Black Christmas unsettles the viewer; there’s no wasting time, no mundanity to wade through before things “get going.” The mood has been instantly established (apprehension, anxiety) and the threat has been installed: a watchful menace has gained secret access to the central location before we’ve even met the main characters. Music continues to play a significant role throughout. Just as the killer easily crosses the threshold from outside to interior, so too the sound mix veers back and forth across the line between music and noise, between melody and atonality. Often we hear the wind, moaning and whistling at the fringes of the soundstage. We hear it during indoor scenes, not just for outdoor scenes or when the front door is left open (“Do you realize this is the only door in this whole building that’s locked?” Phyl says to Jess relatively late in the story, a remark that unnerves the viewer while proving that, despite the film’s unspecific location we are, after all, in Canada). By adding the sound of a keening wind behind dialogue inside the house, Clark subliminally chills the listener. It’s a simple enough idea, but it subtly affects the way we feel about scenes that otherwise would have been either comedic or prosaic, and also tweaks our sense of the film’s “set of reality.” There’s not a howling gale outside at any point in the film, and during the exterior scenes, barometrically at least, “all is calm, all is quiet.” The use of sound in this way is thus more expressionist than realist, lowering the temperature of our mood and amplifying shivery ambience into gooseflesh.

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The third and most striking level of “cold” stems from the film’s approach to character. Personal interactions, major and minor, vibrate with rudeness, bad temper, cynicism and callousness. Take the early scene in which Mr. Harrison stands outside the college gates waiting to collect his daughter (whom we’ve already seen murdered). When a passing schoolchild throws a snowball at Harrison, knocking his glasses to the ground, the teacher in charge runs up to apologize, saying “Sorry, I should have been keeping a better watch on them.” Picking himself up after groping for his glasses on the tarmac, Harrison replies testily, “I think so.” The teacher then responds with hair-trigger petulance, “Yeah well,

I said I was sorry.” This brittle exchange typifies an important emotional strand of the film: antagonism. Most everyone is either pissed off about something, or unwilling to see the other’s point of view, or winding others up for their own amusement. Two of the key emotional textures are coldness and brittleness. Fittingly for a horror film, these are words relating not to only to emotions but also to physical sensations, and one of the reasons Black Christmas works so well is that it taps into the shared language of emotion and tactility. In a film where characters are being verbally assaulted, and then murdered by a maniacal obscene caller, the emphasis on sensation gives the film a physicality, as if Clark wants us quite literally to feel the film’s icy touch. The use of coldness in the imagery (washed out colour, wintry locations), music (keening wind sounds) and metaphorically in the emotional palette, helps the film gain sly access to the flesh through the mind of the viewer—mimicking the action of the killer, who gains access through the attic (mind) to the rest of the house (the body). How often do we say a film has “gotten under our skin”? Clark’s intention to do just that is underlined by the poster campaign, which declares, “If this one doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight!” The notion of a house as a metaphorical body is a frequent trope in horror, and Clark uses it skillfully, with an appreciation of its roots in the Gothic tradition: the attic (with its abandoned children’s toys) is like the lunatic’s damaged brain, and the cellar (the bowels or guts) is where the heroine must confront a man who bitterly resents her intention to abort their baby.

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We tend to associate likeable characters with warmth, and characters with whom we can’t empathize with coldness. Black Christmas complicates this process and layers the characterizations with far more contrast than is common for horror films of this variety (although it’s worth remembering that Black Christmas, made in 1974, is unconstrained by the genre’s later orthodoxies). In order to explore the film’s layered character constructs, let’s consider the major roles: Barbara the salty and Above: Black Christmas ad bearing the infamous tagline. Left: Jess (Olivia Hussey) and Peter (Kier Dullea) (Photo: Bev Rockett)

sarcastic life of the party; Mr. Harrison the concerned parent; Mrs. Mac the lovable den mother; Lt. Fuller the patriarchal police chief; Jess the mild-mannered gentle girl and Peter the sensitive artist. Throughout the film these characters exhibit a range of antagonistic personality traits which trip up the unwary and make it hard to simply “like” any one of them. Layered characterization was important to Clark, and in 2007 he told this interesting anecdote to Fangoria (#265, August 2007) about making his 1981 comedy Porky’s:

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“

I have a line in Porky’s for one of the cops played by Art Hindle, where he says, “OK boys, see you later, gotta go find some niggers.” I had such hysteria from the studio over that. I said “Guys, look, I cut immediately to Billy and Tommy looking at each other, rolling their eyes. What are they going to do in 1954, jump down and preach to this cop?” 20th Century Fox said, “But he’s a positive character!” I said “I know, fellas, that’s the point!” It’s just telling the plain truth that’s the way things were. We finally kept it until the end, but they really wanted it out.

Above: John Saxon as Lieutenant Fuller (Photo: Bev Rockett)

Most prominent in the film, thanks to a bravura performance and some great scripting, is Barbara (Margot Kidder), a cynical joker with a sharp tongue. Played by a charismatic actress at the start of a long and varied career, she’s the sort of ”don’t mess with me” character with whom we might seek to identify, and she’s genuinely funny in a bitter sort of way. Barbara is very bright, and is obviously someone to whom the other girls look up, even as they wince at her frequent excesses. She seems, initially, an ideal riposte to the creeping intruder and the revolting misogyny of his phone calls. When the first call begins, she’s there, holding the phone so the others can hear, smirking at the pornographic abuse and delivering snippy put-downs to the snorting, gobbling maniac on the telephone. But when you listen to the nasty intimidating call (which is not the first the girls have received), you begin to wonder if Barbara has given any thought to the possible result of her goading. “I really don’t think you should provoke somebody like that, Barb,” says Clare, before going upstairs to be killed in the film’s first jolting murder scene. Why does Barbara respond to the calls like this? Is it because she honestly thinks mockery is the best strategy, or is it simply that she enjoys grandstanding to the more easily shockable girls in the

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Top: Sassy sorority girl Barb (Margot Kidder) (Photo: Bev Rockett) Bottom: John Saxon as Lieutenant Fuller (Photo: Bev Rockett)

sorority with her profane city-girl attitude and damn-them-all cynicism? She’s not the only resident, yet she deliberately goads a caller who is clearly mentally unbalanced. Our first impulse is to laugh, and to cheer her for being so unfazed by the creep on the phone. But after the dust settles, the more of Barb we see the less admirable she looks: her amusing antics quickly shade into insensitivity and crassness. A self-indulgent love of antagonism takes the character out of the comfort zone of the “spiky broad” into something darker and less amusing. We may laugh during the justly famous scene in which Barbara convinces a dim-witted desk sergeant that “fellatio” is the name of a local telephone exchange, but we can also see how selfish her priorities are: she’s supposed to be there to assist a distraught father who’s trying to persuade a sluggish police department to initiate a search for his missing daughter. The last thing he needs is a potty-mouthed smart-alec putting everyone’s backs up. Worse still, after returning to the sorority house Barbara turns on Mr. Harrison, accusing him without justification of blaming her for Clare’s disappearance. It’s paranoia and projected guilt, made worse by too much booze, the sort of behaviour that could afflict anyone who gets blind drunk and lets self-absorption govern their actions. This behaviour would usually be followed, in the cold light of the following day, by agonies of embarrassment and mumbled apologies: except that in this case, for Barbara, there isn’t going to be a morning after…

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So the film sides with the anxious father against the drunken loud-mouthed student? Not really. Mr. Harrison may be worried sick, and he obviously cares for his daughter, but he’s characterized as a holier-than-thou prig, casting a disapproving eye over the hippy-trippy decorations on

Above: Mrs. Mac (Marion Waldman) comes to an unpleasant end (Photo: Bev Rockett)

the walls of the sorority house: “I’m very disappointed in this atmosphere,” he says to house-mother Mrs. Mac, like a teacher assessing a pupil’s homework. Under the circumstances he needs the help of his daughter’s friends, but he clearly regards them as inappropriate companions for his little girl. He’s a person for whom you feel grudging sympathy, given the trauma he’s trying to deal with, although you also feel like following Mrs. Mac’s example and flipping him the bird whenever he leaves the room. Speaking of Mrs. Mac (or McHenry to use her full name), the sorority house-mother is certainly amusing, thanks to a fruityturning-to-acid performance by Marian Waldman, but one has to admit she’s far from ideal as a guardian: a major lush, with stashes of liquor all over the house, her sole priority is not to help search for the missing girl but to wend her tipsy way from hidden bottle to hidden bottle. This is typical of the film; everyone likeable has a snag or a major flaw. Even friendly, supportive Phyl pays the ultimate price for laughing at the eccentric search-party members who roll up at the door warning her not to let strangers into the house. “I’d rather face the killer!” she giggles, which is the last thing you should say in a film like this…

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Black Christmas is notable for its cast of strong, interesting women, and it’s also striking that salvation does not come from the men in the film. There are only three male characters of any importance to the plot, Above: Phyl (Andrea Martin ) and Jess (Olivia Hussey) embrace (Photo: Bev Rockett)

and the most obviously masculine of these, Lt. Fuller (John Saxon), proves ineffectual when it comes to stopping the killer. Despite being positioned early on as the cop who might solve the case (unlike the desk sergeant, who’s a moron, and his colleague, who’s a giggling slacker), Fuller is unable to fulfill his traditional role as protector. This, however, is not so much an attack on patriarchal authority as an attack on our sense of security: the whole point of the film is that no one understands just how close the killer is to his intended victims. The creaky technology of phone tapping takes three attempts to home in on the caller (who is using a second phone inside the sorority house) and by the time the truth has dawned it’s too late for the majority of the characters. A cop in a police car parked outside the house is found with his throat cut, but the most astonishing failure to protect the innocent comes at the end. The killer remains hidden inside the house during an inept and cursory police search when the bodies of Barbara and Phyl are finally discovered. As protector, Fuller is a failure: distracted by the arrival of the press he leaves the bedside of the sedated survivor, Jess, and when he does, so too do all the others who were gathered so reassuringly around her. As everyone wanders off to do something else, a passing policeman switches out the bedroom light and Jess is left in her darkened room, alone, unconscious, helpless… Is the film storing up rage against patriarchy and releasing it through the depiction of this inept and chaotic police investigation? Certainly abandoning a traumatized survivor in a house where a killer might still lurk is a terrible lapse in care. It’s also quite difficult to believe. The staging finds excuses for everyone to leave the house, but still, from a strictly rational point of view, the situation strains belief. And yet we do hear about cases where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, where the police let a killer slip between their fingers, where everyone, with the best of intentions, made collective errors of judgment leading to disaster. And this is a horror film, not a police procedural; its priority is to terrify the audience. Instead of the 99.9% of cases where something like this would not happen, it naturally wishes to talk about the 0.1% (and these things can happen—in Denver, Colorado in 1941, a homeless man called Theodore Edward Coneys was found hiding in the tiny attic room nine months after killing one of the residents who discovered him). As cops, friends and concerned doctors slip away from Jess’s bedside, we feel the dread of a child abandoned by parents when the lights go out in a bedroom haunted by shadow. Jess is alone, and we’re helpless to intervene as the camera slowly ascends to the attic, to reveal that it still contains the bodies of Mrs. Mac and Clare. We realize with a shudder that the police have missed the attic, and thus the hiding place of the killer. What the film wants us to feel is that nightmare sense of being beyond help; as the final shot cranes away from Clare’s face in the attic window until it’s just

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Top right: Jess (Olivia Hussey) tells Peter (Kier Dullea) she wants an abortion Bottom right: Peter flubs his piano exam (Photos: Bev Rockett)

a smudge in the dirty glass, we hear the telephone ring once again, and imagine its shrill demand piercing the wall of Jess’s sleep. Among this host of negative or compromised characters, Jess, the quiet girl of the sorority, and her boyfriend Peter, a music student prone to monumental petulance, are of special interest. A pivotal factor in the story is the abortion Jess has decided upon. It’s worth noting how ambivalent the film is here. Jess tells Peter in the same breath that she’s pregnant, and that she intends to abort the baby. Not only does she present this information to Peter in one single bombshell, she tells him on the morning of the day he’s due to perform a difficult piano recital for the college examiners. Needless to say, the performance goes badly. Filled with rage, Peter hammers away at the piano as if to smash his girlfriend’s face, and although the kind of composition he’s playing is presumably meant to be in the vicinity of Schoenberg or Xenakis, the examiners’ sour expressions make it clear he’s failing the exam. Regardless of whether one is pro-abortion or not, Jess could have chosen a more compassionate way of telling Peter the bad news! She is otherwise presented as caring and sensitive, but she drops the ball spectacularly here.

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Any sympathy for Peter, however, is swiftly dampened and snuffed out by his unpleasant and controlling attitude. “You are not going to abort that baby,” he yells, as if he thinks he can simply frogmarch Jess through an unwanted pregnancy and take delivery of the product regardless. No better is his idea of a proposal: “I’m quitting the conservatory and we’re getting married,” he says. Clearly Peter is a relationship disaster waiting to happen, while his narcissism and atrocious temper suggest he’d make a terrible father. Is the film “saying something” about abortion? In the haste to uncover serious themes with which to bolster the horror genre’s standing in the eyes of doubters and critics, one can end up making tenuous or absurd claims of social or political meaning. With this in mind, I think the abortion sub-plot is simply here to make the overall coldness of the film sink in deeper. Having an abortion is hardly a warm and cuddly Christmas experience; it triggers thoughts of cold steel and sterile ceramic bowls and the studied detachment of doctors and nurses. Although beyond the range of the story that we see, these images and associations nevertheless add to the prevailing chill. On the other hand, whilst the children singing a carol to Jess outside the sorority house may seem a dig at her decision to have an abortion, don’t forget that their voices obscure the sound of Barbara being murdered in her bedroom, something that Jess might have heard if she wasn’t so distracted!

B L A CK CHR IS T MA S : PA S T A N D F U T URE Transcending its problems with the critics, Black Christmas found a wider audience on American TV under the alternative title Stranger in the House. It first played on late night television in May 1977, under the auspices of HBO, and from then on it popped up in TV schedules across the USA well into the 1980s (one assumes some of the saltier dialogue was trimmed). It was probably by this route that the film started to exert a wider influence both on viewers’ jangled nerves and on the plots of other movies. Its theme of a killer who lurks in his victim’s home was exploited in TV movie Are You in the House Alone? (1978) and most notably in Fred Walton’s feature film When a Stranger Calls (1979). A decade later, Hider in the House (1989) told the story of a man who stows away in the attic of a new house and spies on the unsuspecting family that moves in, and of course Scream (1996) brought the nearer-than-you-think telephone caller into the cellphone era.

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Black Christmas’ influence on the slasher genre is too extensive to go into here, but before we end this call let’s give a shout to a film that may have inspired Black Christmas as much as Black Christmas inspired Halloween. S.F. Brownrigg’s Don’t Hang Up, better known by its 1979 re-

Right: Olivia Hussey as Jess (Photo: Bev Rockett)

release title Don’t Open the Door, was shot in Texas in 1973, and given a PG certificate in January 1974. Its central plot device—an obscene phone caller harassing a woman from a hidey-hole inside her house — is startlingly similar to Clark’s. Was he aware of this movie? In March 1974, Don’t Hang Up was being touted for distribution in Florida by Marvin Skinner of Horizon Films; Florida was Clark’s “home from home” and the place where he’d shot Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Deathdream. Don’t Hang Up, however, didn’t open until May 1974, in Paris, Texas, by which time Black Christmas was well into production. If there was an undeclared influence, the evidence is very difficult to ascertain. So let’s pack up, switch out the lights, and quietly take our leave of Black Christmas. Since both Brownrigg and Clark are no longer with us, we’ll just have to leave the two of them to resolve that question in the afterlife. Perhaps… by telephone?

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Anderson, George. “Three films examine bad conduct”, Pittsbugh PostGazette, 19 November 1975. Berrigan,Donald B. “Parents Movie Guide: Black Christmas”, Cincinnati Enquirer, 28 September 1975. Clark, Bob. “Bob Clark: The Last Interview”. Interview by Anthony Timpone. Fangoria #265, p75, August 2007. Daley, Frank. “Black Christmas a horror of sorts”, The Ottawa Journal, 5 Dec 1974. J.E.V. “‘Silent’ reaches spring’s nadir”, Syracuse Herald Journal, 15 May, 1975. Heady, Tom. “Black Christmas Has Little Cheer”, Albuquerque Journal, 11 November 1975. Variety, 16 October 1974. Variety, 22 October 1975. Variety, 24 November 1976.

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CHAPTER 2 MICHAEL GINGOLD

B

y the fall of 1984, the slasher-movie trend had pretty much run its course. Halloween’s Michael Myers had literally burned out, Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees had seen his (alleged) Final Chapter, and the box-office success of Gremlins was about to usher in a new wave of monster flicks and humourous horror. On November 9 of that year, upstart New Line Cinema and writer/director Wes Craven brought surrealism and the supernatural to teen-stalking with A Nightmare on Elm Street, along with a certain level of critical respect most of its much-maligned predecessors had never enjoyed. But the same day, a more traditionally told psycho-terror tale also hit screens from an up-and-coming distributor, and sparked outrage similar to that which had greeted Friday and its ilk. It was cheap. It was crass. It was full of graphic violence and gratuitous nudity. And it took one extra step that elicited an especially loud chorus of protest: It dared to turn a beloved Christmas icon into an agent of evil.

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The idea of a maniac impersonating Santa Claus was not a new one when Tri-Star Pictures released Silent Night, Deadly Night that pre-holiday season. Appropriately enough, the trope made its first major appearance in a 1954 issue of The Vault of Horror, one of the EC comics that first pitted horror creatives against the forces of decency. That story, “And All Through the House,” was adapted for the screen in Amicus’ 1972 Tales from the Crypt feature film (and later, in 1989, as part of HBO’s popular Tales TV series). Independent filmmaker Lewis Jackson had a disgruntled toy-company employee put on a red suit to punish naughty adults in You Better Watch Out, which first screened in 1980 and received negligible release a few years later as Christmas Evil. Also in ’80, Last House on the Left star David Hess made his directorial debut on To All a Goodnight (scripted by The Incredible Melting Man lead Alex Rebar), about private-school students stalked by a St. Nick-clad psycho, which wound up debuting on VHS.

Left: Protestors picket a Milwaukee theater showing Silent Night, Deadly Night. Photo: The Associated Press.

None of these films, however, had the studio muscle and the attendant publicity that Silent Night enjoyed. In ’84, Tri-Star had just been launched as a joint venture of Columbia Pictures, Home Box Office and CBS, Inc., and made an Oscar-baiting splash with Robert Redford’s The Natural and the Sally Fieldstarrer Places in the Heart. The company also had a lowbrow side, handling the youth comedies Where the Boys Are and Meatballs Part II, and had made a negative pickup deal with independent producer Ira Richard Barmak to distribute a Christmas-themed horror film then called Slayride. Reportedly, junior executives at the studio had voiced qualms about the project, but its president Gary Hendler decided to go ahead with it anyway. After all, the Friday films had been big profit-generators at Paramount, and a gimmicky slasher flick could mean a quick killing for the company. The idea first came to then-William Morris employee Scott Schneid as a spec screenplay by Paul Caimi called He Sees You When You’re Sleeping. Schneid wasn’t a fan of the script, but he liked the concept of a murderer in a Santa suit, so he optioned Caimi’s work and teamed up with Dennis Whitehead, whom he had met while the latter was working at Ernest Tidyman Productions, to raise financing. The duo, who wound up being the film’s credited executive producers, hired then-unproduced screenwriter Michael Hickey to come up with a new draft, with the goal “to develop a central character who was more complete than the average perpetrator in films of the genre,” Hickey says in the movie’s press notes. The antagonist they came up with is Billy, introduced as a child in a prologue in which he witnesses the brutal murder of his parents by a vicious criminal clad in Santa gear. Sent with his younger brother Ricky to a strict Catholic orphanage, Billy has strict rules about naughty behavior and punishment drilled into his head by the tyrannical Mother Superior. When he leaves the place at age 18 and gets a job in a local toy store, he’s a ticking time bomb of puritanical rage— and when he is pressed into service to play the store’s Santa, he snaps, and the killing spree begins… While the storyline’s focus on the development of its villain, as opposed to the victims-to-be, does set Silent Night, Deadly Night somewhat apart from most other teen-stalker opuses of the day, it can’t exactly be confused with a penetrating psychological drama. From an early scene in which Billy is frightened by his grandfather with warnings that “Christmas Eve is the scariest damn night of the year!”, the film adopts a one-dimensional, obvious approach to explicating the boy’s trauma. There’s a similar coarseness to the use of nudity; several female characters are seen topless or more, and they are all literally punished for it, by Billy or the Mother Superior. The puritanical subtext of previous have-sex-and-die films like the Friday the 13th series is made text in Silent Night, Deadly Night, but not explored in any way beyond basic exploitation.

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One way in which Silent Night does go beyond its forebears is in making the most of the possibilities to horrifically pervert its Yuletide setting. Most of the holidaythemed horror films to follow in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) used their respective celebrations as mere window dressing, but Silent Night, Deadly Night fully engages the feelings of the season—albeit the negative ones. From Grandpa to a convenience-store clerk shot by the Santa-dressed crook

to the owner of the toy store, it seems like everyone in the movie has soured on the Christmas spirit, and enthusiastically expresses that distaste. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, among others, decried prior slasher flicks for hating women; this one, in scene after scene, demonstrates a hatred for Christmas. An irony is that many of the key people behind this grisly, sacrilegious saga had much more benign backgrounds. Former actor Barmak’s credits included TV fare like The Girl Who Couldn’t Lose (1975), for which he won a Daytime Emmy Award. Schneid and Whitehead originally wanted “a young John Carpenter” to direct; Albert Magnoli (1984’s Purple Rain) and Ken Kwapis (2009’s He’s Just Not That Into You), both fresh out of USC’s film school, were among the candidates. But Charles E. Sellier Jr. wound up making his debut at the helm after a successful career producing family-friendly features such as 1974’s The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (and its NBC series spinoff) and In Search of Historic Jesus (1979), though he had then-recently dabbled in R-rated horror territory with The Boogens (1981).

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“He was intrigued by the idea of this picture,” Barmak says of Sellier in the press notes. “For him, it was an opportunity for a little mischief.” (Coincidentally, Silent Night cinematographer and frequent Sellier collaborator Henning Schellerup was also part of the 2nd-unit team on Nightmare on Elm Street.) Lilyan Chauvin, the veteran performer and acting coach who played the Mother Superior, had served as vice president of Women in Film and on the Women’s Steering Committee of the Directors Guild. Gilmer McCormick, who portrays sympathetic Sister Margaret, appeared on Broadway in Godspell and, at the time she made Silent Night, was producing and acting in plays for the First Christian Church’s Advent Theater in North Hollywood.

Above: Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) reprimands Billy (Danny Wagner). Photo: Bill Sellier © 1984 Tri-Star Pictures.

Tapped to play the rampaging Billy was feature first-timer Robert Brian Wilson; for the more physical moments, including some of the key murder scenes, he was doubled by Don Shanks, who had done several projects with Sellier and would later don the mask of Michael Myers for Halloween 5 (1989).The most memorable murder victim, a topless girl impaled on mounted reindeer antlers, was Linnea Quigley, a year ahead of her attention-grabbing role as Trash in Return of the Living Dead (1985). As they shot the film in March-April 1984 on Sellier’s home turf of Utah, the filmmakers and cast had little concern that what they were working on would be contentious. “I don’t think anybody [at Tri-Star] really paid much attention to it,” Barmak told the Los Angeles Times. “There was some comment about the wisdom of making a horror picture about Christmas, but I said that it was larger-thanlife and impossible for anyone to take seriously.” Similarly, Hickey said in the same article, “I regarded it as having a certain

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Top: Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) and Mr. Sims (Britt Leach). Bottom: Denise (Linnea Quigley) faces the killer’s axe. Photos: Bill Sellier © 1984 Tri-Star Pictures.

tongue-in-cheek appeal. You can’t write that concept with a completely serious attitude.” Shanks told this writer, “I thought it was kind of strange, because [he and Sellier] went from doing Grizzly Adams and Heroes of the Bible to a slasher film…but we didn’t know it would become so controversial.” One of the few to raise a red flag was Bethlyn Hand, director of the MPAA’s Advertising Code Administration. She recalled to the Times, “I said that Santa Claus was like motherhood and apple pie, and that I couldn’t approve anything that made him look like a villain,” and that six versions of the film’s TV commercial were submitted before it finally passed. Among the changes: a line of narration was added pointing out that the killer “only looks like Santa Claus.” “I knew they might have a problem [with the movie], and I knew they knew,” she added. “But neither of us knew how gigantic it was going to be.”

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Indeed. The trouble began when that TV spot, intended for late-night audiences, was aired by certain stations at times when children could see it. In Milwaukee, local mother Kathleen Eberhardt saw the commercial while watching a Sundayafternoon Green Bay Packers game with her husband, and while their five- and two-year-old children weren’t with them, she was outraged by the images of Santa wielding an axe, a knife and a gun. “It was absolutely disgusting,” she told The Milwaukee Journal. “I was fuming.” She and a friend, Karen Knowles, formed a group they called Citizens Against Movie Madness and led protests directed at Tri-Star, local affiliates running the ads and Milwaukee’s Grand Theatre, which was showing Silent Night. Among those who showed up to picket that venue: two nuns dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus. (Beyond objections to the film’s content,

Above: Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) takes a swing at Mother Superior. Photo: Bill Sellier © 1984 Tri-Star Pictures.

there was also concern in the Wisconsin city about imitative violence. The previous month, after watching The Burning Bed, in which a woman played by Farrah Fawcett avenges herself on her abusive husband by setting him on fire, a Milwaukee man did the same to his estranged wife, who died from her burns.) The Grand wasn’t the only one of the 398 cinemas playing Silent Night in the East Coast and Midwest to attract unwanted attention. In Norwalk, Connecticut, former mayor Thomas O’Connor led picketers in front of the local theater. A pair of theaters in the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York were visited by parents, carollers, PTA members and others, who succeeded in getting the film withdrawn after a week at both venues. “We had some great slogans,” Bronx protest leader Denise Giordano bragged to People magazine, “like ‘Deck the Halls With Holly, Not Bodies’!”

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Even though the film was released regionally, news of the backlash against it went national. Dan Rather reported on the protests on the CBS Evening News the night the movie hit theaters, The Phil Donahue Show devoted a full episode to the story, and Entertainment Tonight weighed in as well. Even Mickey Rooney, the beloved actor (born Joe Yule Jr.) long known for wholesome entertainment, chimed in via the Los Angeles Times, ranting that “The scum who made that movie should be run out of town.” (Another beloved funnyman had a more sardonic take on the whole thing. When Dudley Moore was interviewed by The Pittsburgh Press at the time about the upcoming Santa Claus: The Movie— also a Tri-Star release—in which he played an elf, he quipped that it would not feature an axe-wielding St. Nick: “Ours is a chainsaw murderer.”)

Above: The Daily News and New York Post cover the Silent Night, Deadly Night controversy.

Inevitably, the reviews didn’t help. Tri-Star didn’t screen Silent Night, Deadly Night for critics, and in New York City, the Times and Post ignored the film. Only the Daily News weighed in, with Hank Gallo awarding it zero stars and calling it a “bloody mess.” In other cities, critics took offense beyond that attending the usual slasher fare. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Roxanne T. Mueller made no bones about her feelings, opening with “Silent Night, Deadly Night is a sleazy, miserable, insulting, disgusting, worthless, exploitive piece of garbage.” Lou Gaul of Calkins Newspapers said the movie “appears to have been made by people who have as much respect for human life as Jack the Ripper,” and called it “hateful and sick.” The Toledo Blade’s Fred Lutz raged, “To say that Deadly Night is blasphemous would be an understatement. It’s an absolute travesty, a movie so grotesquely perverted in its shabby pandering to the sicky crowd that you wonder whether the no-talent no-namers who made it are maybe outpatients somewhere.” Siskel and Ebert, who had famously campaigned against “women-in-danger movies” four years earlier, didn’t give Silent Night a review proper on their popular At the Movies, but weighed in on the film in an “X-Ray” segment on the show. Describing the airing of the commercials as “sick and sleazy and meanspirited,” Siskel called out the three companies behind Tri-Star by name and admonished them, “Shame on you.” He then did the same for Hickey, Sellier and Barmak, chiding, “You people have nothing to be proud of.” Early the following year, Silent Night made their televised list of “The Stinkers of 1984.” Taking a more objective point of view, Henry Sheehan of the Boston Phoenix found the movie fell short even on its own terms: “None of this is state-of-the-art gore—they’re just off-screen effects supplemented by insert shots that left a Saturday matinee crowd noticeably disappointed.” Perhaps the most cleareyed observation was offered by Variety’s “Jagr.,” who described Silent Night as “quite (unintentionally) hilarious and for those few who hate Christmas, this could be their favorite film of the season.” At least one observer, meanwhile, wondered if the outrage surrounding the release was misplaced. Writing in the Wilmington Star-News, Ben Steelman offered:

“

Across America, people have yawned at reports of famine in Ethiopia, child pornography and child abuse, even hazardous wastes at Boy Scout camps. But angry parents in Northern cities took to the streets in November, loudly protesting a movie about an ax-murderer who wears a Santa Claus suit… Several people claimed that the one-minute trailers on television were traumatizing little kids. These same little kids, in most cases, are already watching mass destruction on The A-Team and Knight Rider… Last week, youngsters tuning in to the TV news could see dead, mutilated bodies in Sri Lanka, dead, poisoned bodies in India and the usual casualties in Latin America. Nobody, except a few cranks, seemed to think real life was too much for children to bear.

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Needless to say, all this was not the kind of attention Tri-Star and its parent companies desired. Columbia had recently fired executive Craig Baumgarten after learning he had produced and co-starred in the porn film Sometime Sweet Susan (the movie Robert De Niro takes an appalled Cybill Shepherd to in Taxi Driver—a Columbia picture, amusingly enough), and didn’t need any further association with the unsavory side of the movie business. And their parent company at the time, Coca-Cola, no doubt wanted to preserve the sanctity of Santa, who had long figured in the soda’s advertising. Still, Tri-Star’s vice president of advertising David Rosenfelt went on the defensive regarding the commercials. Referring to TV-station managers who had been dropping Silent Night’s ads, he told the Journal, “They didn’t complain about the commercials for Friday the 13th, which depicts 13 murders in the space of a minute. But for some reason we have to protect this revered image of Santa Claus. It doesn’t make sense to me.” Nonetheless, the studio pulled the offending ads the day before the movie opened. And as it turned out, all the outcry neither overtly encouraged nor seriously harmed business, as Silent Night, Deadly Night grossed a decent but unspectacular $1.4 million in its first weekend at those 398 theaters. Boosters of the film enjoy pointing out that that figure is higher than Nightmare on Elm Street’s take of almost $1.3 million over the same three days, though Nightmare was playing on only 165 screens and did more than double Silent Night’s perscreen average. (In New York City, Nightmare grossed $1.2 million in its first week at 83 theaters, as opposed to $530,000 for Silent Night on 74.) In its second weekend, after losing 34 of its venues (largely due to the protests), Silent Night fell by 45 percent, enough of a slide for Tri-Star to cite disappointing business, as opposed to the public antagonism, as the reason for its subsequent decision to pull the movie from release, with no further bookings forthcoming.

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The Daily News reports on the film’s ejection from a Brooklyn theater. Right: Aquarius Film Releasing’s Christmas-free poster for the 1985 secondround theatrical release

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While some communities were no doubt relieved, not everyone was agreeable to letting Silent Night go. In Boston, despite the Globe and local TV stations dropping the ads, the film did well enough that over a dozen theaters retained it after Tri-Star officially gave it the axe. “I’ve got to believe they [the exhibitors] have refused to return it,” Barmak told Variety. “And if they’ve refused to return it, you’ve got to guess why. It’s not out of charity for me. It’s because it’s doing business.” Movie houses in Buffalo also declined to withdraw Silent Night. By the end of November, Barmak was in discussions with Tri-Star about buying back the film; he saw a continuing value in it and, he claimed, already had a couple of other companies interested in picking it up. In early December, it was reported that Tri-Star—apparently concerned about taking the brunt of Silent Night’s continuing capacity to offend, regardless of who released it— had declined to let Barmak reclaim the movie, and instead were pursuing a settlement that would involve the producer making another movie for the studio. But then, a week before Christmas, Barmak received a gift: Tri-Star decided to relinquish the movie after all, turning over all of their prints, trailer negatives and other promotional material. Appropriately enough, Silent Night would now be issued to theaters by Aquarius Film Releasing, the New York-based outfit known for releasing Italian shockers that had similarly attracted outrage, like Umberto Lenzi’s Make Them Die Slowly (a.k.a. Cannibal Ferox). The posters made the most of the picture’s past notoriety, screaming (with dubious punctuation), “The Movie That Went Too Far! …that so outraged Hollywood, the Government and parents everywhere. They Tried to Ban It!” Aquarius did exercise a bit of caution, though, opening the movie in late spring 1985 with posters and newspaper ads containing no references to Christmas or images of Santa, and TV advertising was minimal. The deal with Aquarius included a one-year moratorium on a VHS release, and when International Video Entertainment put Silent Night on cassette in ’86 under the U.S.A. Home Video banner, there were no qualms about exploiting the subject matter: The big-box packaging sported the original poster art of Santa’s axe-wielding arm sticking out of a chimney. For whatever reason, the availability of the movie to anyone who might want to rent it—making it arguably more accessible to children than its R-rated theatrical release had—did not engender anything like the rancor the movie previously received. And at some point around that time, someone decided that a sequel would be a good idea.

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When audiences sat down to watch Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 beginning in April 1987, they were in for a surprise: About half of it was Silent Night, Deadly Night part one. Originally, according to writer/director/editor Lee Harry and his co-scripter Joseph H. Earle, the rights holders to Silent Night, Deadly Night approached them to simply re-edit the movie into a new feature. Anxious to make their first film, they hammered out a deal to shoot additional footage that could be interpolated with the old material. The story they came up with involves a now-18-year-old Ricky recalling his and Billy’s trauma and his older brother’s rampage (including moments where he was not present in the first film) to a psychiatrist, before slaying the shrink and heading out on a murder spree of his own.

Even if Part 2 wound up being not quite as mercenary as first intended, it’s still pretty shameless in its recycling of its predecessor’s scenes. On the other hand, newcomers to this saga could effectively get two movies in one with this flick, as almost all of the original’s key scenes (some of them tightened by Harry) are present and accounted for. The fresh stuff has attracted a small cult of its own, thanks largely to the over-the-top performance of Eric Freeman as Ricky. Chosen, according to the filmmakers, over a more accomplished actor because he had the right look, Freeman contributes a riot of overwrought expressions and line readings. His crazed delivery of “Garbage day!” has become a particular favorite, and a scene in which he takes out an obnoxious patron in a “movie theater” (obviously a small screening room) is regularly used as part of a no-talking PSA by Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 barely made a box-office ripple, as it was given only limited distribution by Ascot Entertainment, the short-lived outfit whose most conspicuous release was Lamberto Bava’s Demons. And yet, the title’s notoriety ensured that it would live on; Tri-Star might have wanted nothing to do with it, but IVE (later rechristened Live Home Video) spun it off into a series of further direct-to-video sequels. The last one to continue the original saga was 1989’s Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!, in which Ricky (now played by Bill Moseley, in his first horror lead since breaking out in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) wakes up from a coma and stalks a blind psychic girl, his exposed brain covered by a large transparent bowl. Of all people, cult filmmaker Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) directed the film; he recalled at an Alamo Drafthouse screening in July 2008 that it came together at lightning speed, going from rewritten script to final answer print in four months.

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Brian Yuzna of the Re-Animator films joined the franchise for the next two features, the first of which, 1990’s Silent Night, Deadly 4: Initiation, bears all the earmarks of a pre-existing project retrofitted into being a “sequel.” Clint Howard plays a character named Ricky, and the action takes place in the days leading Above: Ricky (Eric Freeman) carries on the family tradition with a new Mother Superior (Jean Miller) in Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. Photo: © 1987 Ascot Entertainment.

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up to Christmas Eve, but otherwise there is no relation between this witchcraft thriller and its predecessors. Yuzna directed this one, and served as a producer/ co-scripter on 1991’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker, for which the reins were taken by Martin Kitrosser, who had co-written Friday the 13th Part III (1982) and Meatballs Part II (1984). This one has more of a Yuletide flavor than 4, dealing with killer playthings created by the title character, Joe Petto (nudge nudge), who has a strange son named Pino (wink wink). Having apparently gotten over his distaste for the original Silent Night, none other than Mickey Rooney took the Petto role, though he does not seem to have ever gone on record about what changed his mind. As the years went on and Silent Night, Deadly Night re-emerged on various video formats, it became absorbed into the culture, its bete noire status replaced by a new appreciation by connoisseurs of the slasher-film form (especially once the Internet made it easier to share that appreciation). With pop culture having pushed boundaries every which way in the last decade or so, and the transgressive and offensive having been mainstreamed in the process, the days when a mere low-budget horror film could engender such a vitriolic public response seem very long ago indeed. Yesterday’s “trash” is today’s grist for multiplex fodder, and remakes of such notorious shockers as The Last House on the Left (1972) and I Spit on Your Grave (1980) were produced and released without ruffling any puritanical feathers. And so it was inevitable that Silent Night, Deadly Night would be revisited as well. Producer Ryan E. Heppe came to that idea by happenstance: the writer of Legacy, a werewolf thriller he was developing with David Foster, had been part of the 1984 film’s producing team, and invited Heppe to a screening. The audience reaction convinced him that a new version would be a good idea, and just after Christmas 2006, word went out that Silent Night, Deadly Night would be coming back, albeit as a “total reimagining.”

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The new version’s road to production and release would be a long one, but it was development issues, not outside objections, that delayed it. (Along the way, in February 2008, Foster and Heppe also optioned the remake rights to Christmas Evil, presumably as a preemptive strike to corner the market on killerSanta updates.) Writers like Franck Khalfoun (who would eventually direct 2012’s Maniac redux instead) and Joe Harris (2010’s The Tripper) were attached, but the final script was written by Jayson Rothwell. And in the ultimate irony, his redux Left: Live Home Video’s U.S. cover art for the in-name-only sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990). Above: Anchor Bay Entertainment’s U.S. poster for the reimagined remake Silent Night (2012).

of a movie that had sparked fears of real-life trauma and imitation was informed by an actual crime: On Christmas Eve 2008, a man named Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, dressed in a Santa suit, invaded a party at the home of his ex-wife’s parents with a handgun and a homemade flamethrower, killing nine people. Directed by Steven C. Miller, starring Malcolm McDowell and Jaime King and released under the simplified title Silent Night at the end of 2012, the new film was indeed a complete overhaul of Sellier’s, with a higher and even more gruesome body count. And the reviews, from both mainstream outlets and genre critics, were… mixed, some positive, some not, and none bearing the condemnation that greeted the original. Evidence abounds of how far horror has come in terms of general acceptance in the 2000s, and the fact that a new version of Silent Night, Deadly Night with an increased violence quotient didn’t get anyone’s dander up is certainly part of that proof. Even if it had, it’s another sign of the times that the public protests that greeted the original film would likely not have been repeated. That sort of displeasure is expressed differently today, and who better to point out the change than Australian director Craig Anderson, whose movie Red Christmas (2016) courts controversy not only by showcasing graphic bloodletting on the holiday, but by featuring a villain who survived an attempt to abort him at birth? “Today we have something far more insidious—we have Twitter and social media, and you can be condemned on that,” Anderson says. “It can spread like wildfire across the world. People protesting is old-school; the new school has far greater reach, and social media can silence people and crush their careers. It works differently now.”

R E FER ENCES & B IB L IO GR A P H Y Anderson, Craig. Interview by the author, July 23, 2016. Blank, Ed. “Dudley Moore Uneasy After String of Flops.” The Pittsburgh Press, December 4, 1984. Caulfield, Deborah. “The Slasher Film That Didn’t Sleigh ’Em.” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1984. Collins, Brian. “All is Bright: The Producers of Silent Night, Deadly Night on Christmas’s Best Horror Film.” Birthmoviesdeath.com, December 12, 2014. Gallo, Hank. “You Better Watch Out.” Daily News, November 10, 1984. Gaul, Lou. “Film confuses Christmas, Halloween.” Beaver County Times, November 18, 1984. “Jagr.” Review of Silent Night, Deadly Night. Variety, November 7, 1984. Kissinger, Meg. “Killer ‘Santa Claus’ in TV Ads Stirs Outcry.” The Milwaukee Journal, November 6, 1984. Lutz, Fred. “Silent Night, Deadly Night A Sick, Perverted Travesty.” Toledo Blade, December 4, 1984. Maslin, Janet. “Silent Night Furor Hasn’t Sold Tickets.” The New York Times, November 16, 1984. McKeown, Frank. “Homicidal Santa’s Foes Win a Round: Movie Gets the Ax.” Daily News, November 16, 1984.

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Right: Right: Billy prefers busting down the door to coming down the chimney. Photo: Bill Sellier © 1984 Tri-Star Pictures.

McMurran, Kristin. “Angry Moms Call a Movie Featuring Santa Claus as An Ax Murderer a Mean-Spirited Hatchet Job.” People, December 3, 1984. Mueller, Roxanne T. Review of Silent Night, Deadly Night. Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 13, 1984. No author credited. “Night Rights Sold Back to Producer.” Variety, December 19, 1984. No author credited. “Parents Seek Ax for Killer Santa by Picketing Pic.” Variety, November 14, 1984. No author credited. “Silent Night Back on Screens May 3.” Variety, April 3, 1985. No author credited. “Silent Night Causing a Loud Uproar.” Daily News, November 19, 1984. No author credited. “Silent Night Flap Still Going; Coast Booking Doubtful.” Variety, November 21, 1984. Shanks, Don. Interview by the author, March 11, 2012. Sheehan, Henry. Review of Silent Night, Deadly Night. The Boston Phoenix, November 27, 1984. Silent Night, Deadly Night production notes. Tri-Star Pictures, 1984. Silent Night, Deadly Night Blu-ray audio commentary. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2014. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 DVD audio commentary. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2003. Steelman, Ben. “Jingle All the Way—to the Bank.” Wilmington Star-News, December 9, 1984. “The Stinkers of 1984.” At the Movies With Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, Tribune Entertainment Co., January 12, 1985. Tusher, Will. “Tri-Star Declines to Relinquish Shelved Night Distribution Rights.” Variety, December 12, 1984. “X-Ray: Silent Night, Deadly Night.” At the Movies With Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, Tribune Entertainment Co., exact date unknown, 1984.

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CHAPTER 3 LEE GAMBIN

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eaturing a psychopathic Santa Claus who punishes hapless victims in suburban Utah, Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) caused a moral uproar. Watchdog groups picketed the cinemas screening the film and called TV stations demanding its ads be pulled from the airwaves, claiming it upset children. For Gilmer McCormick, who played the sympathetic nun Sister Margaret in the film, this type of controversy was nothing new—the versatile actress was an original stage performer in the stage (and later film) musical Godspell, which sparked a similar outcry from religious groups on its debut in 1971. McCormick spoke with us about controversial cinema and her character’s role in taking care of the traumatized (and then terrifying) Billy in this classic Santa slasher. Your character Sister Margaret is kind-hearted and sympathetic (as opposed to the strict stern Mother Superior) who helps guide Billy through life. When you first read the script, what were your thoughts on your character?

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When I first read the script I was reminded of Ingrid Bergman’s good servant character in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)! I mentioned that at the audition, and I could see straight away that we were on the same page. Later, I was told that that comment helped sway casting in my favour. Do you feel that Silent Night, Deadly Night says something profound about child abuse and how it plays a part in how violent behaviour can emerge in adulthood? I suppose the movie does explore child abuse and its effects, though I doubt that noble idea was in the minds of the creators. If anything, the film says a lot more against the Catholic institutions of the time; their fierce and punishing disciplines Top left: Gilmer McCormick as Sister Margaret in Silent Night, Deadly Night. Bottom left: Gilmer McCormick on a publicity tour for Godspell (1973).

and mixed-up ideologies. Only in today’s light those abusive “servants” are being exposed. In Billy’s timeframe, that kind of abuse was “normal.” How did working on Godspell, which you were a part of from the play’s offBroadway run through to the 1973 film adaptation, differ from Silent Night, Deadly Night, a one-off film shoot? Was it at all collaborative the way Godspell seemed to be? Godspell was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. From its conception in those early workshop days all the way up to Broadway and then the film adaptation, it was unbelievably exciting; we watched it morph from one actor or director to another, and made life-long friendships. It can’t compare to making a low budget slasher film, but I will say that the cast and crew of Silent Night, Deadly Night were absolutely professional and wonderful to work with. I remember one time the camera operator, who was so generous and patient, allowed me to look through and operate the Slo-Mo Camera when they were filming a night scene in the toy store. It was a good lesson in film technique to compare what the camera sees against what you, the actor, thinks it’s seeing. Having come from the stage, where each gesture has to be brought up a notch or three, the camera picks up the smallest nuance: a mere raised eyebrow can read loud and clear. It’s your thoughts that count in film acting. Danny Wagner, who played Billy as a child in the orphanage, has some difficult scenes. Did the director make sure he was okay with the subject matter or was Danny mature enough to fully comprehend that it was all “make-believe”? I hardly had an opportunity to know Danny, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing. In other words, he was trained as an actor, young though he was. He was very professional, listened and followed direction well. And, as I recall, the director worked very well with him and vice versa. Honestly, I was so nervous myself that I hardly noticed anyone else. Those scenes with Danny were the first ones we shot, and I was sort of new at this myself.

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What was it like to work with Lilyan Cahuvin, who played Mother Superior? Did you two hit it off?

Lilyan and I struck up a real friendship during the making of the film. She was a fascinating person, and so professional. On one hand she could be found laughing and joking with cast and crew, but when “places” was called her professional side would kick in and she’d become very composed and focused. I learned a lot from her about the importance of preparation, and even how to deal with things an actor can’t prepare for. I remember we were filming our first scene together, and I just couldn’t get the tension out of my face. She whispered that she would inflict pain on another part of her body, to bring the tension down from the face and into the self-inflicted area. Since we were both sitting with a desk between us, she suggested I squeeze my hands together as tightly and as painfully as I could. She said it was okay for an actor to sometimes use little tricks to get the right result, though Stanislavski would probably have disagreed. She was delightful! What did you think of Silent Night, Deadly Night when you first saw it?

It’s very difficult to watch any movie that I’m in. All I notice is what a terrible job I did—how I should have done this or that. And, as a rule, I don’t like horror movies of any kind. So when I did see the movie, and I’ve only seen it once many years ago, I could hardly wait until it was over! Were you aware of the backlash to the film throughout America? Likewise, do you remember any backlash against Godspell from religious groups who objected to Christ’s depiction as a clown minstrel? Oh my lord yes—in spades! The Godspell cast often received hate mail—scary, graphic stuff. Sometimes someone in the audience would yell out that we were all damned to hell, before being forcibly escorted out of the theatre. It happened quite a lot in the beginning. That changed when the Pope publicly blessed the show and said he recited the “Day by Day” prayer every day. This was the Vietnam era and, among other things, the beginning of Vatican II, when the church’s views were being radically challenged and we were right in the middle of it. As time went on, the hate mail and the harassment stopped for the most part, and it was not uncommon to be playing to very enthusiastic audiences of nuns and priests. There will always be fanatics, but as far as the general and various religious audiences, we were very much appreciated and uplifted. I still receive fan letters from people all over the world saying that the film and its message changed their lives. As for Silent Night, Deadly Night, I was aware of the backlash and someone even said at the time that the protesters were acting as if Santa Claus was on a par with Jesus Christ. I stayed way away from all of that—I know my agents were trying to decide whether to try to capitalize on the publicity. In the end, they thought better of it. The film’s advertising campaign outraged some parents, since the trailer showed Billy dolled up as Santa with a bloodied axe. Do you think the ads should have been less extreme? No, I think the advertisers did their job! Truth in advertising, I always say. You see up front what you’re going to get and you choose to go or not to go. God forbid we should ever censor the thoughts and imaginations of our artists, no matter how warped they may appear. We’ve gone through that sort of thing in this country before, during the disgraceful and damaging McCarthy era. So now we have a rating system—very democratic and, dare I say, American.

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What is your fondest memory about working on Silent Night, Deadly Night? I have several fond memories of the film. We filmed it in the heart of Mormon country in Utah, and stayed in a hotel owned and operated by a family with four wives and quite a few children. I remember that one of the actors, who was from Los Angeles like the rest of us, was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Every morning you would hear him leave the hotel hours before filming would begin, trying to witness in this completely Mormon territory. Poor thing; for a week or so, his guilt and anxiety level were off the charts, but after a while he relaxed and even laughed about it knowing that sometimes not all things were possible.

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CHAPTER 4 FLORENT CHRISTOL

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The fool [...] provides a subtler balm for the fears and wounds of those afflicted with the inferiority complex [...]. It is all very well to laugh at the buffeted simpleton; we too are subject to the blows of fate, and of people stronger and wiser than ourselves, in fact we are the silly Clown, the helpless Fool. [...] the Fool of course represents the cause of the stupid against the clever, of the weak against the strong. [...] Every man, therefore, is prepared to identify himself with the Fool, as he turns the tables on his chastisers, defeats the powerful, outwits the wise, and assumes the most effective of all roles, the role of David against Goliath, the role of the pariah triumphant. - Enid Weslford, The Fool. His Social and Literary History (1931)

C

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hristmas Evil (1980), Lewis Jackson’s lone but memorable directorial effort, tells the story of toy factory assembly line worker Harry Stadling (Braggon Maggart), who was traumatized as a child when he saw his mother getting intimate with Santa Claus (unbeknownst to him, his father in disguise). (1) As a result of this early Oedipal trauma, Harry harbours a regressive, “abnormal” social behaviour, expressed through a childish infatuation with Christmas. Harry is in love with the holiday, especially the figure of Santa. He leaves his decorations up all year long, sleeps in red Santa pajamas, and even spies on the neighbor kids so he can keep lists of who’s naughty and who’s nice. While Harry takes great pride in his workmanship at the toy factory, wanting to make toys that some child will love for years, his co-workers think he’s a fool and

Left: Full page Variety ad for Christmas Evil in advance of the Cannes Film Market, 1982.

a sucker for working so hard. After a series of events which reactivate his childhood trauma, Harry, fed up with his colleagues’ cynicism and selfishness, decides that it is great time for Santa to deliver the goods. Donning a Santa suit of his own making, he goes on a mission to reward nice kids and punish those who have taken advantage of his kindness, but also of mean and uncaring, self-centred adults who disrespect the spirit of Christmas. A completely independent production originally titled You Better Watch Out (the director’s preferred title), Jackson’s film performed badly at the box-office and was, for a long time, discarded within the realm of exploitation films. Its gradual reappraisal followed an enthusiastic endorsement by the “Pope of Trash,” director John Waters. Part of the reason why Christmas Evil failed to find an audience upon its initial release may have been that the film was distributed and advertised as a generic slasher film like Friday the 13th (1980) or Terror Train (1980), in which crazed psychos kill inebriated and horny teenagers. However, Christmas Evil is much closer

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Top: Harry’s father, dressed as Santa, about to get a Christmas treat. Photo: courtesy of Lewis Jackson. Bottom: Modern Times Reloaded: Harry on the assembly line.

in spirit to Taxi Driver (1976) or other New Hollywood movies such as Willard (1971), Horror High (1974) or Carrie (1976), in which bullied social misfits avenge their persecution by executing their tormentors in scenes of graphic violence. This chapter explores Christmas Evil’s relation to these films and to their structuring narrative. It also looks at the cultural myth of the Foolkiller, a marginalized American myth that provides an anthropological framework for understanding Harry’s psychotic identification with Santa Claus and his murderous use of the symbols of Christmas.

THE F OOL K IL L E R MY T H In the 1970s and ‘80s, a new subgenre of horror films featuring bullied social outcasts avenging their persecution appeared on screens. These titles include Willard (1971), Horror High (1974), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Carrie (1976), Massacre at Central High (1976), Fade to Black (1980), Evilspeak (1981), Trick or Treat (1986) and 976-Evil (1988). The victim/murderer in these films belongs to the socio-cultural category of the “fool,” a character type distinguished by a physical deformity or disability, or conduct that is regarded as ludicrous, improper and inferior (the fool’s characteristics frequently overlap with those of the “freak”). The fool is bullied or humiliated for being physically weak or too “feminine” (that is, failing to meet the dominant masculine ideal), and often comes from a poor, workingclass background. In other words, the fool represents the opposite of the cultural features traditionally valorized in mainstream American culture (strength, beauty, richness, success). As sociologist William Orrin

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Left: Birth of the Fookiller: Harry dressed as Santa. Photo: courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome.

Klapp notes, “Whereas the hero represents the victory of good over evil, the fool represents values which are rejected by the group; causes that are lost, incompetence, failure, and fiasco.” As the main character of these films is a “fool” but also a killer of “fools” in the looser and more moralistic sense of socially irresponsible people, I call him the “foolkiller” and name the genre he evolves in the “Foolkiller movie.” (In a more comical vein, Revenge of the Nerds (1984), The Toxic Avenger (1985) and Funland (1987) provide burlesque variations on the same script.) These Foolkiller movies encourage the viewer to empathize with the bullied victim—notably by dedicating several scenes in which the fool is persecuted by physically stronger, sadistic bullies—and by placing the viewer in a masochistically congruent place with the victim through camerawork (such as the use of POV shots). The foolkiller’s seemingly disproportionate revenge, although criminal, is given some legitimacy within the narrative in the sense that the world inhabited by these teenagers is devoid of responsible adults or social institutions that could curb the bullies’ mean or abusive behaviours. Thus, this presentation partly exonerates the foolkiller’s violence (his life is a shown to be living hell) and enables the viewer to enjoy his retribution and symbolical revenge against abusive and dysfunctional embodiments of strength, power and authority.

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As I have argued in my article “The Foolkiller Movie: Uncovering an Overlooked Horror Genre,” these films can be understood as contemporary expressions of a cultural myth that was archetypically formulated by Edgar Allan Poe in his 1849 short story “Hop-Frog.” Published in the journal Flag of our Union, “Hop-Frog” tells the story of a crippled dwarf forced to be a jester at the court of a sadistic and tyrannical king who revels in abusing his fool in order to provoke the laughter of his council. After a particularly cruel humiliation, the fool decides to avenge himself by encouraging his tormentors to dress as apes during a masquerade party and by lynching and burning them in front of the guests.

Above: Two early embodiments of the Foolkiller: Vernon (Horror High, 1974) and Willard (Willard, 1971)

“Hop-Frog” was officially adapted on the screen only once, as a subplot in Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964). However, the Foolkiller films of the 1970s and ‘80s seem in many ways to be unofficial adaptations of the text, as they depict the revenge of a “freakish” social outcast against bullies, often during some sort of masquerade, festival or carnivalesque setting (such as a high school prom). However, “Hop-Frog” is never explicitly quoted or referred to by the filmmakers, and it’s unlikely that they had Poe’s text in mind when they made the films. Indeed, my belief is that Poe’s tale is an expression of a cultural myth—in other words, a socially valued story informing a trend in culture and which strongly resonates with a part of American society—that these movies (re)activate more than a century after Poe wrote “HopFrog.” As Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes (among others) have shown, a myth is a disembodied narrative entity only grasped through its incarnations in artifacts such as texts and films. In order to get closer to the myth tapped into by both “Hop-Frog” and the Foolkiller movies—a theoretical operation necessary to better appreciate the aesthetical politics of Christmas Evil—it is helpful to go beyond the texts to reach the anthropological and symbolical dimension of the stories.

CHA R I VAR I A N D T H E R E V E N GE O F T HE W E AK Citing historian Barbara Tuchman, horror scholar Jack Morgan notes in The Biology of Horror, Gothic Literature and Film that “Hop-Frog” was inspired by the story of the “Bal des Ardents,” a masquerade ball held at the court of Charles VI of France in 1393. At the suggestion of a Norman squire, the king and five other aristocrats dressed as Wild Men in highly flammable costumes made with pitch and flax. Four of the men died in a fire, and only Charles was saved. According to author Marie-Yves Bercé’s book Fête et révolte: Des mentalités populaires du XVI° au XVIII° siècle, the men were dressed as savages because they participated in a charivari (also known as rough-music or skimmington), a carnivalesque medieval ritual in which people who had engaged in certain foolish or immoral actions (oftentimes of a sexual nature) were publicly ridiculed and punished by young adults costumed as court jesters or wearing other grotesque masks and disguises. The charivari usually took the form of a noisy mock procession in which the guilty party or his effigy was paraded through town seated backward on

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Above: “A Medeval Charivari” from A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art by Thomas Wright, 1875.

a donkey. The victim of the charivari was also frequently turned into a “wild man” or a savage beast, and forced to wear horns and beast skins. He or she was then hunted down through the village, judged by a burlesque youth tribunal, and symbolically sacrificed. The charivari was a cultural expression of the Carnival, a complex of rituals and social practices in which marginalized people normally excluded from the discourse of power were temporarily endowed with some political attributes. The anonymity provided by the costume and the masks helped the youth access the position of symbolical (and sometimes real) executioners. They could thereby enforce punishment —a form of legal transgression not authorized outside of Carnival— with impunity. A typical carnivalesque ritual was the Feast of Fools, a winter celebration in which the low clergy in French cathedrals elected a “king” or “abbot” of “Misrule” to preside over wild revelries and engage in a wide range of blasphemous (yet officially approved) clowning and borderline anarchy within the church. In spite of this, the Feast of Fools was, at its core, a celebration of the poor, the weak, the persecuted innocents who most resembled Christ, the ultimate scapegoat figure. Although most of these carnivalesque festivities and charivari provided outlets for those everyday conflicts that were fraught with the potential for violence, carnival rituals and motifs (ritual abuse, mocking, inversion) could also be used as political weapons when authority figures abused their power. As Bercé writes, “the normal sanctions of the youth kings and kings of fools—burlesque tribunals, charivaris, skimmingtons, and mock sacrifices—were endowed with obvious aggressive potential. These burlesque weapons could offer passages from carnival to revolution and appear as subversive.” The charivari sheds light on the jester’s violence in “Hop-Frog.” In traditional historical anecdote and folklore, the king’s abusive “use” of his fool is hidden (or given a form of legitimacy) by the aberrant, “unlawful” behaviour of the jester, who functions as a convenient scapegoat. But, in Poe’s tale, the fool/freak is depicted as a martyr. By bullying two innocent and defenseless “fools,” the monarch loses his status of legitimate sovereign and becomes a sort of disorderly mock-king imperiling the social structure. In the face of this corrupted political state, in which transgressions go unpunished, the jester re-establishes order and justice by killing the tyrannical king through a political and lethal charivari, becoming the king’s executioner. The king and his courtesans’ dressing up as “savage” beasts ritually degrades the tyrants. Hung from the chandelier of the ballroom, exhibited in front of the guests, the king and his ministers are subjected to the mocking laughter of the guests, like the victims in the shaming ritual of the charivari. The jester uses the setting and objects of carnival (the grotesque ape costumes of the king’s masquerade),

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as a way to avenge his abuse. By punishing those whose irresponsible behaviour imperil vulnerable people, the jester in “Hop-Frog” plays the role of “moral censor”/executioner played by the masked “fools” in the medieval Carnival.

A CHR I S T MA S ( DE AT H ) W IS H : H ARRY AS F OOLKI LLE R Although Christmas Evil differs from the “Hop-Frog” story in several ways, the main motifs of the Foolkiller myth still provides key structuring aesthetical and ideological poles in the film. Like Poe’s pathetic crippled dwarf, Harry Stadlin is a “fool”—a lone, sad, meek, and even pitiful figure who is easily taken advantage of and seems to have no loving relationship in his life, except with the neighborhood children (the nice ones that is) with whom he shares the same “innocent” worldview. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (an obvious inspiration here), Harry seems to live in a bubble or a cage, a point Lewis Jackson visually expresses by regularly shooting Harry through internal frames such as windows or mirrors. Harry’s alienation is also illustrated through his voyeurism. He watches his brother having sex with his wife through a window; peeps on the children in the building opposite his with a pair of binoculars; observes his colleagues mocking him in a pub through another window, and so on. These shots, which constitute a spatial restaging of the film’s opening primal scene (Harry is excluded from the action and can only watch his parents from a distance), express

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Above: A contemporary Feast of the Innocents (also named Feast of fools): Harry as a symbol of childhood innocence in Christmas Evil.

a form of powerlessness. Harry’s relation to the world is fundamentally dissociated and split, with Harry acting out his repressed desires through the scenes he gazes at, like a spectator in a movie theater. The mean figures who mock the “fool” in the film may be equated with the king and the ministers in Poe’s story. In one key scene, Harry is presented to a new supervisor at his factory. Harry tries to suggest that the toys fabricated by “Jolly Dream” could be of a better quality and benefit poor and sick children at the state hospital, but his boss does not seem interested. Likewise, Harry’s colleagues do not care about the Christian meaning of Christmas and see the season as an opportunity for drinking and partying. In many ways, the world depicted in Christmas Evil is the same “upside-down” world described in “Hop-Frog,” where the weak are endangered by the strong, and immorality, corruption and meanness seam to run unchecked within the whole social fabric.

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In “Hop-Frog”, the jester uses the carnival to invert the power positions and punish those who mocked him. Likewise, it is through the carnivalesque mythology of Christmas and the figure of Santa that Harry brings his own “rough” justice. Though now mainly associated with Coca-Cola commercials and simplistic cartoons for kids, Santa Claus is an Americanized take on Saint Nicholas, a historical and mythical figure connected with, among other things, the moral upbringing of children and the protection of the weak and innocents. But Saint Nicholas has a darker side, and was often depicted in cultural representations and folklore as accompanied by a monstrous helper whose duty was to mete out a traditional punishment to “bad” children, threatening them with a Above: Echoes of Citizen Kane: Snowglobe and childhood trauma.

beating or even possibly abducting them. This demonic companion— clad in skins or straws, shaggily dressed in fur, blacked over, or given some other diabolic or animalistic attribute—was variously named Knecht Rpprecht, Hans Trapp, Krampus, Black Peter, or Belsnickel (“Furry Nicholas”). Anthropologists believe that this scary figure represents the anarchic “Mr. Hyde” side of Saint Nicholas that was dissociated into distinct entities through the ages.(2) At a time when the state did not police individual behaviour, this bogeyman figure played a crucial social role in the moral education of children and was a helpful tool for parents who had trouble disciplining their rebellious offspring. The mythical character of Saint Nicholas’ demonic helper was also ritually embodied and “performed” during Christmas masquerades and charivaris. As historian Dale Cockrell writes about the belsnickel figure:

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“

A belsnickel was a mad masqueraded in a fur coat and cap who made his rounds on Christmas Eve frightening and delighting small children. The bells attached to his clothing or to a pole jangled diabolically as he went along, in a manner that dates back at least to the fourteenth century. Typically he dispensed small presents, candy, and nuts, but then would slash at the children with a whip or rod as they went to take up their treats. Before allowing them to approach he would require from them a promise to “be good.” The belsnickel was then treated to libation of food.

Above: Harry about to pay a visit to naughty people.

In Christmas Evil, this rich social and political folklore is introduced through close-ups of Thomas Nast’s (among others) paintings depicting Santa as a severe judge of morality. One painting shows him putting a disobedient child in a bag. A coded reference to Saint Nicholas’ monstrous helper also appears in Harry’s workshop in the shape of a bear-like puppet with a grin, from which echoes a sinister laugh. The reference is extended by an excerpt from classic Christmas film Babes in Toyland (1934) that plays on a TV. In this scene, Harry’s nephews watch Laurel and Hardy face an army of furry, beast-like creatures that evoke the Greek kallikantzaroi—hairy monsters that, like the belsnickel or Krampus, appear during Christmas time to wreak chaos on the houses of people who do not want to give food or gifts to the poor. It’s a kind of noisy and frightening—but morally grounded—charivari.

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Far from being a simple visual horror trope, like Jason’s hockey mask or Freddy Krueger’s red-and-green-striped shirt, Harry’s adoption of the Santa persona and costume is integral to the character’s moral and psychological positioning. Indeed, Harry’s Santa Claus costume provides him with a direct link with the carnivalesque juridical prerogatives and functions of its mythical model. Like Saint Nicholas’s companion, Harry punishes immoral people such as Moss Garcia, a child who has “impure thoughts” (he is seen reading soft-core magazines at the beginning of the film). One night, Harry stands in front of the boy’s house, blackens his face and his hands with mud, and sticks them against the wall to Above: Harry turning his car into Santa’s sleigh.

leave a black imprint as a warning—similar to the way Black Pete “marked” the house of disobedient children in the German folkloric tradition. Then, his face still covered with mud, Harry scares the boy by hiding behind a bush and suddenly extending his arm as if to catch the child when he passes by.

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Harry also punishes cynical adults who do not believe in Santa or the Christmas spirit of goodwill towards men. In particular, he turns objects related to childhood innocence into punitive weapons in a carnivalesque fashion reminiscent of the spirit of the Feast of Fools. (3) He rips one colleagues’ throat with a Christmas star tree and executes another who overtly mocked the Santa symbol Harry stands for, by planting the sword of a toy soldier into the person’s eye (a further reference to Babes in Toyland), before chopping two more in the head with a toy axe. The spectacular configuration of the scene (the executions take place in front of a church with the churchgoers watching) evokes the way Hop-Frog kills the king and his ministers, setting their costumes on fire then hanging them over the ballroom with guests attending. Above: Harry as Punitive Foolkiller.

CONCL US I ON By advertising Christmas Evil as a slasher film, the distributors obviously wanted to cash in on the success of Friday the 13th (1980), released a few months before, and on the Puritanical/New-Right zeitgeist that led to the election of Ronald Reagan. But, with its focus on a pathetic but likable social outcast (insane in his own way, Harry is nonetheless the only truly sympathetic character in the film) and its empathy with the innocent and the marginalized, Lewis Jackson’s film is surprisingly subtle and complex. As opposed to Halloween’s Michael Myers and later slasher killers, Harry has adopted a system of belief that somehow exonerates him for his crimes; by applying the sort of just punishment Santa Claus stands for, Harry believes that he is doing the right thing. As far as he is concerned, he is Santa, and Santa punishes the ones who have been naughty. In open homage to James Whale’s Frankenstein and Fritz Lang’s M, the end of the film features a lynch mob that chases Harry in the darkened streets. In the fantasy he acts out, Harry believes he is the innocent scapegoat of a society that pretends to live by values it does not actually upheld—in this case, the simple morality of Christmas. Far from using the holiday as a purely decorative or aesthetic setting (as in slasher films such as To All a Goodnight (1980)), the folklore of Christmas—through its association with medieval folk rituals of justice such as the charivari—provides the protagonist with a way to move beyond his psychopathology and to access a position from which he can play a primordial political role: the upholding of a moral law disregarded by society. By masquerading as Santa, Harry becomes the King of Fools, a Carnival Lord of misrule who brings (rough) justice to those who disrespect the traditional meaning of Christmas. His exclusion at the end of the film, which evokes the ritual scapegoating and sacrifice of the Carnival king, is a tragic but fitting conclusion to his reign of vigilante terror.

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It should come as no surprise, then, that the film was not popular at the time of its release. In an America on the verge of electing Ronald Reagan, Santa was better appreciated as a joyful embodiment of capitalism run-amock (see Santa Claus: The Movie, 1985) than as a leftwing killjoy. In its overt indictment of the selfish values of commercialism and liberalism, Christmas Evil illustrates that the Foolkiller can be a dangerous myth.

NOTE S 1) The scene opening the film, in which Harry witnesses his parents engaging in sex in the livingroom, reads like a textbook illustration of the Freudian primal scene (a fantasy in which the child sees or imagines his parents copulating). Sat in the middle of the stairs, Harry sees “Santa” on his knees, caressing his mother’s leg and about to get a treat of his own. Clearly upset by what he has just observed, he rushes upstairs to the attic room, smashes a snow globe on the floor, picks up a piece of broken glass, and deeply cuts his hand to expiate this forbidden vision in a masochistic gesture. Harry’s later fixating on Christmas lore and obsession with the figure of Santa can be apprehended, within this psychoanalytical frame, as a fetish preventing Harry from total psychotic breakdown. 2) Saint Nicholas’s archaic origins, its relationship with mythological figures such as Herne/Pan and Wodan/Odin, and its connection with the Wild Hunt (in France, Mesnie Hellequin) are the object of careful studies. 3) Mikhaïl Bakhtin, the most important theoretician of the carnival, writes about the use of everyday objects such as kitchen implements as burlesque weapons in Carnival.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Bakhtin, Mikhaïl. Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bercé, Yves-Marie. Fête et révolte: Des mentalités populaires du XVI° au XVIII° siècle, Paris, Hachette, 1976. Christol, Florent. “The Foolkiller Movie: Uncovering an Overlooked Horror Genre,” in Interdisciplinary Humanities: Expanding the Scope of Horror ed. Edmund Cueva and William Nowak, 2017. Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder. Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Morgan, Jack. The Biology of Horror, Gothic Literature and Film. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Zemon-Davis, Nathalie. “The Reasons of Misrule” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007. Miles, Clement. Christmas Customs and Traditions. New York: Dover, 1976 Bowler, Gerry (ed.) The World Encyclopedia of Christmas. M&S, Toronto, 2000, Sanson, William. A Book of Christmas. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1968. Van Renterghem, Tony. When Santa was a Shaman: The Ancient Origins of Santa Claus and the Christmas Tree. Llewellyn Publications, Saint Paul, MN, 1995.

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Y OU B ETTER W AT C H O U T: CHAPTER 5 AMANDA REYES

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or anyone who ever felt like Scrooge during the holidays, Lewis Jackson’s classic holiday horror Christmas Evil (1980) (aka You Better Watch Out) may be just the movie to warm your cockles. A true dark horse that seemed to come out of nowhere in 1980, Jackson’s anti-commercialism arthouse horror film is laced with subversive humor as it takes on a holiday known more for excess spending and long lines than actual Christmas cheer. Although it only had a limited release during its original run, Christmas Evil has acquired a growing following in recent years. Whether we look to Christmas Evil’s main character Harry Stadling as a symbol of a more innocent time, or have finally caught on to what Jackson was trying to tell us all those years ago, the film has cemented its status as a Christmas anti-classic, with its bizarre riff on the Santa Claus myth. To get to the bottom of what makes the film works so well, we talked with Lewis Jackson about his inspirations, the movie’s distribution issues and Christmas Evil’s most famous fan.

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What was the inspiration for Christmas Evil? One night in 1970 at Christmastime I smoked a joint and had this image of Santa holding a knife in his hand. I wrote the first draft in 1975 and ’76 and then rewrote that for another three or four months, which is the basis for the movie, which was originally called You Better Watch Out. Although when I got the financing, I had to go back and take out some of the more expensive elements, including some grandiose crowd scenes. Originally I wanted shots from the sky of hundreds of people Left: Harry Stadling, always on the outside looking in, in Christmas Evil.

running through the streets, looking like blood in the bloodstream. Are you a fan of horror movies? Only some, like The Black Cat (1934), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). And there are references to other movies throughout Christmas Evil. For example, I borrowed the gun turning and facing the camera in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) in order to do the snow globe with Harry as a child. And I took a lot from Fritz Lang, both M (1931) and Fury (1936). Frankenstein (1931) is an easy reference. I have no use for the slasher film cycle that began with Halloween (1978); I find movies about killing girls who aren’t virgins despicable. Ironically, the success of Halloween led to my getting financing and, to my producer’s great dismay, he didn’t realize what he was getting into because he couldn’t see the difference between my script and that movie. The thing about my taste in horror films, as in most other genres, is I like content and ideas that make you think. The studios have dumbed down their audience and are slowly losing them. And now, when I look at a horror movie, I feel like I’m watching something I’ve seen a thousand times over. Christmas Evil walks a fine line between art house and horror with a strong emphasis on character analysis. Was it a tough film to get produced? Oh yeah. As I said, I got the money because people thought I would make a slasher movie, but I never had any intention of doing that. I was totally wrapped up in Fassbinder at the time! I felt I was making, if not an art movie, then a foreign film. The funny thing is that, before I got the money, I spent years getting the script rejected. And then after I made the movie, I spent years getting the film rejected. It took forever for the film to get any recognition, and John Waters was the first to acknowledge it. You can’t imagine what it was like going to screenings and having no one like the film.

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Brandon Maggart’s performance as Harry Stadling is amazing. What stuck out to you most when he auditioned? There was something about the way he pantomimed carrying the sack on his back. I was looking for something visual to connect it and he gave it to me. His background was in theatre and musical comedy on Broadway and comedians usually make good dramatic actors. Harry’s descent into madness is expressed almost solely through nuances and facial expressions. Was that hard to capture and convey?

I only know one way to work and it’s mostly instinctive. I don’t think I was aware of anything more than the fact that I wanted to convey things visually; I like the pictures to tell the story without the dialogue. Only many years later did I actually realize that much of the story could have taken place in Harry’s head. The only time I ever intended to have that ambiguity was at the end when Harry crashes and imagines himself flying away in his van. How did this surreal ending go over with general filmgoers? When I saw the movie on 42nd Street in New York City for the first time, the audience booed and threw things at the screen. Only in the last few years have audiences began to find the film funny. Time has caught up to my sensibility. Or maybe the world has proved to be as dark as I imagine it to be? The film was a perennial on 42nd Street for about eight years. There are many other good performances in the film. Peter Neuman was adorable as Moss Garcia. Do you know what ever happened to him? I have no idea what happened to Peter but god, was he a cute kid! And very sweet in person. He really wanted to go through that Penthouse magazine in one scene we shot and I remember his mother wasn’t happy. Even though the film was low budget, some of the production design and special effects were remarkable. Harry’s apartment full of Santa memorabilia, for example, is amazing. I spent ten years collecting every odd Santa Claus piece I could find. Every picture, every cup, every odd item. When we finished shooting I found that the crew grabbed up much of the pieces and I only have one or two left.

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It’s amazing what you can do if you’re inventive enough. I was quoted a price of $200,000 from Hollywood to fly Harry’s van at the end. We did it for maybe $8,000. The snow was cut up plastic bags, blown by giant fans. Since we shot in the dead of winter, the wind was brutally cold and you could see the actors’ breath. It helped make the atmosphere look real. Christmas Evil has had an interesting distribution history. I wouldn’t say interesting, I would say catastrophic! The film was originally supposed to have a theatrical release by a very reputable Hollywood

distributor, Atlantic Releasing. But my producer was in great personal financial difficulty and he was always trying to make these business deals. One day the distributor said to me, “I’ve gone along with Burt, but he’s now thrown his seventh deal into the mix and I’m out.” From there the story gets murky. There seemed to have been two theatrical distributors, one on the east coast and one on the west. The one on the west coast planned a wide release through Southern California, but the MPAA nixed his ad campaign (this was at the time of the controversy over Silent Night, Deadly Night (1980)). He lost a fortune on the campaign and didn’t have to money to start again, so he pulled all the bookings. On the East Coast, I’m not sure where it played besides 42nd Street. I don’t know if John Waters saw it in New York or Baltimore. Somewhere in this time period, someone changed the name from You Better Watch Out to Christmas Evil without consulting me (although from this point on, no one ever consulted with me about anything ever again). As much as some people like the new title, I don’t because I think the word “Evil” is wrong for the story. From that point on, the film kept appearing on home video releases. There were two or three VHS versions, including one that didn’t even know how to spell my name. Then came the DVD versions, which became kind of a joke with so many bootlegs. A few years ago, I was determined to get the film back and began going after the bootleggers. I subsequently found out that even Troma, who I agreed to do a commentary for, didn’t have rights and so now their version is off the market too. Synapse’s DVD version of the film was a treat for me at the time, but the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray features a 4K scan from my 35mm master and collects all the extras from earlier versions. It even restores my original title, You Better Watch Out.

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You’ve mentioned that you wished you could have expounded more on certain plot points. What would you have changed or added?

This is hard to answer after so much time, but there are at least two whole scenes that completely explain the film’s backstory. One of these scenes, especially, shows Harry’s brother’s job as a city Marshall and was intended as a fairly lefty political comment. They were cut to speed up the movie and because they were anything but typical horror movie scenes. Are you surprised by the longevity and growing cult status of your movie? I wouldn’t have been surprised when I first wrote the film or when I

was making it, but in the years following I would never have guessed. I remember someone in a video store told me John Waters had written about the film in his book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1986). While a little too egotistical of me to quote what he said, needless to say it’s pretty great. We’ve become friends and he continues to support the film to this very day. He now does a great summary of the movie’s plot, which can be heard on the National Public Radio archives of Terry Gross’s program Fresh Air. Today, of course, I assure you I always knew I was right. There is a very rewarding feeling about the fact the film plays better almost a quarter of a century after it was made. It really doesn’t seem to have dated. Christmas Evil really criticizes commercialism. Do you think things have gotten worse in the last 25 years? To me, greed is the American religion. Whatever pious bullshit the church or the government tells us, it’s only about greed. Years ago, Hollywood actually made movies that acknowledged that. Today you get directors like Spielberg and Lucas—two men without an intelligent idea in their head between them, who together took all the content out of American movies. Spielberg has since tried to pretend he’s putting it back in, but he’s a complete propagandist. Harry is an innocent gone wrong. But today’s movies don’t like innocents, and they certainly don’t like stories about the working class. There’s no ambiguity left. No grays; just finite right and wrong. It makes it easy to tell audiences how to judge things in the most simplistic terms. But god forbid that people see beneath the surface and realize they’re not even acting in their own best interests. One of the reasons the film has become so accepted and even seen as funny is that, if anything, it underestimates how crass America has become.

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Above: A reimagining of Santa’s sleigh in Christmas Evil.

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CHAPTER 6 ZACH CLARK

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n a clearing in the woods, artificial smog floats through the electric blue glow of nighttime in the movies. Three teenage girls with almost matching perms emerge from the trees, and one of them, Kirsten, announces that she’s found the spot they’re looking for. The girls gather in a makeshift circle, sitting cross-legged on the dirt. Kirsten lights some candles and announces the convening of the first meeting of “The Sisters of Anti-Christmas.” She passes some papers around with a script for the ceremony, while she flips through an old book on the occult. “We bemoan Christmas as a petty, bourgeois, over-commercialized media event,” reads her friend Brooke. Kirsten shows them a drawing in her sketchbook—a nude Aryan goddess with freeslowing blonde hair and symbols on her oversized breasts that look very much like unfinished swastikas.

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“She’s our symbol,” Kirsten announces. “The Virgin of Anti-Christmas!” A cold wind moans through the woods and the candle flickers. Kirsten reaches out to steady the candle’s glass base but it breaks, cutting her hand. The teens decide to head indoors, but not before Kirsten’s blood seeps into the ground and the claw of a rotten, monstrous little puppet shoots straight up through the dirt. This early scene sets the stage for the subversive yuletide carnage of Jeff Mandel’s Elves (1989), a low budget straight-to-video creature

Left: An elf sculpted in clay for Elves. Photo: Vincent Guastini.

feature with a knowing sense of camp and a nasty mean streak. Shot on 16mm over three weeks in summer 1989, it was the second production from Action International Pictures to film in Colorado Springs, Colorado, following the controversial supernatural thriller Alien Seed, starring Erik Estrada. The cast and crew were mostly locals, many of them working on a feature film for the first time. Unapologetically lurid and sensational, Elves was rushed to video store shelves in time for the 1989 holiday season bearing the tagline, “They’re not working for Santa... anymore.” The film often wears its low budget on its sleeve—there is actually only one elf in Elves, a barely articulate little gremlin that doesn’t so much attack its victims as it does lunge and lurch at them, thrusted in violently from off camera. Despite this, Elves has developed a small but devoted cult following over the past two and half decades, thanks in part to a viral Youtube excerpt featuring a lengthy monologue concerning the origins of the titular monster, involving a Neo-Nazi plot to breed a new master race. Elves stars Dan Haggerty, a fluffybearded bear of a man who gained fame as the title character in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974) and a subsequent television series of the same name. But in 1984, Haggerty was busted for supplying cocaine to two undercover police officers and, a few years later, was slumming it in direct-to-video B-pictures like Abducted (1986), Terror Night (aka Bloody Movie) (1987), Mind Trap (1989) and The Chilling (1989). While Elves was likely just another gig for Haggerty, he brings a measured, lowkey grace to the role, letting the film’s ridiculous atrocities slide off with ease.

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The film’s story revolves around Kirsten (Julie Austin), whose blood accidentally gives life to the film’s killer elf. While working at her department store job during the pre-Christmas rush, Kirsten is molested by the lecherous, drug-addled sleaze that’s been hired to play Santa, until a gnarled little creature shows up and repeatedly stabs him in the crotch. (“He was a pervert and a drug addict and somebody killed him,” Kirsten monotones. “Isn’t that the spirit of Christmas?”). In need

Above: Dan Haggerty on the cover of TV Guide, promoting The Life and Times of Grizzly Addams (1974).

of a new Santa, the store quickly hires chain-smoking Mike McGavin (Haggerty), a homeless ex-store detective. Hysteria soon begins to mount. Kirsten’s psychotic mother (Deanna Lund) drowns the family cat in a toilet after it angers her. Kirsten is chased by killers with bad German accents, and they attack some of her friends and loved ones in a series of bloody and grim deaths, including an especially unnerving bathtub electrocution. Working together, Mike helps Kirsten uncover a dark family secret—sired by her own invalid grandfather (Borah Silver), she is being prepared to mate with an elf on Christmas day to keep her German bloodline pure and help usher in the new dawn of the Fourth Reich. Ah, the holidays! Director Jeff Mandel, who has only a few other completed feature directing credits to his name—including the cyborg spoof CyberC.H.I.C. (1990), whose name had to be changed from Robo-C.H.I.C. for legal reasons—brings to Elves a smart self-awareness and a scrappy DIY attitude that make it an enduring classic of degenerate Christmas kitsch. Mandel, a gregarious storyteller, discussed his involvement with the film by phone in August, 2016.

How did you get into filmmaking? I was raised in Los Angeles in the Park La Brea Towers near the La Brea Tar Pits and the L.A. County Art Museum. I was jumping up and down in the back of my mom’s bright red Pontiac convertible as she was driving around there, and Charlton Heston pulls her over, and says, “Him. I want him to play me as a kid in this movie I’m making.” That movie was The Ten Commandments (1956). She says, “He’s only three and a half years old.”

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My mother wanted me to be a doctor. I entered UCLA at 16 as a pre-med major, but in my junior year I secretly changed to the College of Fine Arts. As a junior, I was taken into the UCLA Film and TV department and went to graduate school there. I didn’t tell my parents for a little bit; I think that I always wanted to go into music but they wanted me to be a doctor, and so I think I just squeezed into film that way—couldn’t go completely against them. It was just in my blood since I was born. What attracted you to genre movies?

I remember Invaders from Mars (1953). I remember the music from it. I have this kind of eidetic memory. All the TV theme songs from when I was a kid, I can remember them, hear them in my head. I think that real filmmaking, in the United States at least, only appears in [low budget] genre films; everything else is a manufactured studio process. I’ve worked in that mainstream studio atmosphere, on television, and it’s not as creative, there’s so much political maneuvering you have to do. In film school, in those days at UCLA, you would get this kind of guerrilla filmmaking feel, where we made it work any way we could. The set fell over? Okay, let’s incorporate that into the story. Let’s just keep rolling. There’s an excitement to it. How did you come to be involved with Elves? Action International Productions (AIP) came about at the peak of direct-to-video. They would first do a poster for a film and sell it to all the foreign markets. Then, with the money they made, they could budget the film and build in a profit before shooting. I don’t know if that’s commonly known; it’s not illegal, but it’s maybe not the most ethical thing to do.

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I wrote some films for them. I helped out. It was just exciting the way they turned those things out. I think we just finished writing Firehead (1991); Christopher Plummer, Chris Lemmon and Martin Landau were in that film. Peter Yuval, one of the partners at AIP, told me they had agreed to distribute three pictures for a company in Colorado: Alien Seed, Elves and Cyber-C.H.I.C., which I could direct. I felt Cyber-C.H.I.C. was my opportunity to really break through and make a name for myself. I worked really hard on that script and when they got it there in Colorado,

Above: Spanish VHS cover for Alien Seed (1989)

everybody loved it. They went crazy. A few months before the shoot, I got a call from one of the other producers, Mark Pagley. He told me the director of Alien Seed didn’t work out very well, and that they were having script trouble with Elves. So they asked if I could take a shot at the Elves script and, if they liked it, I could come early and direct that one. I said, “Well, sure.” You never say no, right? He said, “We have Dan Haggerty as a department store Santa, and then there are these Nazis.” I said, “Stop. I don’t want to hear what the other writer did. That’s all I need. Dan Haggerty, department store Santa and Nazis. Yes, I’ll do this, but don’t tell me any more.” Robo C.H.I.C. was actually the first solo writing credit I think I had. Everything else was done with my collaborators—usually Rod Taylor and Bruce Taylor, who later did the Jodie Foster film, The Brave One (2007). I had just come off writing five things in a row and I was so exhausted. I called Bruce and said, “Bruce, I’m just so burned out. You have to help me.” He says, “Well, I can’t. I’m not free either.” We agreed that Mike [Griffin] would come Monday and Wednesday, and Bruce was going to come and help me on Tuesday. So, we wrote it in six days.

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What’s your personal relationship with Christmas as a holiday and how do you feel you might have channeled it while making the movie? I was raised in a liberal, secular, Jewish home, but my mother always had a Christmas tree. She would do a litany of things like stick cotton batting in the fireplace grating to look like Santa’s beard, or have footprints going to the presents. Once my uncle Jerry showed up in a Santa suit. Yes, there’s a cynicism in the film, but whatever film I did would have had that.

Above: U.S. VHS cover for Robo-C.H.I.C., aka Cyber-C.H.I.C. (1990).

I love going to the candlelight precession at Disneyland every year. I love Christmas music. I think the hymns are beautiful. I like Christmas. I like the parties. I think the Nazis were a more important influence to me, in [writing] the film. The thought was, “Why would Christmas be significant? What would it be?” Of course, it was the elves. Do you know why AIP was interested in getting into the Christmas horror genre? AIP couldn’t make enough money fast enough just producing their own films, so they would work with outside producers. I believe that producers would come to AIP with a few suggestions for films they could distribute. I don’t know if AIP picked [which movies they wanted] or if Elves was always part of that mix. I will say that AIP had never done a horror movie. They had never done anything as unique and idiosyncratic as Elves. I think they were expecting something much less ambitious. Speaking of expecting something less ambitious, we should talk about that elf puppet. At first the producers said, “Look, this elf is being made in New York by this special effects team. We’re going to have like seven elves. There’s going to be one elf that’s about a foot tall, maybe two feet tall, and one that can scamper on the floor like a squirrel, one that can go up stairs, one that can do advanced facial expressions.” So I incorporated all that into the script. When I get there, there’s not one elf. Patrick Denver, the guy representing the special effects group, was the son of Bob Denver who played Gilligan in Gilligan’s Island. He had the same haircut and from about two feet away he looked like he was Gilligan. He and I became good friends. He was into the arts and crazy stuff like I was.

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So Patrick comes in and tells me they ran into problems and all they have is a four and a half foot tall clay sculpture of the top half of an elf on the rotating stand. Everybody’s watching it on a video going, “Oh man. Oh wow, that looks great.” I said, “That’s very different than what I was told. Where are the ones that do other things?” So the top half of an elf showed up, but the cable controls locked up before shooting so nothing on the elf moved. Then there was a stunt elf, a non-moving, foam elf that you’d throw at actors from off camera. Then, we got two articulated hands and two feet. Patrick also had a five-foot tall giant foam elf face with really great articulation that they were supposed to shoot close-ups with; he was going to do that as B-roll in another studio while we were shooting the movie. But you could

Right: “Patches” the Elf. Photo: Vincent Guastini

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look at it and see the face looked nothing like the face on the elf that we were using. A lot of directors would have put their foot down and refused to do it, but my attitude was, “We’ve got 16 days. How am I going to make this work?” Patrick said, “Look, Jeff, don’t worry about it. We’ll cut a hole in the bottom, I’ve studied puppetry. I can stick my hand up that elf and move it.” Except, I guess he learned puppetry like at the Muppets or something, where they do these kind of comedy takes. So we’re shooting on location at the Black Forests of Colorado at night, and here’s Gilligan with his hand up an elf, operating it like a Muppet. I said, “I love this. I love my job.”

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What was working with Dan Haggerty like? He has such a laid-back presence on screen. He was warm, he was wonderful. He would go into town and go to bars. Colorado Springs was great for him but he started spending the money that he got, and he got a lot of the budget. I think the producers wound up spending only about $130,000 or $150,000, counting Haggerty’s salary. I’m proud of that. But then, he started doing cocaine. We tried to stop it, but the guy

Above: Giant elf head. Photo: Vincent Guastini

who played the detective was Dan Haggerty’s friend, and he would sneak Gatorade in to him loaded with coke. At one point, the costume designer came to me and said that Dan wouldn’t come out of the closet. She said, “He’s wearing the wrong coat for this scene and I can’t talk to him. I’m afraid of talking to him.” So I went and opened the closet door, and said “What are you doing in there Dan? Come on, we’re ready to shoot the scene. You know, you’re wearing the wrong coat. Let’s get the right coat on you.” I grabbed his arm and it was like a bear. His arms, his huge upper body, was hard as wood, hard as a rock. He was just going, “Grr,” like that. I’ve never been that close to somebody that was on that much medication.

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But I never had to do a retake with him. We would start rolling and you would hear him snort up blood or get the mucus out of his nose. Then, “Action,” and he would hit his mark, do his line perfectly. After “Cut,” he’d go back down to the floor and be fucked up again. In that regard, he was a pro. We would [shoot] 7- to 12-page days. He knew his lines. The movie has a sort of crazy, unhinged tension to it but it’s never too campy or self-aware. I knew we couldn’t make E.T. (1982), we couldn’t even make Friday the 13th (1980). But what we could do is push it farther, be more outrageous.

Above: Elf puppet legs. Photo: Vincent Guastini.

There’s no way that this elf could compete with any other Christmas monster, but we could make it do terrible things. When I wrote the script in six days I didn’t intend to include those elements, but I wanted to take to every thread to its logical conclusion. I didn’t say, “I’m going to do incest.” I just got to the point where I had to figure out, “Wait a minute, why is this going on?”

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You never felt like you took things too far while shooting?

There was a scene in the elevator with the girl [being murdered while wearing lingerie]. I wanted to cast real teenagers—16, 17 years old. But I guess the producers wanted a movie with actresses they were allowed to be attracted to. That was the first thing that I really felt defeated on. She was the one holdover from the first set of three girls. She was only 17 years old. She’s laying there and Patrick Denver brought in a bucket of blood, and then the line producer came in and said, “Listen, we just got word from AIP. It’s too bloody and maybe there’s too much skin showing in some scenes.” So I told Patrick to take it easy with the blood. He had his hands in the bucket, and said, “Jeff—When did you ever listen to anybody else?” I said, “Hmm.” He sticks his hands all the way into the Above: On the set of Elves. Photo: Vincent Guastini.

blood and looks up at me, hopefully. I looked over my right shoulder, I looked over my left shoulder, and I looked at him and nodded. I said, “Go ahead.” And he just poured the blood out. Of course, in Japan that scene is used in the cover art. Did you have to finish it just as quickly?

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It was edited in six days. I took the 6:00pm to 6:00am shift, and then another group came in for the day shift. We edited direct to online, there was no rough cut. I think half of my time was going back through the day crew’s work and conforming it more to what I had envisioned instead of what they had cut together. None of these people had ever cut films. They had done commercials before, but I have very distinct ideas about editing that I got from working with Slavko Vorkapić at UCLA, who did montage sequences at MGM in the 1930s. He codified film grammar—he was all about Eisenstein, and Orson Welles, overlapping cuts, and how you’re not supposed to do a 360 degree cut. Then we had three days to do the final dub in a little eight-track Above: Kirsten (Julie Austin) comes face to face with the elf.

recording studio in Wisconsin owned by one of the producers’ brothers. So I flew to Green Bay and discovered that none of the dialogue had been separated or mixed. It was a mess. They’d never heard of foley effects. I thought, “No. I’ve come this far, we can’t do this. We’re going to ruin the movie.” So I sat in that studio for 24 hours or more and foleyed the entire movie myself. As the last reel was being mixed the taxi was outside waiting to take me to the airport because it had to back in Colorado Springs. Going through security I carried the reels by hand, wrapped in my jacket. A guy standing behind a counter said, “Excuse me, I think you dropped something. Is this yours?” I said, “Oh my God, it’s reel four. Thank you.” How was the movie received when it was released to video stores that Christmas? AIP’s owners told me that Elves was their highest-earning direct-tovideo release over the six or seven years the company was around. Some reviewer called it the best direct-to-video horror film of the ‘80s. Since then, I learned it was big in Japan. A Japanese reporter came here and went crazy, called some people and I did interviews. I also ran into these guys who ran a fan club in England for Elves. They told me that, all through school, they would say lines to each other. To me, that’s maybe the best compliment I can think of.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y:

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Feldman, Paul. “Dan Haggerty Gets 90-Day Jail Term in Drug Sale Case” in LA Times, April 25, 1985. Accessed online http://articles. latimes.com/1985-04-05/local/me-27248_1_officers-entrapped Prior, David A. That’s Action! Action International Pictures, 1990

Right: U.S. VHS box art for Elves.

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CHAPTER 7 ERIC ZALDIVAR

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o-directed by college students Paul Talbot and William Cooke, Campfire Tales (1991) is a modest and generally unrecognized horror anthology that managed to rework the Santa Claus legend in a way that hadn’t been done before. Born in 1965 in Salem, Massachusetts, Talbot became infatuated with horror movies at an early age, after viewing The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958). The hobby fueled his young creative endeavors and he would entertain his friends by showing them his Super 8 shorts at school lunch break. Later teaming up with like-minded peer Cooke, the two collaborated on Campfire Tales, a portmanteau horror film that included a segment called, “The Fright Before Christmas” in which a failed businessman murders his mother for his inheritance and is visited by Satan Claus. This paved the way for Talbot to produce a string of sister films that, like Campfire Tales, starred the late Gunnar Hansen, the man behind Leatherface’s mask in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

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In this Q&A, Talbot discusses the inspiration for Satan Claus, creating seasonal horror stories and his professional relationship with Gunnar Hansen. What made you decide on doing an anthology film as opposed to a more traditional feature? In our final year of college, William Cooke and I took a 16mm film course and made a short horror movie called The Hook. After graduation, we wanted to make a feature but we had no money or connections. So Left: A fearsome skeletal Santa in Campfire Tales (1997). Photo: Courtesy of William Cooke.

we decided to use the already-completed The Hook as the first story in a horror anthology. That way, we could save money and shoot the movie “piece-by-piece” with different casts and crews instead of trying to commit one group of people to a spread-out shooting schedule. So the film came together over some years? Yes. We finished The Hook in the spring of 1987. The post-production on the feature was completed in early 1991. The stories are morality based; there is a comeuppance for characters who behave poorly. Were EC Comics an influence on the film? Absolutely. I think every post-EC anthology movie has been inspired by those comics. Not only were we trying to imitate the EC story format, but we were also trying to copy the visual style of those magazines via odd camera angles and garish coloured lightning. Along with the different subjects within each story, careful attention is given to when the tales take place. Changes in season (including Halloween and Christmas) and time periods (such as in the film’s pirate segment) are notable throughout. Many portmanteaus don’t stray into that level of detail. Was this intentional or just a happy accident? The Hook was set on Halloween, mainly because it was shot in October and we took advantage of the seasonal pumpkins. When we wrote the feature, I had just watched a lot of Christmas-themed horror movies (such as Christmas Evil (1980) and Black Christmas (1974)) and I wanted to do a Christmas-set scary story. The pirate story was written to take place on a specific island where Cooke had vacationed. That way, we could shoot a “period” story without needing extensive sets.

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Was “The Fright Before Christmas” produced during its respective holiday?

No, it was shot in the spring. To simulate snow in the exterior scenes, we spread laundry detergent on the porch and dropped ground-up Styrofoam from a box. Starting with the Joan Collins segment in Amicus’ Tales From the Crypt (1972) there’s been no shortage of Santa-suit wearing killers. It seems that Campfire Tales is one of the first, if not the first, films to include a mephitic version of Santa Claus. What was the inspiration for breaking the mold?

I thought it would be cool to have a Santa Claus monster that was a “real” monster and not a human psycho wearing a Santa suit. This was before the internet and the Krampus craze. I hadn’t heard of Krampus at the time, but I found a book at the library with a chapter about the similar Dutch character “Black Peter.” That legend was an inspiration. Campfire Tales’ practical effects are among its highlights. Though crude, the lack of resources adds to the creep factor, such as the scene with Satan Claus’ lone reindeer—a barely articulate, woodenlooking monstrosity. Could you tell us something about the making of these effects? The (not very) special makeup in every segment was old school latex, tissue paper, crepe hair and spirit gum. The blood was, of course, food colouring and corn syrup. The reindeer was a miniature made from clay. The sleigh was found in an antique store. The movement of the reindeer’s head was done with fishing wire. We couldn’t afford to make eight reindeer. What is the appeal of taking symbols of innocence and goodwill like Santa Claus and repurposing them as something to be feared in horror cinema? Horror and Christmas are odd juxtapositions. When you’re trying to create a horror movie with no money, you can’t attract attention with special makeup or production values. We were trying to create odd stories that might appeal to hardcore horror fans. What was it like working Gunnar Hansen, a man who meant so much to so many even though he only donned Leatherface’s mask once? The wraparound campfire segment was the last thing shot for Campfire Tales. We needed a horror “name” to help make the movie stand out from all the other no-budget shit that was cluttering the bottom shelves of mom ‘n’ pop video stores. That storyteller character was always designed as a cameo role that could be shot in one night. It took some doing to track Hansen up in Maine where he lived—this was before the internet and before Hansen could easily be found at a horror convention every month. We could only afford to have him on set for one night. Prior to the shoot, he had the script and the storyboards for his segments. We rehearsed briefly on the night he flew into South Carolina and we shot his segments on the following evening. (That night, we shot only the shots that he was in. The shots that didn’t include him were shot the previous night using a stand-in/double for his feet, shoulder, etc.) It was a long, stressful night and we were terrified that there would be a camera malfunction, although we had

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another (shitty) camera on set as a backup. Flying him back for reshoots would have been out of the question. Hansen was a very intelligent, softspoken guy. He also did not consider himself to be an actor and he was very insecure about his acting abilities. At the time, he had only done two movies after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. After the shoot, the kid actors and everyone on the crew surrounded him with Texas Chain Saw photos and VHS covers for him to sign. Cooke and I were Texas Chain Saw fanatics and it was a thrill to have Leatherface in our movie. Gunnar also starred in the two spiritual sequels that you made after Campfire Tales (Freakshow and Hellblock 13), which means you have the distinction of working with Gunnar more times than any other director. Any further memories of him from those films? I remember on Hellblock 13, we ran a little over schedule on the day we filmed with Gunnar and we only had him contracted for a certain amount of hours. Instead of charging us extra money to stay late, he offered to stay later if we let him keep his costume. He was a big guy and it was costly to buy clothes in his size. Gunnar played a prison guard in Hellblock 13. You mean to tell me he was doing errands in small town Maine wearing that getup? He actually lived on a barrier island in Maine that you could only get to or leave via a boat that came twice a day. I’m originally from Massachusetts and I always read Yankee magazine, which covered the New England area. In one issue there was an article about the island written by a guy named Gunnar Hansen. I guessed that had to be the same one that was in Texas Chain Saw. I wrote a letter to the editor and that’s how I was able to find him. This was preemail, so it took a few weeks for scripts and contracts to reach him. I guess he wore the prison costume while writing on the island!

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You cited Christmas-themed horror movies as inspiration for your own macabre holiday segment. Do you have a favorite? Three of my favorites are the eerie “The Christmas Party” segment from Dead of Night (1945); Black Christmas (1974), an elegant, intense thriller with a grim ending; and Christmas Evil (1980), a creepy character study. Above: Gunnar Hansen in Campfire Tales (1997).

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CHAPTER 8 AMANDA REYES

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n a review for the inaugural Tales from the Darkside episode titled “Trick or Treat,” Variety wrote that the antagonist of the fable was “the Scrooge of Halloween, crackling all of the images of ‘never listen to your heart’ and ‘nothing is as powerful as money.’” This appraisal of the premiere illustrates the enduring motif of Dickens’ classic novella A Christmas Carol while also underlining its endless ability to perform as a cultural touchstone, even outside of the holiday it is affiliated with. And certainly, Scrooge isn’t the only identifiable trope of the yuletide season. Santa Claus, family gatherings, and consumerist traditions have become ripe and easy go-to images, constructing a familiar milieu on the small screen. But, there are also more subliminal elements attached to the stories of Christmas on television, including the themes of personal redemption, second chances, and forgiveness, among others. These commonly shared literal and metaphorical allusions have been used on the small screen since its rise in the 1940s. And the combination of holiday imagery and allegory is a potent one, positioning audiences into comfortable, wellknown traditions before dropping them into deeper fables.

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While the history of genre anthology programming is rich with classics (or soon-to-be-classics) that range from The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) to Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996) all the way to edgier contemporary fare such as Black Mirror (2011-), anthologies originated as dramas and date back to the earliest days of television. Piggybacking on the success of radio programs featuring “one-off” stories, television incorporated a play-like structure with a visual aesthetic most akin to the Broadway Left: Tales From the Crypt “And All Through the House.” Photo: Bernard Fallon. .

production in terms of its simple set designs and contained spaces. The hybridization of these elements was integrated into a framework of programming that fell into a more modest budget range, yet, the fluidity of the anthology structure allowed it to survive the early days of television, where it still finds devout audiences today. Although it may appear antiquated to modern eyes, the original dressed-down anthology program targeted the Everyman in its dramatic storytelling. According to Molly A. Schneider’s “Television’s Tortured Misfits: Authenticity, Method Acting, and Americanness in the Midcentury ‘Slice-of-Life’ Anthology Drama,” teleplays such as Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) and Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty (1953) strove to present the American experience, and worked because they “are representative of the slice-of-life drama, a realist tradition within television anthology that examines the everyday lives of unglamorous and even maladjusted people, often in order to raise the question of what constitutes authentic Americanness.” And while Jonah Horowitz argues in “Visual Style in the ‘Golden Age’ Anthology Drama: The Case of CBS” that scholars tend to concentrate on only a small section of anthology episodes, generally avoiding a deeper analysis of the form and style of the whole, there remains a “consonant with a critical discourse of the 1940s and 1950s that valued intimacy, realism and story over technique.” Certainly, the proletariat stories reflected a more realistic middle class Americana, with reproductions steeped in “ordinariness,” presenting problems that many viewers personally faced, inside a visual aesthetic that looked much like the audiences’ own living room. This socio-realistic angle of anthology television provided an antidote to the clean-cut lawns, and easily solved issues found in episodic fare such as Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) or Father Knows Best (1954-1960). Several shows throughout the decade were dedicated to this type of single-play format, including Kraft Television Theatre (1947-1958), Studio One in Hollywood (1948-1958), Goodyear Television Playhouse (19511957), and Playhouse 90 (1956-1960), among many others.

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One approach television has continuously used to create an ordinary, recognizable world is to place the audience inside one of the biggest celebrations in Western culture, Christmas. Depictions of the holiday go as far back as the beginning of TV. According to Christmas on Television, the Dumont Network aired a production of A Christmas Carol in 1943. From then on, images of the holiday spread across every type of programming available, including situation comedies, dramas, variety shows and, of course, anthology programs. Early examples of using Christmas as a backdrop in darker anthology

holiday episodes are wide and varied, and include looking at holiday behind bars in the Cavalcade of America’s episode “Barb Wire Christmas” (1955), and using the annual holiday party as a backdrop for murder in Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ “Together” (1958). And just as assorted as the Christmas themes in each tale are the tropes used to bring a message to viewers. It is here that those themes of redemption, second chances and forgiveness are exchanged for disillusionment, ruthlessness, and even death. Consequently, genre anthology shows weren’t far behind the similar groundbreaking series that flourished in the 1940s and ‘50s. Programs such as Science Fiction Theatre (1955-1957), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962), Suspicion (1957-1958), One Step Beyond (19591961), Thriller (1960-1962), The Outer Limits (1963-1965) and of course, The Twilight Zone, relied heavily on the conventional Everyman character study, but thrust Joe Public into amazing and bizarre situations through the platforms of science fiction, fantasy, suspense and horror. In short, by combining the traditional beats of the anthology structure with the most popular tropes of the Christmas season, genre television’s omnibus series are able to exploit the “one off” narrative to explore the darker themes of the holiday. Of course, one of the gloomier aspects of the Christmas season is the feeling of isolation and aloneness that permeate the holiday for so many. That sense of disaffection and alienation has been given the celluloid treatment for decades in many different forms. And even non-genre anthology television has explored this idea since its early days, looking at the ruptures of family, such as with Four Star’s Playhouse’s “The Gift” (1953), which examines the life of a man estranged from his son. Television has also surveyed the melancholy that infiltrates the holiday, such as with The Dupont Show with June Allyson’s “Silent Panic” (1960), which is about a deaf mute who witnesses a murder, but is ostracized by the community, putting his life in danger. However, perhaps no one did it better than the esoteric, metaphor-loaded “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (1961) from Rod Serling’s historic genre anthology series The Twilight Zone.

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Above: Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Photo: © CBS.

Adapted from Marvin Petal’s story “The Depository,” and heavily inspired by Luigi Pirandello’s existentialist play Six Characters in Search of an Author, as well as Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Five Characters” employs a simple, non-descript set, nameless “characters” and a bleak ending to construct an illogical situation twisted inside the very real concept of a disconnection with humanity.

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The story opens with a military man (William Windom) waking up in a large, nondescript cylinder that also houses four other lost souls, including a clown, a ballerina, a hobo and a bagpiper(!). The military man is desperate to escape the tube, but once he finds himself on the outside, he must face the chilling reality of his true place in the world. The military man, like the others residing inside the cylinder, is a thrift store doll left behind in a charity bin, unwanted and unloved (the military man is actually rejected and thrown back into the container by a child in the mind-bending finish). The final scene reveals the characters as their “real” doll counterparts. In her article “Five Characters in Search of a Christmas Episode,” Candace Opper states that the episode is refreshing in its unironic Above: Christmas goes existential in The Twilight Zone’s “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (1961). Photo: © CBS.

self-reflection and that it “exposes the underbelly of Christmas.” She adds that the episode’s cryptic nature allows for layered readings, depending on your mileage. Opper says, “On a social level Rod is making an elementary comment about consumerism. The characters, as people, are lost and purposeless, but as dolls they are part of a system: bought, discarded, recycled. They are destined for the hands of poor orphans, so they have more value as an object than they do as human beings… there is no transcendental spiritual experience or renewed faith in humanity.” Furthermore, use of the word “characters” further designates the individuals as mere personas, relatable to the audience in terms of identification, while also denying them a more layered personhood. Through these devices, the episode explores the idea that we are more than one thing, and the face one puts on in public may not be the same one we would see in private. These dolls, unaware of what they actually are, may look like cheap plastic renderings of a human, but their feelings of despondency, confusion and terror are all too real. Additionally, there are no visual clues this is a Christmas-set story until the surprise ending. Using the holiday as the twist, the anthropomorphized dolls build on an idea that Christmas isn’t always a time for celebration. A more common motif used in holiday television is that of Charles Dickens’ beloved Ebenezer Scrooge from the classic novella A Christmas Carol. In “Sponging the Stone: Transformation in A Christmas Carol,” Arthur P. Patterson notes that Scrooge’s conversion from miserly curmudgeon to generous gentleman lies in the images of “celebrations, social injustice, cruel indifference and deep regrets,” making it quite suitable for the allegorical approach of the anthology format. Patterson also surmises that an unfortunate downfall to the classic novella is that Dickens’ much-loved mythology is often marred by nostalgia and sentimentality. Certainly, well over a century later, Scrooge himself has been eternally overhauled through endless adaptations, so to fall into the mawkishness of the tale is by no means unusual. But, the Monsters (1988-1991) episode “A New Woman” trades in Scrooge’s genuine, feel-good transformation for pessimism, questioning whether the character’s redemption is ultimately more self-serving than altruistic.

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From the outset, the opening credit sequence for the syndicated Monsters is steeped in Americana. The famous main titles feature an overhead shot of a run-of-the-mill suburban neighborhood, where a monstrous but recognizable family reside. A mother, father and daughter bond over their “favorite show” Monsters on the television, suggesting that the series is aligned with American ideologies, while also embracing the Other with the odd but recognizably traditional family. Therefore,

numerous representations of what makes us “human” can exist in this format. (And let’s face it, what family, traditional or otherwise, doesn’t connect over good TV?) Essentially, Monsters riffs heavily on its predecessor Tales from the Darkside (1983-1988) (both shows share the same creator, Richard P. Rubenstein, as well as production company Laurel Entertainment, Inc.). And, as Tales’ descendant, it too was interested in presenting messages and teaching lessons. In his book Terror Television, John Kenneth Muir states, “The series is not above advocating moral standpoints, and is actually fairly didactic in its approach to the human condition.” Because these series were syndicated, Muir adds that they could “escape network censorship and depict bloodier violence (and greater intensity) than ever before.” And, while each series had a low-rent feel, the arguably more visceral (and even lower budgeted) Monsters borders on completely unpolished and ludicrous, which in some ways makes the moral finger-wagging more transparent.

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Although episodes could feel clunky and overly moralistic, there was often an arresting edge of dark cynicism, which has left the series rich with ideas worth revisiting. A good example is “A New Woman” (1990), which features Linda Thorsen as Jessica, a greedy socialite plotting the

Above: Linda Thorson meets a macabre “ghost” in the Monsters episode “A New Woman” (1990). Photo: © Laurel Entertainment Inc.

murder of her ailing husband Thomas (Tom McDermott) so she can stop him from signing over her inheritance to his nephew (Dan Butler) to maintain a homeless shelter. She is visited by a supernatural “heart specialist” (Mason Adams), who wants Jessica to fix her own cold heart. The episode is fairly straightforward and even references A Christmas Carol in a dialogue exchange, but Jessica’s epiphany only occurs after she’s been visited by the Zombie of Christmas Yet to Come (who is her husband). He shows Jessica that she will undergo a disgusting physical transformation that is brought on by her selfishness and ego. This dismal prophecy manifests itself into a last-minute volte-face. Whereas Scrooge’s conversion transpires through a journey of both joy and trauma, it is only through a fear of the painful and disgusting future that awaits her that Jessica can alter her compassionless ways. Even then, she still complains about the fortune she’s lost, so the doctor reaffirms her fear that she can be made hideous at any second if she veers off the straight and narrow by turning her hands into claws with boils. The satirical ending reinforces the notion that darkness and greed are embedded inside Jessica’s very spirit and, consequently, her turnabout is trivial and self-serving, and is likely to be short lived. The title itself also communicates that, while she may be a “New Woman,” Jessica is not necessarily a “Good Woman.” The cheap sets, small cast and crude special effects may appear to slightly lower the aesthetic bar on this tale, but it also elevates it by exchanging the fancy FX for storytelling that explores the overt skepticism of human nature, proving that that Monsters was interested in meatier material. Dickens wasn’t the first one to bring the supernatural into the yuletide season. The longstanding British holiday custom of telling ghost stories around the fire dates back at least to the 16th century. It’s a tradition so deeply entrenched that it found its way to the modern world on television. But, unlike Britain’s longstanding series A Ghost Story for Christmas (original run 1971-1978), which adapted nonChristmas supernatural stories for annual airings, the syndicated series Tales from the Darkside wed the literal act telling chilling tales around a warm fire with the flavourings of the holiday in the episode “Seasons of Belief” (1986).

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A popular series, Tales represents the little guy in figurative form because it spoke to the middle classes in ways that loftier fare did not. Muir contends, “it filled a need and demand not satisfied by big budget network features such as Amazing Stories: the need for good, solid storytelling. That’s not to say that Tales from the Darkside is a classic, or even that it is consistently good, only that it is amusing and a bit inspiring to witness a low-budget, high-concept, homegrown product kick the

tar out of the entertainment equivalent of ‘city hall.’” Like the other, and much cheerier, holiday episode of Tales titled “The Yattering and Jack,” the series generated that homegrown feel by centreing its Christmas stories in the domestic spaces of home, disrupting the comfort of the Everyman with supernatural forces. Adapted from Michael Bishop’s short story of the same name, “Seasons” opens with a family gathered around a fire, as the children await Christmas. The kids’ disbelief in Santa compels the parents (E.G. Marshall and Margaret Klenck) to share a childhood story (which appears to have been made up off the cuff) about “The Grither,” a giant beast from the North Pole who wreaks havoc on anyone bold enough to call out its name. What begins as an amusing attempt to terrify the children into believing the unbelievable ends in horror and death.

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Veteran actor Marshall was the host of CBS Radio Mystery Theatre (19741982), and was therefore no stranger to spinning a yarn. And the core of this tale lies in how a child’s subjectivity is influenced by stories told to them by a trusted adult. Their own version of socio-realism is shaped by these mature figures, and even when the parents confess that they invented the Grither, the children have already invested all of their faith into the idea of the monster, leading to its manifestation. While Muir felt that Tales was connected to Monsters through its didactic messaging, “Seasons” veers off of the morality tale map in

Above: Margaret Klenck brings fantasy into reality in the Tales from the Darkside episode “Seasons of Belief” (1986). Photo: John Perry III.

interesting ways. Even though the creature is summoned by accident, innocent victims are brutally dispatched. And the lingering theme that if you believe in something enough you can make it real is disturbing when used in this context. The children, who are more jaded than we like to think any of us are in childhood, are less interested in imagining the mythos of a benevolent Santa Claus, choosing instead to invest themselves in a creature that exists on pain and sorrow. If centuries-old traditions set the stage to for celebrating the holiday with dark ghostly spirits, the celluloid medium took it one step further, grabbing Santa Claus by the reigns and leading him into the world of horror. As a symbol, the much beloved figure of Santa riding across the globe once a year to descend millions of chimneys during the dead of night may be the most recognizable image of the holiday. Associating St. Nick with horror works on a number of different levels, but essentially, it is this darker image of the adored Kris Kringle that jars us into a state of dread. He invades our homes and has no interest in gift giving; his intention is to cause harm while we wait silently in sleep. While Western culture seems to get most of the credit for the “Killer Santa” subgenre, it has been explored in Japan as well, even though the Japanese celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday denoted by commercialism. As Junko Kimur and Russell W. Belk state in their essay, “Christmas in Japan: Globalization vs. Localization,” yuletide celebrations are a “welcome relief from more hierarchical and obligatory traditional holiday celebrations in Japan, such as the gift giving that occurs at the Oseibo holiday that occurs at the same time of year.” Christmas is commemorated on a volunteer basis as compared to the compulsory Oseibo celebrations, and there is a “unique fantasy element to the Japanese Christmas, one that is also seen in Japanese anime, manga, films and literature.” Yet, despite the popularity of the holiday, it remains to be “seen as foreign,” and therefore the Japanese have maintained a “Western Christmas iconography.” In short, the more recognizable version of Santa Claus remains, for the most part, as is.

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With regards to the holiday’s connection to anime and manga, it is unsurprising that treasured manga author Kazuo Umezu brought a very twisted version of Santa to television for Kazuo Umezu’s Horror Theater. This series, which ran in 2005, was in some ways like the USA’s Masters of Horror (2005-2007) in that it was a limited series (six episodes in all), done by different directors. The connecting factor was Umezu himself, whose work was adapted for television to honor his 50th anniversary as a manga writer.

Adapted for the small screen by Tamio Hayashi, “Present” (2005) is a simple story about a group of young adults who use the Christmas holiday as an excuse to party at a mysterious hotel. Unfortunately, Santa Claus has a different idea in mind. “Present” is one of the more sadistic variations on Santa, but the twist is not so much that the normally benign character is wreaking havoc, so much as that St. Nick is seen as a fluidly monstrous creature, appearing before each victim as he was depicted to them as children.

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Nevertheless, “Present” is in many ways a by-the-book slasher, while offering a variant theme on redemption. The main character’s version of Santa appears before her as the more traditional image (as compared to her friend who sees the killer Claus as a female because her Mother “was a feminist” and told her Santa was a women), but he is also a hybrid of Kris Kringle and the Ghost of Future Yet to Come, showing her the horrors that await her if she doesn’t change her self-absorbed and manipulative ways. Like Jessica’s turnabout in “A New Woman,” this transformation becomes less of a request to alter her behavior and more of an imperative when the spirit of her child-self (Ghost of Christmas Past?), appears to scoop out the devilish part of her brain! Cleverly shot like a manga with extreme angles and a primary color scheme, “Present” uses the familiar in a completely non-Western way, drawing viewers into the story with its Japanese aesthetic, and

Above: Randall Himes maintains the Westernized iconography of Santa Claus in Kazuo Umezu’s Horror Theater episode “Present.” Photo: Shôchiku Eiga. Right: Tales From the Crypt “And All Through the House.” Photos: Bruce McBroom.

then further harvests traditions from both cultures to craft a uniquely chilling version of a Santa hell-bent on destruction. Speaking of deadly Santas, it would be remiss of any essay on Christmasset anthology horror to not mention Tales From the Crypt’s infamous entry “And All Through the House” (HBO, 6/10/1989), which weaves a few of the above-referenced elements into its story. Certainly, the killer Santa imagery is the most obvious trope, as this episode features a mentally unstable stranger dressed as St. Nick (Larry Drake) stalking a woman (Mary Ellen Trainor) who has just murdered her husband. A remake of a segment from the 1972 British theatrical anthology film Tales from the Crypt (which itself was adapted from issue #35 of the Vault of Horror comic anthology series), the common air of cynicism is duly noted by the near sociopathic wife, who, while being chased by a maniac, still has the wherewithal to exploit the dangerous situation by attempting to pin the murder of her husband on the stranger. Ironically, the wife is undone by her own daughter, who lets the crazed killer inside the house because she believes he is Santa Claus. Unlike the Grither, this child still has innocent notions of St. Nick, but like “Present,” that beloved mythology of Santa becomes a symbol of terror and tragedy. The theme of loss of innocence is also prevalent in another Monsters episode. In, “Glim Glim” (2/4/1989), a young girl tries to calm the anxiety of

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the sole survivors of a deadly outbreak by coaxing a peaceful alien into mimicking the traditions of Christmas, only to have the alien gunned down by the girl’s father. Again, the effects are cheaply done and even awkward (the alien looks distinctly like a green tree stump), but is in line with how the anthology series disrupts “normal” holiday aesthetics and perverts the tone of the season (in 22 minutes no less!), lending these misanthropic entries a distinct air of nihilism. In the world of horror anthology TV, the wide-eyed and curious can become keepers of the dark knowledge of death and destruction. The genre anthology series continues to fascinate and find devout viewers. Traditional omnibus series like Black Mirror and Inside No. 9 (2014), and the more modern “one off” season anthology programs such as American Horror Story (2011-) remain interested in deconstructing the Christmas season, putting an emphasis on the grimmer aspects of it. Black Mirror’s “White Christmas” (2014) further incorporates the traditional act of storytelling into the episode. Likewise, Inside No. 9’s “The Devil of Christmas” (2016) also pays tribute to storytelling while recreating the feel of A Ghost Story for Christmas with its vintage aesthetics. And, American Horror Story’s “Unholy Night” (2012) focuses on a sadistic and mentally disturbed Santa Claus. These series are a loving reminder of what can be done with common Christmas images and tales, while also bringing something unique and intriguing into those well-worn tropes in a “one-off” narrative. In TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen, authors Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott conclude, “The thought provoking nature of the single play found a natural home in the allegorical genres of science-fiction or horror, well-suited to philosophizing or conveying messages. This may make horror ‘safe’ for television, but it also directs attention to underlying themes.” It is within the omnibus structure that television can build a normal world, perhaps one in the midst of celebrating the most popular holiday of the year, and then turn it on its ear through disturbing that ordinary space of the Everyman with terror, gooey special effects and tragedy. Visceral pleasures for the masochistic, perhaps, but also thoughtful when one chooses to look deeper.

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Right: Fan art by Michelle Winer for Black Mirror’s “White Christmas” episode

B I B L I OG R A P H Y: Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Penguin Books, Limited, 1994. Horwitz, Jonah. “Visual Style in the “Golden Age” Anthology Drama: The Case of CBS.” Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques Cinémas:/Journal of Film Studies 23, no. 2-3 (2013): 39-68. Jowett, Lorna, and Stacey Abbott. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd., 2013. Kimura, Junko, and Russell W. Belk. “Christmas in Japan: Globalization Versus Localization.” Consumption Markets & Culture 8, no. 3 (2005): 325-338. Muir, John Kenneth. Terror Television: American Series: 1970-1999. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2000. Opper, Candace. “Five Characters in Search of a Christmas Episode.” Full Stop. Accessed February 17, 2017. http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/21/blog/ candace-opper/five-characters-in-search-of-a-christmas-episode/ Patterson, Arthur P. “Sponging the Stone: Transformation in “A Christmas Carol.”” Dickens Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1994): 172. “Radio-Television: Syndie TV Reviews – Tales from the Darkside (Trick Or Treat).” Variety, November 2, 1983, 80. Schneider, Molly A. “Television’s Tortured Misfits: Authenticity, Method Acting, and Americanness in the Midcentury” Slice-of-Life” Anthology Drama.” Journal of Film and Video 68, no. 3 (2016): 30-50. Werts, Diane. Christmas on Television. Westport: Praeger, 2006.

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CHAPTER 9 KIER-LA JANISSE

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ne of the most beloved of all small-screen holiday horrors remains the “And All Through the House” episode of HBO’s 1980s reimagining of Tales From the Crypt (1989-1986), which mined various publications from the EC comics roster for lurid tales of terror that could be made into stand-alone episodes. Broadcast as part of a trio of episodes that kicked off the series on June 10, 1989, “And All Through the House” rivalled its 1972 Amicus counterpart for sheer terror, thanks to a terrific performance from Larry Drake as the slaughtering Santa, deft direction by series co-creator Robert Zemeckis and a cracking script by The Monster Squad’s (1987) Fred Dekker. We asked Dekker for some of his recollections of working on the series and this iconic episode.

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How did you get involved with the Tales from the Crypt series? I was licking my wounds after the box office failure of The Monster Squad when the phone rang. It was Joel Silver, legendary producer of films including Lethal Weapon (1987), Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), The Matrix (1999) and more. I had met Joel through my friend Shane Black, and he was calling to ask if I’d be interested in writing the very first episode of a new HBO series based on the old EC Comics. He told me that Robert Zemeckis would be directing the pilot. I had met Zemeckis briefly because his then-wife, Mary Ellen Trainor, had Left: “And All Through the House” makes the cover of Fangoria #84, July 1989.

played the mom in The Monster Squad. I don’t know if Bob asked for me specifically, but needless to say, I was also a huge fan (anyone who makes movies should be). The decision to do “And All Through The House” was strictly Bob Zemeckis’, but I was happy to go on whatever ride he chose. My phone was not ringing a lot at that particular moment, so the call was part life preserver/part dream come true. Obviously, I jumped at it.

comic “And All through the House”?

Were you a fan of the original Vault of Horror

My only experience with the story was the Amicus film version starring Joan Collins, which—like most of that movie—scared the crap out of me at a young age.

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Do you at all remember the ban on horror comics that was happening in the late 50s?

The McCarthy era/Wertham hearings pre-date me, although I was familiar with the Comics Code Authority that resulted (I was a Marvel kid and saw that logo on all the comics I bought). I also recall various reprints and articles about the classic ECs, so as a horror fan, I knew what they were. When approached to write the script, do you go back and watch the previous version or go directly back to the original comic at all? What did you use as your basis? I didn’t watch the Amicus version again. It was indelibly stamped in my 13-year-old brain, and I didn’t want to be influenced in any direction that wasn’t Bob’s. So instead, I read the original comic story once or

Above: Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis and Walter Hill with The Cryptkeeper. Right: Larry Drake as the psycho Santa of “And All Through the House.”

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twice, and that was our springboard. None of the other episodes I wrote had been produced on film, so I used the same approach: read the comic, cull the best stuff, try to minimize the anachronisms, and so on. How involved were you beyond providing the screenplay? Were you on set at all? I was on set. Bob was incredibly gracious throughout the process. He knew I was a director as well, and he was really great about including me in many decisions. But because he was Robert Zemeckis, I mostly just shut up and learned from watching him. A highlight for me was when we were shooting the episode and Bob asked me to join him in a conference room where a group of Art Department people showed him some miniature set mock-ups for his next film—Back to the Future Part II (1988). I’m curious about the casting—I don’t know whether you had any input there, but especially about Larry Drake who is so brilliant in it. I had no hand in casting, but there’s no reason I should have. There are literally four actors in the whole thing. Plus the lead role was played by his wife (again, Mary Ellen), a decision I highly doubt I could have talked him out of… not that I wanted to. But yes, Larry Drake was perfect! What was your relationship like with Robert Zemeckis? As I said, he was a hero of mine; certainly in the top tier of my favourite directors. This was mostly due to Back to the Future (1985) but I also loved his early films, like Used Cars (1980) and also his screenplay (with Bob Gale) for Spielberg’s 1941 (1979). We worked together closely to break the script, and I still have a little sketch he did of the house so we could track where Santa could get in, where Mary Ellen would try and elude him, where the little girl was, and so on. Bob was meticulous in every aspect, and I learned a lot from him.

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Once “Tales” became a success, the producers decided to tap the EC well again and began developing a news series based on the “TwoFisted Tales”. Zemeckis and I wrote a pulpy World War II adventure—our tribute to pictures like Hell is for Heroes (1962) and Where Eagles Dare (1968), but sadly, it was never made and the series never took off. What was it like working for HBO in those days? Was there a lot of money flowing and creative freedom? I’m not sure about the money, but it felt like total freedom. As I learned on subsequent episodes of Tales From the Crypt (I wrote five; directed

one), each segment was its own little movie, with its own look, its own tone, its own unique reflection of the filmmaker doing it. In that way, it’s one of the purest filmmaker-driven anthology series I can think of. Our executive producers (Bob, Joel, Richard Donner, Walter Hill, David Giler) were all icons to me, so their suggestions were not only welcome but made me feel emboldened. I was working with some of my heroes, and the experience remains a highlight of my career. HBO was one of the first premium cable channels, which meant it was not subject to the same rules that regular television had to abide by for violence, nudity and swearing. Were there things in your “And All Through the House” script—or any of the others you wrote for the series —that you feel you were able to get away with because you were operating in this context? Let’s put it this way: nobody ever told us we couldn’t do anything. Now, that was back when Americans had an inner barometer of what was appropriate or socially acceptable (long gone in 2017), but I suppose we were fairly edgy for the time we were working. My later episodes were a little grittier in terms of violence and language, but I think the best was “Lower Berth,” which was a period piece I wrote for Kevin Yagher to direct. It was unsettling, but a period piece and relatively chaste… if you don’t count a man with severe birth defects copulating with a mummy in order to give birth to The Cryptkeeper! Since you are a director yourself, what did you think of the final product, did it follow what you envisioned with the screenplay? As I said, Bob and I broke the story in minute detail, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. Also, he had, by that time, developed a shorthand with cinematographer Dean Cundey—who happens to have shot some of my favorite films of all time—so it was really a matter of me just sitting back and learning at the feet of masters. Frankly, it’s not a story I would have adapted otherwise, so I was just following Bob’s lead. It should be noted, however, that he shot my script exactly as written, word-for-word.

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In what ways do you feel each version of this story has reflected the anxieties or context of its own time? I haven’t seen the Freddie Francis version in many years, so I can only answer this as a student of film and history. Hammer and Amicus were kind of pushing boundaries in the early ‘70s —a time of extreme uncertainty and social change. For that reason, there’s a provocative boldness to the Tales movie that was au currant

at that time, and really holds up in terms of sheer terror. I’m not sure our version is as scary, per se, because Zemeckis and I were very much influenced by what Steven Spielberg was doing (prior to Schindler’s List (1993)), which was: push the envelope but don’t genuinely unsettle anyone. Which, as a filmmaker, I appreciate as an important lesson if you want to be successful on a wide scale. Since then, Zemeckis has very much embraced his darker side, resulting in some of his greatest work (Flight (2012) springs to mind, among many others). But just to illustrate the point, if you extracted Alan Silvestri’s music, “And All Through The House” would probably be scarier. By the same token, if you extracted Alan’s music from Back to the Future or Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1989) or Forrest Gump (1994), those movies might not work half as well as they do. So it’s all about context. The ‘80s—despite the era of most of my favorite movies of all time—was a mostly safe time, full of pastel colors and blow-dried hair and a vague sense of avoiding base instincts unless coloured by a cheesy sense of meaningful social messages. Not that “And All Through The House” was warm and cuddly, but it was very beautifully mounted and shot and scored, and those things can sometimes take away from the raw reality that is where true terror usually lives. In that regard, I suspect the Amicus version holds up better as a reflection of our current times. Santa Claus is mostly seen as benevolent but his image is so twisted here. What is it about Santa Claus that you think can be really terrifying? Why do you think this particular story has endured over the years? I think that’s the key to horror in a nutshell—taking the familiar and twisting it. You stop at a roadside motel for the night… but what if the desk clerk is actually a homicidal maniac with mother issues? You visit a family member’s grave… but what if that lurching figure behind the tombstones is actually an undead zombie? Your little girl is acting strange and wetting herself—better take her to a psychiatrist and get some MRI imaging. The last thing you expect is she’s possessed by the devil.

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So obviously, Santa is a classic symbol of warmth and good cheer… it only makes sense to give him an axe and add, “Oh, by the way, he’s not really Santa, he’s a lunatic who just escaped from an insane asylum.” Even more than that, Christmas is deeply rooted in western culture as a time we feel bonded and warm and safe. But in our story? Not so much.

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Above: Tales From the Crypt ad © Home Box Office, Inc.

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CHAPTER 10 DEREK JOHNSTON

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Esmé leaned over towards me. “They are telling ghost stories.” “Yes,” said Will, his voice unsteady with both excitement and laughter. “Just the thing for Christmas Eve. It’s an ancient tradition!” —Susan Hill, The Woman in Black, 1983 The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. —Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, 1898 We are telling Winter Stories—Ghost Stories, or more shame for us—round the Christmas fire —Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Tree,” 1850 Now I remember those old women’s words, Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales, And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night About the place where treasure hath been hid. —Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, c.1589

Left: A portrait of English horror author M.R. James, by Alisdair Wood

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he four quotations presented above take us back across 400 years of literature, each claiming an existing—even an ancient—tradition of ghost stories told in winter. The attachment of the ghost story to Christmas as a particular point within winter may be a product of the 19th century, but it was certainly not Dickens’ invention, and is likely to be an older tradition. The German practice of producing Christmas gift books and special seasonal editions of popular periodicals was introduced into Britain in 1822. These gift books and annuals frequently featured elements of the Gothic, including ghost stories, such as “The Regretted Ghost” by Mrs. Hofland, which appeared in the Forget-Me-Not Annual (1825). The Anglophile American writer Washington Irving presented, in his collection The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a story about an English country squire trying to recreate and retain medieval Christmas traditions, including having the local clergyman tell local legends and ghost stories by the fire. This was in 1820, 23 years before Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas. Going even further back, Professor Robert Davis points out that medieval Christian literature featured more ghostly stories at Christmas than at All Souls’ Day, as noted in his 2009 essay “Escaping Through Flames: Halloween as a Christian Festival”:

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In any case, the specific connection of ghost stories to Christmas appears to be one of those traditions that actually is an ancient practice, rather than one invented by the Victorians. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, he was merely part of an ongoing custom, one that shifted from the oral tradition of tales told by the fireside to while away long winter nights, to authors publishing stories to be read aloud to the family or silently to oneself.

So it should come as no surprise that the tradition should develop yet again as new media for storytelling came along. The BBC launched its radio service in November 1922, offering a nominally national service (it would take some time for true national coverage to be available) albeit with some local programming available from each of its transmitters. On Christmas Eve, 1923, the network offered a talk by Mr. A.M. Perkins on “Old Christmas Customs and Superstitions.” Later that evening, three of the regional transmitters offered different versions of A Christmas Carol as part of their seasonal festivities, with Cardiff and Manchester serving up readings of the story, and Glasgow featuring a dramatization. It was here that the tradition of the broadcast Christmas ghost story began. Notably, however, it started with a look back to

the past, to oral storytelling, and particularly to Dickens’ version of that practice. In doing so, it also added to the misconception that it was Dickens who was responsible for the idea of the Christmas ghost story. By linking itself in this way to the past, radio borrowed some of the sense of legitimacy associated with the literary. In the same way, writers like Henry James, Dickens, and even Shakespeare with The Winter’s Tale (c.1610), borrowed some of the strength of tradition that lay behind the long history of the Christmas ghost story. This happened again, when the BBC launched its television service in 1936, and included in its first Christmas schedule a 15-minute performance by the actor Bransby Williams as Scrooge. Williams had appeared in the same role on the radio in 1929, and also played Scrooge on stage and in a 1928 film and 1913 audio recording, so television was picking up on existing links between the actor, the character, the original novel, and the season. Indeed, Williams continued to play Scrooge on radio and television up until 1955, aged 85. It is perhaps no coincidence that 1955 was the year that the competing television service, ITV, was launched in the UK; Williams’ appearance would thus serve as a reminder to audiences that there might be a fresh, new broadcaster around, but that the BBC had already established a history with its audience, and that it fitted into existing traditions. ITV, while wanting to establish itself as exciting, innovative and modern, also needed to align with British traditions and audience expectations. As a result, ITV’s first year included a Christmas Day reading of a ghost story by dramatist and actor Emlyn Williams.

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Since then, the seasonal horror story on radio and television has appeared in several different forms. There have been straight readings, replicating in some ways those fireside tales of the past, by authors or performers including Lord Dunsay, E.F.Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Powell, Tom Baker and Christopher Lee, amongst others. There have also been dramatizations, appearing either as standalone programs or as part of a series. The most prominent of these is probably the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas, which ran from 1971-1978 and had revivals in 2008, 2009 and 2015. But other notable productions include ITV’s Nigel Kneale-scripted The Woman in Black (1989) and oddities like the BBC’s 1992 The Vampyr, a Soap Opera. There have been broadcasts (including on radio) of feature films with a supernatural aspect, frequently in seasons running across the Christmas

Above: An 1890 printing of Shakespeare’s 1623 play The Winter’s Tale.

schedule. These range from the numerous versions of A Christmas Carol to the expected Universal, Hammer and Val Lewton seasons, to Channel 4’s diversification into Chinese Ghost Stories and Japanese kaiju. British television has also featured special Christmas episodes of series that feature ghosts, even when that series otherwise would not include supernatural elements. So while a Christmas special for dark comedy anthology Inside Number 9 (2014-) could be expected to be horrifying, perhaps more surprising were the Christmas ghost stories from police dramas like Bergerac (1981-1991) or The Bill (1984-2010). Even the first Downton Abbey Christmas special in 2011 featured a seemingly supernatural intervention through an Ouija board, while sitcoms such as Not Going Out (2006-) have also presented Christmas hauntings. By associating a supernatural divergence with the holiday season, the disruption becomes acceptable in a way that it would not be at any other time of the year. Just as we expect our daily lives to be changed in the Christmas celebrations, so we accept this change— even expect it—in the the “lives” of familiar television characters. This applies particularly when we consider the Christmas season as something fairly delimited, say to the traditional Christmastide of Christmas Day to Epiphany, or for the two-week duration of the Christmas special Radio Times or TV Times, rather than from mid-August (as in the case of UK broadcaster Channel 5’s screenings of Christmas movies).

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Above: Pauline Moran in The Woman in Black, first broadcast December 24, 1989 on ITV.

Of course, Christmas is not the only time that we find tales of the supernatural in broadcasting, nor are most of these Christmas horror stories set at Christmas. The television version of The Woman in Black does not draw from a holiday setting, while dramas such as The Stone Tape (1972), The Thirteenth Tale (2013) and adaptations of The Turn of the Screw are also not set at Christmas, allowing them to be repeated at any time of the year. The connection is the scheduling; the idea that yuletide is, as the quotations above have it, an appropriate time for horror stories. This means that Halloween specials from American TV series have, with the delay in transmission, been shown in the UK at an appropriate Christmas time, including episodes of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries (1977-1979), The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985) and even The Flintstones (1960–1966).

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So the Christmas ghost story is a long-standing institution, one that dates back past broadcasting, through literature, to oral traditions. At least, that’s the case in England. In the United States—and even in the rest of the UK—the idea of the ghost story at Christmas can seem odd. The reason seems to lie with the split between the Catholic and the Protestant churches in the 16th century. The official Protestant position was that ghosts did not exist, because all souls would be consigned immediately to either Heaven or Hell, with none left to wander the earth and interact with mortals. However, this official position was not

Above: Vanessa Redgrave in The Thirteenth Tale, first broadcast December 30, 2013 on BBC 2.

communicated widely, leaving the ghost story free to strengthen its connections to a secular, folk tradition rather than being part of religious teaching. So, where customs of telling ghostly stories around Christmastime had been part of medieval Christian literature, reinforcing folk practice, the Church did not work to stop the continued telling of supernatural tales at Christmas, even though belief in ghosts was no longer officially acknowledged. This change was absorbed more slowly in areas such as Scotland and Ireland, and where Catholicism retained more of its strength, particularly in Ireland. There, the celebration of the dead around All Souls’ remained the dominant time for the traditional telling of supernatural tales. This led to a divide not just in religion, but in popular culture, that would affect beliefs on the most appropriate time for a ghost story. One result that followed this split was North America’s development of Halloween as a “horror holiday.” This October tradition manifested across Canada and the United States as a result of the influx of emigrants from Ireland and Scotland through the 18th and 19th centuries. As with the UK’s Christmas ghost story, the domestication of Halloween in North America came in part through broadcasting. The 1960s and ‘70s brought an emphasis on Halloween as a time of horror, as TV stations marathoned old horror films and television dramas and sitcoms incorporated supernatural elements. Thus Starsky and Hutch (1975–1979) could face off against a vampire, The Waltons (1971–1981) could experience a poltergeist and, more recently, both Hawaii 5-O (2010–) and Grey’s Anatomy (2005-) could tackle zombies. In contrast, American Christmas became a time for family and togetherness, ensuring that any contemplation of potential horrors brought happy endings. Thus, A Christmas Carol focuses on the reformation of Scrooge in order to facilitate a happy family Christmas for the Cratchits, while It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and its many variants demonstrates the importance of the individual to the community. Both Christmas and Halloween thus served the need to unite the dispersed populations of America into new communities, focused on reuniting scattered families and celebrating that togetherness. In this way, the ghostly, scary edges of Christmas were worn away in North America.

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But this separation is not the end of the story. The international spread of broadcast media means that the American Halloween is celebrated globally, while broadcast programs have increasingly steered away from local customs to be accessible to the international market. Add to this the fragmentation of the viewing audience, including the popularization of on-demand services for entertainment, and it looks like the mainstream broadcast Christmas ghost story may be on its way

Right: Detail from an illustration for M.R. James’ An Episode of Cathedral History by Alisdair Wood

out. Indeed, over the past few years, the Christmas horror offerings on the main UK television channels have primarily been film versions of A Christmas Carol and Christmas episodes of ongoing series that have supernatural elements that are more along the heart-warming lines of American television, often taking inspiration from It’s a Wonderful Life. However, the seasonal ghost story has in some ways come full circle and returned to the original oral tradition; while the heyday of supernatural Christmas TV will always live on in some form thanks to home video collections, there are numerous Christmas season events across the UK where people gather to hear a reading of Dickens or M.R. James, or even of some original Christmas horror. Perhaps this could even be the start of a new yuletide terror cycle, which is fitting for a season of death and rebirth, of reflection and resolution, and returns from the dead.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Davis, Robert A. “Escaping Through Flames: Halloween as a Christian Festival” in Malcolm Foley and Hugh O’Donnell (eds) Treat or Trick? Halloween in a Globalising World. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

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CHAPTER 11 LESLIE HATTON

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hile Jacob Marley was undeniably dead as a doornail, the same can’t be said about his business partner Ebenezer Scrooge, whose classic tale of yuletide redemption continues to be resurrected, reimagined, and satirized in ways that have made it one of Christmas horror’s most enduring narratives. In the almost 200 years since its first publication in 1843, thousands upon thousands of adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol have appeared in all forms of pop culture media: theater, radio, film, television, opera, graphic novels, webcomics, fan fiction—even wrestling matches and rap battles. Of course, not all these adaptations of A Christmas Carol are made in the original spirit of what Dickens once called his “Ghostly little book,” and instead downplay the novella’s genuinely grim elements and social concerns for pure sentimentality. But even these less faithful adaptations have helped prop up this timeless Victorian ghost story as the sturdy cornerstone of the Christmas horror canon.

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In his groundbreaking novella, Dickens was able to combine his interest in social issues—especially about the plight of the poor—with the then-current popularity of spiritualism and the supernatural. At its heart, the novella is an appropriately spooky story of old dark houses and visitors from beyond the grave, as Scrooge is confronted not only by the ghost of his old friend and partner Marley, but also three unique spirits that show him visions of his life and death. Though the British tradition of telling spooky ghost stories on Christmas Eve pre-dates A Christmas Carol, John Mullan’s article “Ghosts in A Christmas Carol,” points out that Dickens’ tale helped further popularize the ghost story during the Victorian era—an approach carried on by contemporaries like M.R. James and Henry James.

Left: Alec Guinness as Marley’s Ghost in Scrooge (1970). Photo: © 1970 Cinema Center Films.

Likewise, at the time A Christmas Carol was published in England, those in poverty who tried to claim “poor relief” were forced to endure hard labour in workhouses following changes to English law in 1834. Many of the characters in the story—most prominently Bob Cratchit and his family, but also the women who pawn the deceased Scrooge’s belongings—are shown to suffer without assistance from either the government or those who were in a financial position to help. Having Scrooge be convincingly uncharitable and insensitive towards the poor helps his eventual deliverance from “bah humbug-itude” resonate as more than just another ghost story. In his 2000 book A Christmas Carol and its Adaptations: Dickens’s Story on Screen and Television, film programmer and Dickens historian Fred Guida attempted to outline all existing film and TV adaptations of A Christmas Carol. His book reveals the degree to which these productions adhere to (or more often transgress) Dickens’ intentions, blending scares and social concerns with a believable transformation in the persona of Ebenezer Scrooge himself.

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These include more straightforward adaptations (like the 1951 film starring Alistair Sim) and pastiches (famously, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)). The tone of the adaptations ranges from the dark bleakness of the 1971 animated version by Richard Williams and animator Ken Harris to the corny Broadway approach of 2004’s made-for-TV film A Christmas Carol: The Musical, and even the light romantic comedy of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) (when Matthew McConaughey’s Scrooge asks a

Above: E. A. Abbey illustration for an 1876 edition of Dickens’ Christmas Stories. Right: Images from Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901).

little boy if it’s Christmas Day, he’s met with the irritated reply, “No, it’s Saturday”). Gender-swapped adaptations are also not uncommon; in 2015, Kathleen Turner starred as Scrooge for a radio production, joining the ranks of previous female Scrooges including Cicely Tyson, Susan Lucci, Vanessa Williams, and Tori Spelling. The character of Scrooge has also been inhabited by a duck (Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983), Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas (2006)), a rabbit (Springtime with Roo (2004)), a dog (An All Dogs Christmas Carol (1998)), a train (Thomas & Friends “Diesel’s Ghostly Christmas” (2015)), a plastic doll (Barbie in a Christmas Carol (2008)) a Smurf (The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol (2011)), and even a fuzzy green trash monster (A Special Sesame Street Christmas (1978)). It’s a sprawling legacy that proves that Dickens’ story is as versatile as it is popular, even after two centuries.

A CHR I S T MA S C A R O L IN C IN E MA : T HE E ARLY YE ARS Two of the earliest cinematic adaptations of A Christmas Carol that still exist (at least in part) were made during the silent film era. The special effects are quite good in both films, though it’s difficult to determine whether they frightened audiences at the time, since horror cinema was still in its earliest stages. Only five or so minutes remain of Scrooge (or Marley’s Ghost) (1901), produced by Robert W. Paul and directed by Walter R. Booth. As such, several significant details in Dickens’ original text, such as Marley’s death, are not extant. It does, however, show a vision of Scrooge’s death, as well as Tiny Tim’s, ending shortly after the latter scene.

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The other surviving early adaptation, 1910’s A Christmas Carol was produced by the Thomas Edison Company and directed by J. Searle Dawley. While it would be impossible to compress the entire narrative of the original story into the film’s eleven minutes, certain elements,

such as Marley’s ghostly face in the doorknocker, do appear. Rather than having the Spirits of Christmas take Scrooge to the past, present, and future, these visions appear in Scrooge’s home instead. Henry Edwards’ 1935 adaptation Scrooge is a full-length feature starring British theatrical actor Seymour Hicks that, unfortunately, isn’t very convincing, marred by wooden acting and maudlin music. Scrooge also dispenses with many of the story’s horror elements, although a scene in Old Joe’s rag shop becomes somewhat grotesque through the use of shadow and stark light. Interestingly, Marley’s ghost doesn’t appear on screen, while Christmas Present appears as a weird glowing shadow. It’s disappointing that the

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Top: A Christmas Carol (1910). Bottom: A Christmas Carol (1938) starring Reginald Owen as Scrooge and Leo G. Carroll as Marley’s Ghost.

special effects are somehow less effective than the adaptations from the silent era. Reginald Owen stepped into the old miser’s shoes for an even more unimaginative 1938 adaptation for MGM, A Christmas Carol—the first version by a major Hollywood studio. The social conditions that troubled Dickens are not much of a factor in this film from director Edwin L. Marin, as the Cratchit family doesn’t seem particularly poverty stricken. There’s also a lot more religious content in this adaptation, which seems at odds with Dickens’ ideas on religion according to The Dickens Project, which notes that although he was a devoted Christian, Dickens was “outspoken” in his dislike for organized religion. Overall, this Carol is a sentimentalized and glossy film.

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E VE R YON E ’ S FA V O R IT E S C R O O GE : ALI STAI R SI M Two of the more well-known and critically acclaimed cinematic adaptations of A Christmas Carol share a lead actor. Scottish stage and screen star Alistair Sim played Scrooge in director Brian Desmond Hirst’s 1951 adaptation, known as both Scrooge and A Christmas Carol, and he voiced the character again in a 1971 animated take on the classic tale.

Above: Reginald Owen (Scrooge) and Leo G. Carroll (Marley’s Ghost) in A Christmas Carol (1938).

Sim’s performance in the 1951 version is considered the gold standard by which all other Scrooge performances are judged. Although this production isn’t technically a horror film, the lighting, music and production design combine to make it decidedly darker than many other versions. In one scene, Marley’s ghost violently rattles his chains and money boxes to create a frightening din and Sim is certainly convincing as the terrified Scrooge. Another of the film’s frightening moments, one included by Dickens but rarely adapted for the screen, occurs when Marley’s ghost allows Scrooge to see beyond the veil as he peers outside the window to see the air filled with moaning phantoms. Likewise, this film marks the appearance of Ignorance and Want, two scrawny, filthy children who hide beneath the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present, which adds another creepy and significant aspect to this film. While these allegorical characters are often overlooked in adaptations, Guida even goes so as as to say that they “may well be the most important portrait of children ever created by Dickens.” While this may be a bold and controversial claim, it underscores that the characters of Ignorance and Want are some of the most important in the novel, and prove a point that Dickens was trying to make that is bigger than the Cratchit family or Scrooge himself. The Ghost of Christmas Present warns that Scrooge should “beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

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Yet it’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that Scrooge fears most, a

Above: Alistair Sim as Scrooge in the 1951 adaptation Scrooge (A Christmas Carol).

silent “phantom” that lives up to Dickens’ description: “shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand.” Scrooge delivers: we see that very hand first and Scrooge’s frightened reaction until the camera pulls back to reveal the black hood. This is also one of the film adaptations of A Christmas Carol where Scrooge’s redemption seems truly convincing and especially moving. This seems due in no small part to Noel Langley’s faithful adaptation of Dickens’ text in the screenplay and Sim’s outstanding performance. Alistair Sim—or at least his voice—was reunited with Scrooge for 1971’s animated take on A Christmas Carol. At roughly 25 minutes, this production by director Richard Williams and animator Ken Harris is shorter than the average feature, but it still conveys Dickens’ ideas in an effective way thanks to expressive artwork. Chiaroscuro dominates an early scene where a skull-faced Scrooge walks home in the “palpable brown air” that Dickens describes in the book, and then ascends the staircase as we see “a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom.”

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Above: Richard Williams’ A Christmas Carol (1971).

Marley’s appearance also seems drawn from the novella, which describes the ghost as “provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own… for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.” Williams also visualizes a horrific scene in the book where Marley’s ghost unties a bandage wrapped around its head (in accordance with Victorian funeral custom), and its lower jaw drops down several inches. Critics were also pleased by the movie; it won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Fans of the Carol would have to wait over a decade, however, for what might be the most frightening version of the story ever made.

FA I THF U L A DA P TAT IO N S : GE O R GE C . SCOT T, PAT RI CK ST E W ART, A ND J I M CAR R E Y The 1984 made-for-TV movie A Christmas Carol, directed by Clive Donner and starring George C. Scott, opens with a hearse in the city square; there is no Christmas music or cheer, but a dank, foggy atmosphere with eerie music and tolling bells. This is a notable change from the usual opening credits establishing shot of a cheerful town square with Christmas music playing, and provides an early hint of the film’s intention to stick a bit closer to Dickens’ text, but with a reliance on death and horror imagery.

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Most notably, the film plays up the spooky elements of the sequence that runs from Scrooge leaving his counting house on Christmas Eve until the appearance of Marley’s ghost. As Scott’s Scrooge walks home, he’s framed like Jack the Ripper—all dark shadows and foreboding music, his faceless shape looming in the horizon. When the ghostly hearse from the story approaches him from behind, rather than being

a superimposed image as in many previous adaptations, these are real white horses leading a white hearse that both fade into the fog. The shadowy ascent of Scrooge on the stairwell, inspired no doubt by the Sim film, here looks like a scene from Nosferatu (1922). Soon after, the locks on Scrooge’s door come undone by themselves and, along with the zoom shot of Scrooge’s alarmed face and the shrieking violins and eerie voices (courtesy of composer Nick Bicât’s incredible score) make the scene look like a slasher film instead of a Christmas story. Other scenes also recall the classics of horror cinema. When Scrooge spies Ignorance and Want, the Ghost of Christmas Present shouts, “They are your children!” in a way that recalls the “rage babies” in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come makes his initial appearance not unlike the scene of Michael Myers hiding in the clothesline in Halloween (1979) or Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare On Elm Street’s (1984) boiler room, with rolling fog, thunder and lightning, and a screeching soundtrack as he glides across the screen and beckons with skeletal fingers.

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Scott’s penchant for playing characters with anger always boiling beneath the surface informs his Scrooge with a scary, yet shrewd, intelligence that refuses to yield to any tenderness of emotion until the very end. His transformation is preceded by a breakdown that is more pathos than bluster and is all the more convincing because of it. It’s a film that is as much as Gothic nightmare as redemption story and, because of this, the most effective at placing Dickens’ words firmly in the pantheon of horror.

Above and right: George C. Scott as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1984). © CBS, Inc.

Another adaptation that adheres closely to the horrific nature of Dickens’ original story is the adaptation starring Patrick Stewart. After several years of performing his one-man rendition of the story on stage (much like Dickens himself did in the 19th century), Stewart brought his Ebenezer Scrooge to film with 1999’s A Christmas Carol. Opening with a hearse carrying Marley’s coffin on a grey winter’s day rather than just mentioning his death in a voiceover, this distinctively bleak film continues to be quite faithful to Dickens’ text. Nearly every adaptation shows the face of Marley’s ghost in the door knocker, but very few include a scene where the ghost reveals himself to Scrooge in the tiles of the fireplace, as this one does. Ignorance and Want are included and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a tall shrouded entity with glowing amber eyes. When Scrooge discovers that the name of the headstone in the cemetery is his own, he stumbles into the open grave and comes face to face with his own corpse in a distinctly unsettling scene. Still, despite a good performance from Stewart, the redemption of his Scrooge is perhaps less satisfying than others, due perhaps to his portrayal of the miser as a more exaggerated version of the stern but kindly Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) Surprisingly, one of the most authentic adaptations in both spirit and visual flair, is Robert Zemeckis’ motion capture animated film from 2009, A Christmas Carol. As a CGI Scrooge, Jim Carrey’s performance may owe a huge debt to Alistair Sim, though it evokes, rather than copies that well-known portrayal. As such, this Scrooge’s transformation is an engaging one. All of the horror high points are touched upon, from opening with Marley’s death to an incredibly vivid scene where his ghost screams so loudly that his jaw cracks open and his tongue lolls out as if he were a zombie. Furthermore, the film is suffused with a genuine air of the uncanny, particularly in the whispery-voiced, flame-headed Ghost of Christmas Past.

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Not only do Ignorance and Want make a memorable appearance but the Ghost of Christmas Present ages before Scrooge’s eyes—and then dies, rots, and crumbles to dust, all the while laughing—in a scene that is singularly unnerving. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears as a giant shadow with claw-like hands and Scrooge almost gets run over by an infernal hearse led by black horses with glowing red eyes. Scrooge even falls into his own open grave and down a long corridor into red glowing coffin. While Zemeckis’ choice to use animation might make this film seem like it’s targeted to kids, it actually contains genuine scares.

Right: Patrick Stewart as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1999).

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TA K I NG L I B E R T IE S : H E N R Y W IN KLE R, B I LL M URRAY, AN D M U S I CA L S Other adaptations take liberties with the time, place, setting, and even the structure of Dickens’ original story, but still manage to drive home the significance of the social concerns that inspired Dickens to write the book in the first place. Although the 1979 made-forTV production An American Christmas Carol transports the story across the pond, changes Scrooge’s name to Benedict Slade, and doesn’t feature any special effects for the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, it’s still an important work. As Scrooge stand-in Slade, Henry Winkler dons a laughable amount of old age makeup and a bald cap, but it doesn’t detract much from the movie’s effectiveness. Winkler is great at convincing us that Slade is an unpleasant person, a flinty businessman who repossess furniture and household items from poor people during the Great Depression. It’s not a scary film, but its sobering look back at recent history is emphasized by a grim visual palette of grey and brown. Despite the changes made to the original story, this is a bleak movie that resonates deeply.

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Bill Murray is perfectly obnoxious as the modern miser Frank Cross in 1988’s Scrooged, which relies on pitch-black humour for its retelling of Dickens. Cross, a ruthless TV executive rumoured to be based on Saturday Night Live impresario Lorne Michaels, deals with the headaches of getting ready for a live television performance of A Christmas Carol amidst Above: TV Guide advertisement for An American Christmas Carol (1979), starring Henry Winkler as “Benedict Slade.”

concerns the network brass want him replaced with a young L.A. hotshot. While Cross tries to scare viewers into watching the show with a promo spot that posits it against real-life terrors like “acid rain, drug addiction, international terrorism, and freeway killers,” he is even more terrified when he’s confronted by his own Marley’s ghost—a deceased network head and mentor who looks like a rotting corpse in golf attire.

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In an added love storyline to Dickens’ timeless tale, Cross tries to reconnect with his put-upon ex-girlfriend Claire (Karen Allen) while fending off three visiting Spirits—a demonic, cab-driving Ghost of Christmas Past (a scenery-chewing David Johansen), the feisty Ghost of Christmas Present (Carol Kane in a scene-stealing role), and a hulking Ghost of Christmas Future with a TV screen for a face. Other highlights include fake TV ads for the network’s other holiday specials (Lee Majors blasts away terrorists at the North Pole in The Night the Reindeer Died), some particularly nasty Ignorance and Want-inspired monsters and Cross watching his own coffin pushed into an incinerator which he suddenly finds himself trapped inside.

Top: Bill Murray and David Johansen in Scrooged (1988). Bottom: Bill Murray as Frank Cross in Scrooged. Photos: © Paramount Pictures Corporation.

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Top: John Forsythe as Lew Hayward in Scrooged. Bottom: Bill Murray and John Forsythe in Scrooged. Photos: John Shannon © Paramount Pictures Corporation.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Scrooged’s satirical nature, Cross’s conversion to nice guy and reconciliation with Claire are utterly convincing and even genuinely moving. Although the film focuses more on the redemption of one man than larger social concerns (with the exception of the homeless shelter where Claire works), Cross’s change of heart takes place live on a global television broadcast; the world is able witness and share in the joy of his redemption. One popular way to adapt A Christmas Carol has been to re-envision it as a musical. There have been a handful of singing Scrooges over the years, including Kelsey Grammer’s thoroughly annoying portrayal in A Christmas Carol: The Musical (2004). Much better is Brian Henson’s A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) which, although it comes off as more heartwarming than horrific, maintains the sharp, self-reflexive humour audiences expect from the Muppets. Cleverly, Henson positions Gonzo as Dickens himself, who tells Rizzo the Rat that “The Marleys were dead, to begin with” in a dramatic tone that somewhat softens the novella’s grim opening, but still manages to thrill Rizzo: “It’s a good beginning. It’s creepy and kinda spooky.” As Scrooge, Michael Caine is more grumpy than menacing; although he does undergo a believable redemption, it’s perhaps less markedly dramatic because the fright factor has been toned down. However, one of the most effective musical versions of A Christmas Carol was 1970’s Scrooge, in which Albert Finney plays a much younger version of the titular character. A UK production directed by Ronald Neame with a screenplay and music by Leslie Bricusse of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) fame, it is possibly the most emotionally engaging of all the adaptations of A Christmas Carol, perhaps even more so than the 1951 adaptation. Employing subtle makeup (especially compared to Winkler’s Slade), Finney walks with a limp and a hunched shoulder and appears to have a facial palsy, almost as if his cruelty and miserly behaviour have physically deformed him in some way. The film’s most memorable song—“I Hate People,” as sung by Scrooge himself— is more cynical and blunt than most Broadway show tunes, taking full stock of Scrooge’s misanthropy:

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“

I hate people! I loathe people! I despise and abominate people! Life is full of cretinous wretches Earning what their sweatiness fetches Empty minds whose pettiness stretches Further than I can see Little wonder I hate people And I don’t care if they hate me!

In one notable scene, Marley’s ghost, played brilliantly by Alec Guinness, takes Scrooge outside and they fly through the air, crashing into phantoms along the way, one of whom looks like a deformed, decaying corpse. Later, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge a celebration in the town square set to the cheerful tune of the song, “Thank You Very Much.” Scrooge joins in the merriment and follows along, not realizing that everyone is celebrating his death—including some revellers literally dancing on top of his coffin. It’s a deliciously dark segment that ultimately makes Scrooge more pitiable. But the most striking of all is the scene in the graveyard, when Scrooge asks the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come what is to become of him. When his headstone is revealed, Scrooge turns back to see that the Spirit is now a skeleton. Scrooge screams in terror and then falls into his open grave and down a long tunnel, only to land in a glowing red coffin (in a scene that no doubt inspired Robert Zemeckis’ 2009 film). Scrooge wanders around in Hell, and discovers Lucifer has appointed him to be his personal clerk in an office made of ice, leading Marley to remark that “You’ll be the only man in Hell who’s chilly. Watch out for the rats. They nibble.” It takes four devils—huge, sweating shirtless men with executioners’ hoods—to carry Scrooge’s chain, one so large he nearly suffocates from it.

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While not quite a true horror film, Scrooge’s black humour makes it wickedly entertaining. The redemption of Finney’s Scrooge is convincing, so much so that when “Thank You Very Much” is reprised towards the end—now with sincerity— it becomes quite poignant. Although the novella’s overarching social concerns receive admittedly short shrift (Ignorance and Want do not appear), Finney’s Scrooge still inspires hope that people can change and affect others in a positive way. Above top and bottom: Albert Finney in Scrooge (1970). Right: Alec Guinness as Marley’s Ghost and Albert Finney as Scrooge in Scrooge. Photos: © 1970 Cinema Center Films.

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A CHR I S TM A S C A R O L O N T H E S MA L L SCRE E N With the exception of the George C. Scott and Henry Winkler films, most Christmas Carol adaptations for television fall dreadfully short, tending to be more pastiche or parody than faithful renditions. These are all the more frustrating because of their shallow interpretations. TV shows which have tackled the Dickens tale include A Different World (1987-1993), Alice (1976-1985), Animaniacs (1993-1998), Bewitched (1964-1972), Blackadder (1983-1989), Bugs Bunny (1960-1975), Captain Kangaroo (1955-1992), Family Ties (1982-1989), Fat Albert (1972-1985), Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983), Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962), Moonlighting (1985-1989), My Favorite Martian (1963-1966), Northern Exposure (1990-1995), Sanford and Son (1972-1977), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968), The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985), The Famous Teddy Z (1989-1990), The Flintstones (1960-1966), The Honeymooners (1955-1956), The Odd Couple (1970-1975), and even Beavis and Butthead (1993-2011). There is also 1984’s abysmal Scrooge’s Rock and Roll Christmas, which is unintentionally terrifying, a vehicle for badly lipsynced performances by Bobby Goldsboro and Paul Revere and the Raiders. There are a few exceptions to the trend, such as the 1980 “Bah Humbug” episode of popular sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-1982). In this retelling, station manager Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump) has a future vision in which salesman Herb Tarlek (Frank Bonner) is the solo human employee of a bland, computer-automated radio station that plays generic music. Time travelling drama Quantum Leap (1989-1993) dispenses with all horror elements for the 1990 episode “A Little Miracle,” save for Al’s rather Beetlejuice-like Ghost of Christmas Future, but it’s still one of the more moving TV show renditions. Saturday morning cartoon The Real Ghostbusters (1986-1991) cleverly tackles Dickens in its first season episode “Xmas Marks The Spot.” Thanks to a time slip, the Ghostbusters arrive in Victorian England, and are called to the home of Scrooge where they capture the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, thus robbing Scrooge of his redemption and creating a future in which Christmas no longer exists. Returning to the past, the team blindfolds Scrooge and pretends to be the ghosts, restoring not only Scrooge’s Christmas spirits, but also those of one of the Ghostbusters who long ago lost his enthusiasm for the holiday.

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The 1992 “Halloween IV” episode of the U.S. sitcom Roseanne (1988-1987) applies the Dickens touch to Halloween in a smart and unforgettable way. When Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) becomes a Halloween Scrooge after her daughter can’t make the annual family

Right: Loni Anderson as The Ghost of Christmas Past in WKRP in Cincinnati’s “Bah Humbug” (1980). Photo: © 1980 CBS Television Corporation.

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Halloween celebration, the Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future appear as costumed trick-or-treaters who take her on a trip through her prankfilled Halloween past. Her redemption comes only when the Ghost of Halloween Future shows her that skipping that year’s party means she’ll turn into her own mother. Television advertising, too, has long mined A Christmas Carol to sell products. Brands including Honey Nut Cheerios, Dolly Madison, Minolta Copiers, Chicken McNuggets, Nyquil, KFC, Sears and, more recently, Beats by Dre and The Source have all employed Dickensian elements in their ads, but Canadian hardware chain Canadian Tire has managed at least two decades’ worth of “Give Like Santa, Save Like Scrooge” TV spots that feature stage actor John Davies as Scrooge bickering with old Saint Nick. They’re clever ads, even if they’re not necessarily what Dickens had in mind. Not surprisingly, Dickens historian Fred Guida insists that Dickens “did not approve of any form of excess in his own day, nor would he approve the three-month orgy of commercialism that precedes the modern American Christmas.”

THE S TATUS O F C A R O L S P R E S E N T Despite the novella’s reputation as a classic of holiday horror, genuinely scary renditions of A Christmas Carol are few and far between. A 2012 adaptation by Jason Figgis, which billed itself as “the darkest, most ghostly version of this story ever made,” lacked the requisite heart and fire to make it effective, relying heavily on a “Charles Dickens” narrative voiceover. And while Victorian-era ghost and horror narratives in film and television have rarely been so popular, such as Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak and Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) series, a truly Gothic adaptation of A Christmas Carol has not yet emerged from the shadows to haunt an entirely new generation of horror fans.

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Ultimately, the best adaptations of A Christmas Carol, like the Alistair Sim and George C. Scott versions, parlay the real life horrors of the Victorian era into something that leaves a strong impression on the psyche, or transform the tale into something new that still retains the original story’s power. Richard Williams’ gorgeous animated adaptation, the dark humour of Ronald Neame’s 1970 musical, An American Christmas Carol’s Depression-era setting, and technological advancements like the ones utilized in Robert Zemeckis’ 2009 film all take different approaches but still manage to breathe new life into one of the world’s most beloved ghost stories. There may no longer be any work houses in North America, but there are modern problems like a shrinking middle class, an expanding

Right: Scrooge McDuck is warned by Jacob Marley (Goofy) in Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983). Photo: © MCMLXXXIII Walt Disney Productions.

homeless population, and the ever-increasing fortunes of the “One Percent.” Some might wonder how we could learn anything new from a book written nearly two centuries ago, or how we could continue to be frightened by the gruesome images it describes, but the enduring appeal of a story that skillfully blends abject terror with unambiguous redemption suggests that A Christmas Carol still has a lot to offer us.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Bloy, Marjie. “The Victorian Poor Law and Life in the Work House,” Political History: Miscellaneous. VictorianWeb.org. Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, 1843. Guida, Fred. A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations: A Critical Examination of Dickens’s Story and Its Productions on Screen And Television. McFarland, 2006. Holly. “Children’s Employment Commission,” FindMyPast.co.uk, March 4, 2015. “Literature: A Christmas Carol,” TVTropes.org. Mullen, John. “Ghosts in A Christmas Carol,” Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians. The British Library at www.bl.uk. Murray, Noel. “You will be visited by 69 spirits”: 23 TV episodes based on “A Christmas Carol,” TheAVClub.com, December 20, 2010. “What Were Dickens’s Views Towards Religion? The Dickens Project; University Of California, Santa Cruz. Dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/chronology.html.

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CHAPTER 12 KIER-LA JANISSE

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orth American horror fans typically delight in the fall season, where that first falling leaf signals the onset of the Halloween frenzy. From the Great Pumpkin to pumpkin spice lattes, it is the one time of year when mainstream society seems to validate those things that horror fans champion all year long. Houses are transformed into haunted mazes and suburban cemeteries, cinemas and TV stations offer a smorgasbord of classic horror programming, children are allowed to stay up late to listen to scary stories. But on the other side of the pond in the UK, it’s another season that is most strongly associated with ghosts and ghouls: Christmas. It was this time of year that spawned the BBC’s much-beloved 1970s holiday series A Ghost Story for Christmas, which drew on the UK’s rich literary history and oral storytelling traditions in its annual quest to make Brits shiver from more than just the frigid weather.

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The tradition of ghost stories for Christmas dates back hundreds of years in Britain (see Derek Johnston’s piece elsewhere in this book), but many credit Charles Dickens with being a pioneer of what we know as the ‘modern’ Christmas ghost story due to the popularity and influence of A Christmas Carol. “In many ways, the traditional Christmas as it’s celebrated in the UK and U.S. was invented for A Christmas Carol,” says author and film historian Kim Newman. “Dickens was observing a fashion in celebrating the holidays that drew on German things— Christmas trees, presents, meals—popularized by Prince Albert. The happy family Christmas of A Christmas Carol, incidentally, is contrasted with the truly miserable Christmas Dickens writes about in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Left: A Ghost Story for Christmas “The Stalls of Barchester.” Photo: Andrew Tweedie.

The appearance of A Christmas Carol in December of 1843 coincided with the Victorian-era commodification of Christmas and its establishment as a largely domestic ritual, and was a huge critical success, with the first edition selling out in less than a month. Dickens responded with a series of Christmas novellas released annually throughout the 1840s, as well as seasonal short stories published in his weekly journals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1895), some of which— ”The Haunted House” (1859), “The Signal-Man” (1866) for example— were supernatural in nature. As such, the tradition of yuletide terror tales is often referred to as a “Dickensian” one, but the writer who presides most heavily over this custom is M.R. James, who was known for gathering his students and colleagues at King’s College, Cambridge (and later, Eton College) on Christmas Eve for a hearthside recitation of ghost stories that he would pen just for the occasion. Dramatizations of this oral holiday tradition even exist in the form of televised recitation of his tales by actors including Robert Powell and Christopher Lee. M.R. James’ brand of horror is more H.P. Lovecraft than Stephen King (Lovecraft himself was a fervent admirer of James), not only due to its academic protagonists, male-centric plots and a postGothic emphasis on more primal forms of horror, but also because—in the words of Gothic Television author Helen Wheatley—his position as a prominent academic in real life “lends his work the gravitas that isn’t automatically afforded to King.” Indeed, Lovecraft fans will find much to cherish in James’ work.

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“There’s a donnish, know-it-all aspect to James that might be perceived as subliminally educational or the classical equivalent of geekiness,” agrees Newman, who notes “all the passages in mock-

Above: Montague Rhodes (M.R.) James, circa 1900

mediaeval Latin or faked church records. That said, ghost stories weren’t seen as academically respectable until quite recently. Even academics who wrote them, like James, wouldn’t take them seriously.” While James wasn’t especially prolific—he penned only 25 short stories— and his fiction didn’t necessarily find its way into school curricula, he has been adopted as Britain’s most respected horror writer. Aside from early radio adaptations in the 1940s (“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad” on the BBC’s Appointment With Fear and even stateside with “Casting the Runes” on the CBS radio program Escape) this role was cemented with Jonathan Miller’s 1968 television adaption “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” for the BBC’s Omnibus series.

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Few of James’ stories have made it to the big screen—“Casting the Runes” being the most popular, with adaptations by Jacques Tourneur (Night of the Demon, 1957) and Sam Raimi (Drag Me to Hell, 2009)— but television has proven a great medium for his work. Miller’s blackand-white “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” is a stark but effective tale of a socially-obtuse vacationing academic who is pursued by a ghost after finding an ancient whistle in the seaside sand-dunes. Bolstered by brilliantly selective sound design that renders banal, everyday sounds into loud threats, Miller’s ghost is utterly terrifying—despite being literally made of bedsheets. The incredible critical and popular success of Miller’s adaptation prompted documentary director Lawrence Gordon Clark to pitch the Above: Michael Hordern in Jonathan Miller’s “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You” (1968), part of the BBC’s Omnibus series.

BBC on the idea of a holiday special based on M.R. James’ “The Stalls of Barchester” in 1971. “In 1969 Paul Fox, the then Controller of BBC 1, gave me the joyous task of making the first A Ghost Story for Christmas,” explains Gordon Clark, “which I’d offered to him because I thought the BBC Christmas schedules would be the better for it, and because I wanted to film one of the stories that my father had read to me as a boy, to see if I could scare the hell out of an audience just as Dad had done with his reading of M.R. James to me. I chose “The Stalls of Barchester” because it is one of his most intricate and ultimately chilling stories.”

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As with many James tales, there is a framing story, wherein an academic researcher stumbles upon old documents that hint of transgressions past. In this case, the hidden crime is that of an archdeacon who orchestrates the death of his bumbling octogenarian predecessor, convincing himself that it was for the betterment of the cathedral he then inherits. James’ tale sees the researcher’s framing story accompanied by that of his investigation—a para-text of diary entries, obituaries and newspaper notices that allows for two firstperson narratives to cleverly co-exist. “James uses the device of time perspective often and very well,” offers Gordon Clark, “enshrouding the central action with the uncertainty of reportage.” But the archdeacon’s jealous actions make him the target of a vengeful spirit that resides in the cathedral’s elaborate choir stalls, whose carved

Above: Director Lawrence Gordon Clark (left) on the set of “The Stalls of Barchester.” Photo: Andrew Tweedie.

wood originated in the Hanging Oak—a tree used in pagan sacrifices. “The Saxon god Woden was hung on an oak tree much as Christ was hung on a cross,” says Gordon Clark. “The puritans cut down the oak tree hoping to kill the old beliefs and sanctify its wood by using it in their cathedral. Instead its blood-soaked power lived on in another form.”

“

When I grew in the Wood I was water’d wth Blood Now in the Church I stand He that touches me with his Hand If a Bloody hand he bear I councell him to be ware. - M.R. James, from “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”, 1911

Gordon Clark continues:

“

James had a genius for imbuing objects from the past with implacable malignity. The bronze whistle in “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”, the Saxon Crown in “A Warning to the Curious”, the Mappa Mundi in “Mr. Humphry’s Inheritance” and so on. Hitchcock claimed that his “Macguffin” could be anything or nothing so long as people were prepared to kill for it, and perhaps that’s why some of his films are compelling but ultimately empty constructs. James’ objects are truly frightening because they resonate with our deepest and oldest fears about what lurks in the darkness outside the comfort and light of the tribal campfire. A whistle blown could summon who knows what fears, or perhaps a terrifying storm, a crown buried in a coastal barrow was a sacred guardian against invasion and to remove it earns the ultimate punishment, and when Haynes sits in the Archdeacon’s throne in the choir stalls for the first time he puts his hand on the carved figure of a crouching cat that adorns his armrest, and his fate is sealed.

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This approach reflects the very physical aspect of James’ brand of horror, his emphasis on revulsion and monstrosity that can be touched and felt—from the black ooze of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” to

the animated linens of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. As Lovecraft himself noted of James in his seminal 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: “In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen.”

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Gordon Clark’s “The Stalls of Barchester” marked the beginning of an annual tradition that ran throughout the 1970s and continues periodically to this day, largely using James’ stories as source material. It would come to be called A Ghost Story for Christmas, although the series title did not actually appear onscreen until 1976. The original run of A Ghost Story for Christmas spanned from 1971-1979, with each film coming in under an hour and premiering on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, usually right before midnight. That first installment set the tone for the whole series; in contrast to Miller’s more tidy approach with “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”, “The Stalls of Barchester” was a visceral horror tale that was deliberately underlit (it used candlelight four years before Barry Lyndon). The adaptation’s murky, ambiguous darkness—both literal and figurative—was redolent of the times. It was a dark decade in British television overall; from Escape Into Night to Children of the Stones and an onslaught of ghastly public information Above: “The Stalls of Barchester.” Photo: Andrew Tweedie.

films, 1970s British TV programming is credited with scaring a nation of children out of their wits. And posited as holiday “family” fare, A Ghost Story for Christmas was an important part of that deluge. Gordon Clark followed up “The Stalls of Barchester” with “A Warning to the Curious” (1972). Coming straight off Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, British character actor Peter Vaughan stars as an amateur archaeologist who is followed by a malevolent force after he uncovers one of the mythical three crowns that protect the Suffolk coastline (although it was actually filmed in Norfolk). “A Warning to the Curious” is perhaps the closest Gordon Clark came to the brooding stillness of Jonathan Miller’s “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”, with its emphasis on coastal exteriors, the obsessive intensity of the central character and the dark spectre that dogs him at every step. It also reintroduces Clive Swift as Dr. Black, a character carried over from the previous year’s “The Stalls of Barchester”.

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Fan-favourite “Lost Hearts” (1973) came next, by which point the BBC realized they had a hit series on their hands and started populating the show with more supporting staff. Simon Gipps-Kent, a popular child actor of the time (later to pop up on TV shows The Tomorrow People and Tom Baker-era Doctor Who) stars as an orphan who is taken in by an unfamiliar elderly relative to live in a huge Georgian house in the countryside. But when he starts seeing the apparitions of two dead gypsy Above: A Ghost Story for Christmas “A Warning to the Curious.” Photo: Lawrence Gordon Clark.

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children on the grounds, he suspects that his mysterious benefactor (Joseph O’Connor) may have sinister plans. It is the only series entry with deliberate camp elements, in the form of O’Connor’s Caligari-inspired performance, but this is possibly to counteract the film’s ultimately disturbing message about predatory adults. While the heavily made-up childghosts may seem dated today, they were legitimately terrifying at the time, aided in no small part by their grotesque smiles, overgrown fingernails and the exotic, repetitive thrum of the hurdy gurdy.

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Above: The ghostly children of “Lost Hearts.” Left: Joseph O’Conor and Simon Gipps-Kent in “Lost Hearts.” Photos: Lawrence Gordon Clark.

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“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas“(1974) is the most ripping mystery of the bunch, starring Michael Bryant as a theologian who teams up with a young posh protégé to try to uncover a treasure allegedly hidden on the Abbey grounds. Bathed in blue and black hues, with the chameleonic Bryant practically unrecognizable from both Girly and The Stone Tape in the years previous, the adaptation moves the action from Germany to Somerset’s Wells Cathedral where it incorporates the famous 14th century stained glass “Jesse Window” as part of the mystery. It was one of many departures from the original text, and as Gordon Clark explained in his 2011 e-book Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Ghost Stories for Christmas : “I had a little difficulty persuading the dean and chapter to allow us to film there because they’d given permission to Pier Paolo Pasolini to shoot his Canterbury Tales there a year or two before, and he’d filmed an orgy in the cloisters and added a buggery scene. But James’ rather more genteel approach to damnation and death was eventually adjudged to be OK and filming went ahead.”

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The stained glass operates as something of a map, with clues leading to the Abbot’s treasure, which (as in A Warning to the Curious) is guarded by a supernatural being—in this case a sludgy black beast. Gordon Clark saw the film’s monster as a failure, as budgetary constraints prevented the creation of something more akin to James’ description Above and Left: “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas.” Photos by Lawrence Gordon Clark.

in his 1904 story: “I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several—I don’t know how many—legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body.” However, Gordon Clark is too hard on himself—the creature is effective, like the sinewy manifestation of a shadow.

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Further physical abominations were on display in follow-up “The Ash Tree” (1975), starring Edward Petherbridge (later to show up in Gordon Clark’s own version of James’ “Casting the Runes” for ITV in 1979) as an aristocrat who is plagued by his ancestor’s execution of a local witch decades earlier. Adapted by renowned English playwright David Rudkin, who similarly explored Britain’s pagan past in the acclaimed Penda’s Fen the year previous, “The Ash Tree” is the shortest of all the installments, but somehow seems the longest, and its protracted sequences in bright daylight fall aesthetically flat. But the film comes alive at night, as the deformed spiders birthed by the witch’s curse scurry about in the darkness, providing the protagonist—and the film—with a tangible sense of twitchy anxiety. While the main house and grounds were filmed elsewhere, “The Ash Tree” of the title was actually filmed on Gordon Clark’s own property, and mysteriously died two years after filming.

Above and right: “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas.” Photos © BBC

For all five of these adaptations, Gordon Clark worked with cinematographer John McGlashan and sound recordist Dick Manton, who he credits with establishing the gloomy look that would be the hallmark of the series (as well as editor Roger Waugh who edited all the original series’ James adaptations save 1973’s “Lost Hearts”). Central to that aesthetic were the authentic East Anglian locations that have been the inspiration for many a terror tale, even aside from those of M.R. James.

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“James lived in East Anglia—the region that encompasses Norfolk and Suffolk—for most of his life,” explains Helen Wheatley, citing this as one reason James set many of his stories there. “However, there is also a broader sense of the region as being rather out on a limb, a relative hinterland, which lends itself to ghost story telling,” she continues. “In James’ stories, and their television adaptations, the geography and landscape of the region—expanses of flat land, the whispering grasses of the East Anglian coast line, sparsely populated agricultural land—has a particularly haunting quality.”

Above: Bodmin Moor location shot for “The Ash Tree.” Photo by Lawrence Gordon Clark.

“

There was nothing to be seen: a line of dark firs behind us made one skyline, more trees and the church tower half a mile off on the right, cottages and a windmill on the horizon on the left, calm sea dead in front, faint barking of a dog at a cottage on a gleaming dyke between us and it: full moon making that path we know across the sea: the eternal whisper of the Scotch firs just above us, and of the sea in front. Yet, in all this quiet, an acute, an acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash that might be let go at any moment. - M.R. James, A Warning to the Curious, 1925

This landscape is key to the series’ hauntological appeal. Scholar Derek Johnston has an extensive catalogue of writing that examines nostalgia in relation to the Christmas ghost story—and the A Ghost Story for Christmas series in particular—and notes that the Victorian middle class idealization of rural life was subverted by James’ stories, which presented the country as peaceful on the surface but a place of dark, tumultuous secrets. He also points out that East Anglia is a land of invaders and colonizers, writing in his essay “Season, Landscape and Identity in the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas” that “The connection to the local soil and landscape runs generations deep, but it has also been built upon the remains of earlier populations, with earlier connections to that landscape, overrun by the incomers...the landscape may encourage identification with the nation, but it also emphasises how the landscape is interpreted through the history of human action upon it.”

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The series hit a ratings high with the eerie Dickens adaptation “The Signalman” (1976). It was the first to eschew James in favour of his predecessor, with a tale Dickens had written for All the Year Round at Christmas 1866 as part of his “Mugby Junction” collection of railway stories. Inspired by anxiety surrounding his own experience in the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865 (and likely influenced by the Clayton Tunnel Crash four years earlier), Dickens’ claustrophobic tale is about a railway signalman who is dogged by an apparition he keeps seeing on the tracks just before an accident. The title role is chillingly portrayed by Denholm Elliott in the film: intensely wound-up, fastidious, sweaty.

And the orbless spectre, though it appears only on brief occasions, is genuinely dreadful. The episode was highly acclaimed, despite almost not being made due to budget cuts; Scottish playwright and critic Simon Farquhar even went so far as to say it was “better than the book.”

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But a miscalculation followed, as the series began to forgo period literature. The 1977 installment, “Stigma,” was a contemporary tale by esteemed TV writer Clive Exton (Doomwatch, 10 Rillington Place) that disappointed audiences who felt the series had started to lose its way. It’s not an opinion I share. The lone femalecentric tale in the original canon, “Stigma” is about a family who moves to the country, this time the southwest of England in Avebury—home to one of the most important neolithic henge monuments in Britain and the location for iconic children’s show Children of the Stones which was broadcast earlier that year. Their backyard excavations to remove a large ancient standing stone release a curse that causes Top: “The Signalman.” Photo © 1976 BBC. Bottom: A newspaper illustration depicting Charles Dickens assisting an injured passenger after the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865.

the mother to spend the rest of the film in the bathroom, trying to figure out how and why she is haemorrhaging to death. It is a confrontational film with prolonged nudity and unavoidable menstrual connotations, possibly a bit too heavy for the seasonal ghost story crowd. But an essential component of the series all the same. “I agree with you about “Stigma”,” Gordon Clark concedes. “It’s a very disturbing story but I don’t think we did it justice. I didn’t have the services of the crew I wanted and, believe it or not, they had cut the budget even further in spite of the great success of “The Signalman” the year before, and I’m afraid I’d lost faith in the production by then. We were so rushed it was like filmmaking by numbers, and once you’ve lost the joy of doing something, it’s time to move on.” The immediate aftermath of “Stigma” was the departure of Gordon Clark from the series he created, and the series folded after one last, admittedly forgettable chapter—1978’s “The Ice House” directed by Coronation Street alum Derek Lister. Written by John Bowen, who had adapted “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” for Gordon Clark in 1974, as well as the beloved Play for Today installment “Robin Redbreast” (1970), the teleplay is set at a rural health retreat run by strange siblings (one of whom is David Beames of Chris Petit’s Radio On) whose on-site Victorian “ice house” is revealed as the locus of a supernatural transformation which may or may not be connected to the film’s homoerotic subtext.

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But the “ghost” of these ghost stories lingered; Gordon Clark went freelance, taking another M.R. James adaptation—”Casting the Runes”—to ITV, where it debuted to great acclaim in April 1979, while a plethora of seasonal terror tales continued periodically on the BBC throughout the next few decades, including the short-lived official reprise of A Ghost Story for Christmas in 2005 and 2006 with James adaptations “A View From a Hill” and “Number 13,” respectively. “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” was remade for the BBC in 2010, this time acknowledging its seasonal affiliations by debuting on Christmas Eve. The remake starred veteran actor John Hurt, but his character’s

Above: “Stigma.” Photo: © BBC.

misanthropy is controversially muted with the addition of a love interest. Add to these the odd ‘70s TV special running in tandem with Lawrence Gordon Clark’s series, and it becomes clear that the trajectory of the televised Christmas ghost story is sometimes hard to follow. The reason is that, at the same time that A Ghost Story for Christmas was airing annually on BBC1, other ghost stories aired on BBC1 and 2 as televised plays or one-off programs, but not necessarily at Christmastime. Regardless, these other programs are often included in discussions of Gordon Clark’s series because of their tonal or aesthetic similarities. For example, Kim Newman notes that “Schalcken the Painter” and the Jonathan Miller “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” were originally shown in a series called Omnibus, which usually consisted of arts documentaries, while “Robin Redbreast” and Alan Clark’s “Penda’s Fen” were featured on Play for Today, a showcase intended for realistic, socially-engaged material that also ran to the odd horror or ghost story. The Stone Tape and Ghostwatch were broadcast as stand-alone specials (the former as part of official Christmas programming), while other ghost stories appeared on ‘70s series like Late Night Horror, Dead of Night, The Mind Beyond or Supernatural. There were also a lot of spooky stories done in children’s drama slots in the ‘70s. ITV had its own ghost series like Haunted, Shades of Darkness and Dramarama: Spooky as well as one-offs including Clark’s “Casting the Runes”. Besides Nigel Kneale, other UK TV writers such as John Bowen, John Burke, Robert Muller and Brian Clemens also specialized in macabre and supernatural subjects. “Our tendency to do literary adaptations meant that often series devoted to a classic writer would include their ghost stories alongside the stuff they were more known for,” advises Newman. “Series adapting Conan Doyle, Hardy or Agatha Christie, for instance, included ghost episodes.”

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While repeats of the original series are common over the holidays, in 2013, BBC2 aired an all-new A Ghost Story for Christmas adaptation of M.R. James’ “The Tractate Middoth”, written and directed by The League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss, whose own horror anthology Crooked House was a 2008 Christmas offering inspired by Gordon Clark’s moody 1970s tele-terrors. Gatiss’ classy creepfest was a welcome addition to the canon, outshining the middling 2005/2006 installments with its saturated hues, solid character casting (including British TV regulars John Castle and Roy Barraclough as well as Eleanor Bron of Beatles-film fame) and a horrific cobwebby ghost that would be right at home in the original series. Gatiss also paid tribute to Gordon Clark by penning the foreword for Spectral Press’ book The Christmas Ghost Stories of Lawrence Gordon Clark, a collection featuring all the original M.R. James tales that Gordon Clark has adapted over the years.

One reason the shows were so popular was that the intimacy of TV— as opposed to a theatrical environment—emulated in some way the oral tradition of storytelling. “I think it’s to do with the security of the hearth,” says Gordon Clark, “and, earlier, the camp fire—warding off the terrors of winter and darkness and frightening in a pleasurable way because the listeners are enjoying that security. No one I think would enjoy a frightening story if they felt themselves to be in real danger at the time. This maybe is why television is such a good medium for ghost stories, because you watch it in the security of your home.”

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But while Christmas television programming is continuing on a long-running tradition that precedes that advent of broadcasting, the audience’s nostalgia has unconsciously reshaped that tradition. While the original films of the A Ghost Story for Christmas canon aimed to honour Britain’s past as depicted by one of its preeminent horror storytellers, scholar Derek Johnston points out that the generation that came of age in the 1970s now aims its nostalgia at the televised reproduction of the original nostalgia. “Is the nostalgia that people are turning to, in television, no longer a nostalgia for a way of life, but nostalgia for previous television?” he asks. “Of course, one of the issues of history in relation to these programmes is the personal history that becomes attached to them, the personal memories. It is appropriate that these issues of memory are considered here in relation to ghost stories, concerned with eruptions of the abnormal into the everyday.” Above: Mark Gatiss’ “The Tractate Middoth.” Photo: 2013 © BBC. Right: “The Stalls of Barchester” behind the scenes. Photo: Andrew Tweedie.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Fenton, Harvey. Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of the Seventies. FAB Press, Guildford, 2000. Johnston, Derek. “Horror, Heritage, Nostagia and Taste: the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas” Paper presented at the New Television History Symposium, DeMontfort University, Leicester , Sept 10, 2010. Accessed online Dec 28, 2016 at https://www.academia.edu/1670109/Horror_Heritage_Nostalgia_and_Taste_ the_BBC_Ghost_Story_for_Christmas Johnston, Derek. “Season, Landscape and Identity in the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas” Paper presented at the University of Reading, 8 October 2015. Accessed online Dec 29, 2016 at https://www.academia.edu/16117009/ Season_Landscape_and_Identity_in_the_BBC_Ghost_Story_for_Christmas Johnston, Derek. Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween Palgrave Macmillan, London 2015 Kerekes, David, ed. Creeping Flesh Vol 2. Headpress, Manchester 2005. Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2007. Lawrence Gordon Clark, Helen Wheatley and Kim Newman interviews conducted personally by the author for an earlier version of this essay which appeared in Video Watchdog # 176 (Spring2014).

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CHAPTER 13 DIANE A. RODGERS

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n a dark winter evening in December 1970, the BBC broadcast “Robin Redbreast,” a significant piece of television now remembered as an especially eerie installment of their renowned Play for Today series. As opposed to the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas (original run 1971-1979), an annual TV series that injected fright into the festive seasons with period pieces based on familiar tales by M.R. James or Charles Dickens, this festive folk horror tale was closer to the pioneering contemporary realism of The Wicker Man (1973). Drawing on renewed cultural interest in the occult at the time, the John Bowen-penned “Robin Redbreast” deals with distinctly British fears and themes as it conjures myths, magic and folkloric dread long swirling in the dark mists of the British Isles.

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Following the break-up of a long-term relationship, successful TV script editor Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) escapes to a drafty, remote farmhouse in rural England, complete with a creaky wooden staircase and cavernous hearth. But this is no cozy idyll; Norah is displaced and lonely here, especially since the local villagers disapprove of her unmarried status and agnosticism. Forbidding housekeeper Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford) is even unable to comprehend such contemporary inventions as a waste disposal unit or what Norah’s job might entail. She not only insists that Norah visit church, but also that she wear a skirt: “So long as you’re not in trousers, they won’t reckon to put you out.” Norah, whose confidence and independence give the character groundbreaking feminist undertones, dismisses these old-fashioned attitudes as eccentric, rather than malevolent.

Left: The BFI’s DVD release cover for “Robin Redbreast.”

Norah soon meets the enigmatic Mr. Fisher (Bernard Hepton), a fount of local knowledge who appears with a polite but peculiar request to “hunt for sherds” in her garden (from “potsherd,” or fragments of prehistoric pottery). The parochial equivalent to Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, Mr. Fisher is described as a “learned fellow“ because he has “the instinct“ and knows the “Old Tongue“ (Anglo-Saxon). His pursuit of “sherds” suggests Mr. Fisher is, as Vic Pratt describes in the “Robin Redbreast” DVD notes, “like a fragment of an elusive rural English past.” When Norah later discovers the cottage is apparently mice-infested, Mr. Fisher introduces her Rob (Andrew Bradford), a young, blond gamekeeper who can help deal with the vermin. Unapologetic about her own sexual appetite as an unattached “middle-aged” woman of 35, Norah is attracted to the “quite extraordinarily dishy” Rob (or Robin) from the outset, even though he is an odd character, set apart from the other locals. For example, he’s one of the only educated villagers, and dreams of leaving for Canada. He keeps his “body at its peak,” but avoids “anything to do with the local girls.” A series of increasingly mysterious occurrences add a sense of creeping threat. Mice scratch in Norah’s cottage walls, voices and cries are heard on the wind, birds flutter down the chimney, and Norah’s contraceptive cap inexplicably vanishes, only to reappear the next day. “Robin Redbreast” is, as 1971’s BBC Radio Times notes, suffused “with such elements as dead chickens, all-knowing village sages, murderous axes, birds in the chimney and fertility symbols,” all with ominous ritual suggestion. Norah finds a glass half-marble in her garden and brings it into the house, where both Mrs. Vigo and Mr. Fisher knowingly comment on it: “Looks like an eye, doesn’t it?” For Norah, this prompts a prophetic dream in which she sees a semi-naked Rob, wielding a knife and making strange ritualistic movements, as well as a startling image of Mr. Fisher, who turns towards camera with painted half-marbles in his spectacle frames.

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Still wary of sinister plots, Norah invites Rob over for a dinner date, for which Mrs. Vigo symbolically prepares a chicken, intoning “She’m broody... Ring ‘er neck, slit ‘er throat, hang ‘er up. That’s all she’m good for.” Although Norah eventually finds Rob ill-informed, naive and dull (“Dear God! To think I said I fancied him”), circumstances push the couple together. An evening of Above: Norah (Anna Cropper), Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford) and Mr. Fisher (Bernard Hepton). Right: Norah comes upon Rob (Andrew Bradford) doing martial arts in the woods. Photo: David Pickthorne © BBC.

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awkward, stifled flirtation is interrupted by worrying sounds—a growling engine, a mysterious bang—that makes the pair nervous and unsettled. When Rob tries to leave, he’s knocked unconscious by an unidentifiable man and, later in bed, Norah is frightened when a bird falls violently down the chimney and flies at her. After Rob rushes back to rescue her, the pair unavoidably end up in bed together, and Norah soon finds she is pregnant. Here the tale takes a more menacing turn, and Mr. Fisher’s earlier remark—that birds often become trapped in the cottage, as trapped as “the women [who] have always lived here”—now seems portentous. The “helpful” villagers quickly turn into warders, keenly interested in Norah’s situation, concerned that she will not have any “modern ideas” about aborting the child. When her car breaks down and her telephone stops working, Norah realizes, with growing terror, that she is being cut-off from the outside world. “I’ve begun to feel trapped, and decidedly nervous,” she says, suspicious that she is part of some sinister ritual, adding, “They’re keeping me here for something.” An especially bleak scene takes place on Christmas Day itself. There is no festive cheer or celebration other than a few cards on a mantelpiece, but there is plenty of visceral pagan imagery in Rob’s language as he pleads “Don’t kill my son... it’s my seed, isn’t it?”

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Norah’s fears are borne out; she may be a “trapped bird” but is not quite the target she suspected—Mr. Fisher notes that “the goddess of Above: Norah and Rob in a tender moment that will have dire consequences. Photo: © BBC.

fertility in the old religions [...] would couple with the young king [...] and from his blood the crops would spring,” a line from author James Frazer’s well-known text The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. Horrified, Norah (now heavily pregnant) realizes her powerlessness to act as Mr. Fisher advises that, “if that were all one had to say to the police, how very foolish they would think one.” After Rob is led from the cottage, we hear his scream. With no pomp or ceremony, Mrs. Vigo, stony-faced and practical as ever, confirms his sacrificial fate, observing “what good would a woman’s blood be for the land?”. We finally understand (along with Norah) that we have been misdirected; Rob has been the mark all along. Robin has been kept well but somewhat apart from the villagers as sacrificial virgin; only to sow his seed and be ritually murdered to bring fertility to the land, Fisher stating “Such bounty there was, such fruitfulness... from the blood that drained from Robin...”. There are even hopes that Rob and Norah’s offspring might serve as the next in line: Mrs. Vigo explains, although Rob’s real name is Edgar, “there’s always one young man answers to ‘Robin’ in these parts—has to be.” Fisher ominously suggests taking the baby to his “... good friends... at a local orphanage” but by now has made it only too clear that each subsequent village ‘Robin’ will meet a similar fate: “He would be treated like a king. Served and pampered... and then, of course... ” “Killed,” Norah flatly replies, coldly declining the offer.

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The eponymous Robin Redbreast is alluded to and remarked upon throughout, with birds and trapped birds thematically significant within the play; the extent to which becomes clear once Rob’s fate is sealed and Fisher attempts to justify to Norah the death of the village “Robin”: “Even Robin Redbreast, one of the very birds in your garden... only lives a year, you know.” The title of the play is, of course, only too appropriate for a yuletide horror broadcast, the bird being associated with both the religious festival of Christmas and with British mythology and folklore, where it is closely related with death and blood. These

Above: The strange and threatening Mr. Fisher. Photo © BBC.

year-round visitors, known for adding a splash of colour to lifeless, wintry gardens, were famously appropriated in the Victorian era as cheery messengers on Christmas cards (postmen were nicknamed “redbreast” or “robin” due to their red tunics). However, folkloric tales associated with the robin have darker origins. Caution abounds in many British folk beliefs that cast these birds as bad omens or messengers of death. For example, there is a long-held belief in British folklore that it is extremely unlucky to take a Robin’s eggs or damage a nest; an interesting parallel to the villagers’ concern for Rob’s child. Further, it was believed that an ill fate would find anyone who killed a robin and, as one writer explains in 1868 journal Notes and Queries, “if a robin dies in your hand, it will always shake.” Another English folk rhyme suggests “The blood on the breast of a robin that’s caught; Brings death to the snarer by whom it is caught.” Some tales further suggest that, if a robin tapped three times upon your window, or entered your home, death was at hand for a member of the household. Even to hear a robin’s song could be unlucky and, in Devon county, it was thought that if a robin sang whilst on the roof of a cottage, a baby inside was to die. This belief lends meaning to an otherwise insignificant scene in Robin Redbreast. While Rob and Norah spend the night together, Mr. Fisher and village butcher Mr. Wellbeloved (Robin Wentworth) keep a watchful eye on the cottage. When he hears a bird begin to sing, Mr. Wellbeloved glances worriedly at Mr. Fisher, who assures him that it’s just a nightingale and there is no cause for concern. Robins also have a history of religious reverence, which comes from the way the bird was said to have received its red breast. One Welsh folk tale tells that the robin scorched its breast in the fire of purgatory, when it took pity on sinners and carried water in its beak to tormented souls (in Wales, the bird is named brou-rhuddyn, or “breast-burnt”). Another tale directly linked with the Nativity tells of a group of little brown birds fanning the flames of the fire in the stable to keep the baby Jesus warm on a bitterly cold night, their kindness commemorated with bright red breasts. Some legends tell that the robin was stained with the blood of Christ as he hung on the cross while the bird tried to pluck away his crown of thorns. In all the tales, the bird is closely linked with death and blood, and the Robin Redbreast title is used here by Bowen as a darkly festive folkloric warning.

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Conflicts of faith and superstition in “Robin Redbreast” reflect a resurgence of interest in the occult in the 1960s. As a result of cultural and social shifts, British society was losing faith in traditional religions and ways of life while, at the same time, drugs and hippie culture

helped new thoughts and freedoms cross into the mainstream. From this cultural and religious confusion, fears emerged about the country’s increasingly blurred national identity, as well as secrets of a veiled past; paganism, witchcraft and long-held superstitious beliefs bubbling under the surface. Like The Wicker Man, “Robin Redbreast” encapsulates the idea of Christian fears in battle with pagan beliefs, a theme recurring in a cautionary manner throughout British media in this decade. Writing in the “Robin Redbreast” DVD notes, Pratt observes the era as a “cultural moment when witchcraft and the occult were no longer ludicrous.” The film even references sensationalist news stories at the time, as Norah grimly observes, “Every now and again there’s a song and dance about it in the Sunday papers. Devil worship. Graves dug up... stories of blood... I’ve never believed it happened seriously.” Just as Mr. Fisher quotes Frazer’s The Golden Bough in “Robin Redbreast,” The Wicker Man also uses this book as source material (as admitted in interviews by director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer). Although Frazer’s text is considered problematic by contemporary folklorists, in part due to Frazer’s blurring of customs and rites from unrelated cultures, it is interesting to compare Lord Summerisle’s vigorously enthusiastic paganism and flamboyant ritual with the understated, coolly dispassionate behaviour of the locals in “Robin Redbreast.” The villagers’ belief in ancient pagan rites to sustain fertility of the land is made clear, but Rob’s sacrificial fate is never explicitly detailed, just his offscreen scream.

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Another conflict between faith and superstition occurs when Norah is pressed to visit church not for Christmas but for the harvest festival— which, in Britain, has a longer pagan history. Mrs. Vigo confirms the village’s allegiance: “Fisher says ‘if you don’t come for Harvest Festival, Parson, you’m get no welcome here at all... Christmas is another matter, we don’t take much account of that.” During the festival, the parson’s words are accompanied with a still montage of traditional offerings, including fruit, vegetables and corn dollies. Our attention is

Above: Images of the traditional offerings at the havest festival. Photo © BBC.

sharply drawn to pagan fertility as the parson speaks of “holding our precious seed... to bring it forth one more in the spring, when the green shoots pierce the earth.” Tellingly, the dialogue rapidly fades out as he mentions God. Faster-paced editing increases intensity as imagery shifts from stills of crops to startling close-ups of slaughtered hares, rabbits and other creatures. Their necks are broken and hang loosely, with drops of blood still on beaks and whiskers, pooling beneath them. The scene implies sacrificial rite and ritual rather than praise and glory. The ending of “Robin Redbreast” makes a direct visual link between the villagers and their pagan allegiance. As Norah drives away, she turns to see Mr. Fisher, Mrs. Vigo, Mr. Wellbeloved and henchman Peter in a final brief but chilling shot. Norah looks back and sees Mr. Fisher sporting antlers and ancient garb, Mrs. Vigo with her hair streaming from a blackhooded robe and others, arms bloodied, wearing leather aprons and brandishing weapons. Bowen’s teleplay specifies that Mr. Fisher is British mythological character Herne the Hunter, recognized as a pagan spirit or God associated with woods and oak trees, while Mrs. Vigo is described as the Crone, Hecate, a pagan goddess often described as “Queen of the Witches.” Whether we are seeing the villagers revealed as their true selves, or merely Norah’s perception of them, Bowen employs ancient myths, with their own set of stories and legends, to add depth to the play. Bowen states that folkloric myth is entirely relevant to contemporary audiences, as “applicable to modern life as well as to the time when the myth first appeared.” Broadcast in a prime festive viewing slot, “Robin Redbreast” struck a chord with audiences and reviewers, who were fascinated with such chilling folkloric themes. While some found the plot somewhat implausible, perhaps because they were city dwellers with little experience of village life, viewers with more provincial backgrounds wondered whether this could indeed happen in parts of contemporary Britain. Even Radio Times reviewers described “Robin Redbreast” as “beautifully creepy” and “convincingly terrifying.” “Robin Redbreast” was also the first ever Play for Today to be repeated, by popular audience request, after power cuts in parts of Britain meant that many originally missed the ending. If indeed power failure occurred, in fact (as Frank Collins’ review notes), at the very moment Norah threatens Rob with a knife, believing him to be part of the village conspiracy against her, then this would have only heightened fear and suspense for many.

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Audiences may have shrunk even further back into their seats had they known that “Robin Redbreast” was based rather more firmly in reality than they perhaps guessed. In order to achieve this realism, Bowen claims that “all sorts of things that I used in ‘Robin Redbreast’ did actually happen,” and also appears to have drawn from real killings from that

time that were believed to have occult connections. Among other iconic moments based on real occurrences, the curious eye-like half-marble and Mr. Fisher’s mysterious introduction are directly from Bowen’s own village experience. “A man appeared [...] and said ‘I’d like to look for sherds in your garden,’” Bowen recalled. “I had found in it half a marble [...] and brought it inside the house, so the beginnings of the play were already there.” In addition, Bowen once happening upon his local gamekeeper practicing martial arts outside is used in the scene where Norah first meets Rob when he’s outside in the forest doing karate exercises.

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Also enhancing the realism of “Robin Redbreast” is its televised play format, which drew on strong British theatrical traditions. Not quite documentary and not quite drama, the televised play is a unique format in its own right; as Bowen notes, “a play for the BBC was not a film, it was mainly shot in the studio [with] exactly the same situation as a play.” The audience closely follows Norah’s fear and incredulity as actors play out scenes that capture the vibrancy and edginess of a live performance. Rare outdoor scenes are dominated by shots of the looming cottage, villagers or the landscape, increasing our sense of Norah’s Above: As Norah leaves the town she has a vision of Mr. Fisher, Mrs. Vigo, Mr.

Wellbeloved and henchman Peter in their pagan garb. Photo: © BBC.

claustrophobia. This low-key realism is accentuated by location shooting in writer Bowen’s own farmhouse cottage (even the studio set was a recreation of the actual cottage interior). More grimly inspiring the story, however, was the stillunsolved murder of Charles Walton in Lower Quinton, Warwickshire. Walton, a man who could “reputedly charm animals with his voice and knew many old rural ways and tales,” (as noted by William Fowler in the “Robin Redbreast” DVD notes) was found dead on Valentines’ Day, 1945. As described in Paul Newman’s book Under the Shadow of Meon Hill: The Lower Quinton & Hagley Wood Murders, Walton’s brutally beaten body was discovered in the “depths of the smiling countryside” where he was “slashed and punctured by a billhook […] with a pitchfork pinning him through the neck.” This sinister and notorious case features so many peculiar ritual aspects and coincidences that Newman notes it “make[s] one think this is surely the plot of an imaginative novelist.” Interestingly, Newman cites a number of fictional works perhaps inspired by the case, including The Wicker Man, but overlooks “Robin Redbreast.”

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The Walton case was investigated by Chief Inspector Robert Fabian, himself a household name. Fabian rose quickly through the ranks of the Metropolitan police, capitalizing on the notoriety of his work in his crime writing, which was dramatized by the BBC in the popular TV series Fabian of the Yard (1954-56). Fabian’s investigation, reminiscent of the inquiry by Police Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) in The Wicker Man, uncovered rites and rituals taken as routinely accepted belief in small communities such as Lower Quinton. Fabian learned of ancient AngloSaxon customs of either slashing a cross into a murdered witch’s skin, or

Above: Isolated landscapes iin “Robin Redbreast.” Photos © BBC.

sticking spikes into them; known as “stacung” or “stanging” (a “stang” being a two-pointed stick which some witches reputedly identified with the horned God). Frank Collin’s review of “Robin Redbreast” quotes Fabian, who warned “anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism [should] remember Charles Walton [whose death was] clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite.” Other occult crime cases may have also influenced “Robin Redbreast.” The Walton murder is often linked to the disturbing Midlands mystery of “Who put Bella in the wych elm?” near Wychbury Hill, Stourbridge. This graffitied phrase appeared after a woman’s skull and almost complete skeleton were discovered inside the trunk of a wych elm tree, and a severed hand was found buried in nearby Hagley woods. In his book, Newman details an earlier murder in Lower Quinton of a young man slashing an elderly lady in the throat “with a billhook in the form of a cross,” believing himself bewitched and that she had turned the evil eye on him. The countryside itself plays a significant role in the Walton case proceedings. Lower Quinton is close to the Rollright Stones, megalithic monuments about which there are numerous ancient myths and fables, and the murder there led some to believe that the very ground itself was evil. Newman interviews one investigator who took a soil sample from the scene of the crime after having an “uncanny sense of evil,” reporting that “from the day on which I brought that ordinary bottle into my home [...] I had an extraordinary run of misfortune.” The investigator relates uncanny family accidents, illnesses and disproportionate sickness and death visited on his farm animals, until the day he got rid of the soil sample (at which point the odd mishaps ceased), noting “I had considered the possibility of the soil being the malignant influence, but it seemed too absurd for words.”

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This creeping fear of the English countryside is also integral to many British film and television works, including “Robin Redbreast,” as idyllic landscapes of wheat, hedgerows, fields and hills scattered with rustic cottages take on dark folkloric overtones. Robert MacFarlane’s 2015 article, “The Eeriness of the English Countryside,” explores onscreen folk-horror landscapes:

“

A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging,” and of the packagings of the past as “heritage,” and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.

This aesthetic is distinctly traceable to “Robin Redbreast” which, alongside The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General (1968) and the Ghost Story for Christmas series, presents stark grey skies above worn fields and trees, as opposed to a soft, lush, safe green countryside. In one of “Robin Redbreast”’s few outdoor scenes, the topography of folk horror is employed to sinister effect as Norah walks through the woods and peers up at the towering, swaying trees overhead. In a worm’s eye point-of-view shot, trees ominously penetrate the sky in contrast to the bleakly static, gloomy countryside, suggesting a moment of vulnerability for Norah. The grainy, dull and murky palette is enhanced by the Eastmancolor film stock, a popular and more affordable alternative to Kodak’s Technicolor in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Though originally broadcast in colour, “Robin Redbreast” only survives today due to an unearthed faded black and white 16mm telerecording, and the monochromatic contrast adds to the telelplay’s overall bleakness. Modern folk-horror, such as A Field in England (2013), Wake Wood (2009) and television adaptations “A View from a Hill” (2005) and “The Tractate Middoth” (2013) pay homage not only to the visual landscape and mise-en-scène of “Robin Redbreast”, but also to the washed-out film stock and faded memories of 1970s television broadcasts. One year after “Robin Redbreast”’s initial airing, it was succeeded by BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas as the reigning festive folk-horror tradition. John Bowen, along with other folk-horror writers such as David Rudkin (who wrote “Penda’s Fen”, a 1974 Play for Today examining England’s mystical pagan past), were equally involved in the Ghost Story series. Bowen adapted M.R. James’ “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas” (1974) and wrote the last of the 1970s Ghost Story series offerings, “The Ice House” (1978). Of the Ghost Story episodes, Clive Exton’s “Stigma” (1977) closely follows the path that “Robin Redbreast” began to forge. Set in contemporary times, “Stigma” involves a family who move into a country cottage (that now-familiar trope of the folk-horror landscape) which happens to be situated near an ancient megalithic stone circle. The family attempt to move part of the circle which, typically, unleashes the ancient curse of a witch who was executed and buried beneath.

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The recent resurgence in folk horror suggests that the creeping fear instilled by “Robin Redbreast”, A Ghost Story for Christmas and even other sinister TV fare aimed at children (like ITV’s 1977 series Children of the Stones) has stayed in the bones of some viewers. “Robin Redbreast” helped instigate a festive folk-horror tradition that showed us that we needed to look no further than our own ancient past, mythological or otherwise, to scare ourselves silly during the festive period—or indeed any other time.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y “Black Aquarius.” Matthew Sweet, BBC Radio 4. UK, 8:00pm 25 April, 2015. Accessed November 24th 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qvr63 Bowen, John. “Interview” Robin Redbreast DVD. UK: BFI, 2013. Brown, Allan. Inside the Wicker Man. UK: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 2000. Collins, Frank. “Robin Redbreast—Play for Today.” Cathode Ray Tube, October, 2013. Accessed 24 November, 2015. http://www.cathoderaytube. co.uk/2013/10/robin-redbreast-play-for-today-dvd.html Federer, C.A. “Killing a Robin.” Notes and Queries Vol s4-I Issue 14, 1868. Fiddy, Dick. “The Ash Tree.” Ghost Stories for Christmas DVD Booklet. UK: BFI, 2013. Fowler, William. “Robin Redbreast and John Bowen—viewing notes.” Robin Redbreast DVD booklet. UK: BFI, 013. Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Howse, Christopher. “The Robin in Life and Literature.” The Telegraph, 27 December, 2007. Accessed 22 March, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3670164/The-Robin-in-life-and-literature.html Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. Koven, Mikel J. Film, Folklore and Urban Legends. Maryland, Toronto, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2008 Lack, David. The Life of the Robin. UK: Victor Gollancz, 1988. Macfarlane, Robert. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” The Guardian, 10 April, 2015. Accessed 30 June, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane Meikle, Denis. “Shrieks on a Summer Night.” The Dark Side, 155 (2013): 12-22. Moon, Jim. “The Robin and Christmas.” The Moon Lens, 19 December 2014. Accessed 21 March, 2016. http://hypnogoria.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/ folklore-on-friday-robin-and-christmas.html Newman, Paul. Under the Shadow of Meon Hill: The Lower Quinton & Hagley Wood Murders. UK: Abraxas & DGR Books, 2009. Pratt, Vic. “Hunting for Sherds: Robin Redbreast”, Robin Redbreast DVD booklet. UK: BFI, 2013. Scovell, Adam. “Robin Redbreast – Play For Today (1970) – James MacTaggart (BFI).” Celluloid Wicker Man, 14 October, 2013. Accessed 21 March, 2016. http:// celluloidwickerman.com/2013/10/14/robin-redbreast-play-for-today-1970james-mactaggart-bfi/ Shubik, Irene. Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama. UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Unknown. “Powerful... “ (Robin Redbreast Review). BBC Radio Times, 18 February, 1971. Unknown. “Robin Redbreast” (Listing). BBC Radio Times, 25 February, 1971. Wheatley, Helen. “Stigma.” Ghost Stories for Christmas DVD booklet. UK: BFI, 2013. Williams, Owen. “A History of British Folk Horror.” Spectacular Optical, 19 October, 2013. Accessed 20 October, 2015. http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/2013/10/ a-history-of-british-folk-horror/

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CHAPTER 14 KIM NEWMAN

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etween The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Phantom of the Opera (1962), Hammer Films reinvented the gothic horror film as a distinctly British proposition—looking to the back catalogue of literary and cinema perennials and bringing them back to life with a jolt and a shock. They reimagined the works of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Gaston Leroux, but left Charles Dickens to David Lean and the BBC—except for the company’s single stab at a Christmas movie, Quentin Lawrence’s Cash on Demand (1961). Here, we get a Hammer take on A Christmas Carol, with Peter Cushing giving one of his best screen performances as a contemporary Scrooge who learns his lesson not through ghostly visitation, but during a suspenseful robbery.

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It’s one of Hammer’s best films, but internal politics at the company meant it was practically thrown away. In the United States, Columbia aptly put it out just before Christmas 1961, but Hammer sat on it in the UK for two years, slashed 15 minutes out of it and dumped it on the bottom half of double bills. It was produced personally by Michael Carreras, who frequently clashed with his father, Hammer films founder James Carreras, about the company’s direction. The movie’s ill-treatment might have come about because Michael left Hammer for a few years in the early 1960s to strike out on his own, directing the Spanish-made Western The Savage Gun (1962) and producing the Joe Brown cockney musical What a Crazy World (1963).

Left: Poster artwork for Cash on Demand (1961).

It is also possible that Cash on Demand was made as a sop to its star. After doing two Frankensteins (1957 and 1958), two Draculas (1958 and 1960), a Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and The Mummy (1959) inside three years, Cushing was bristling at being typecast in Hammer horrors. No great admirer of Jimmy Sangster’s skills as a screenwriter, Cushing had thrown his weight around by insisting on rewrites on The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Brides of Dracula (1960). He also had ambitions for a film career that duplicated the broad appeal of the television work he had done in the 1950s, and Hammer at least made the effort to feature him in meaty roles in their swashbuckling adventure films, casting him as a thin-lipped Sheriff of Nottingham in Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960) and a scarecrow-masked smuggler living a double life as a parson in Captain Clegg (1962). However, James Carreras plainly wanted his Baron Frankenstein back in harness and the gothic production line churning ‘em out so was in no mood to put a big push behind Cash on Demand, even after Cushing came through with an exceptional performance. Made in black and white with a small cast and a single set, Cash on Demand was small-scale and inexpensive, and therefore not much of a loss. In a way, its relatively low profile benefits the film, as it has the sort of twisted plot and suspense mechanics which can still surprise unwary audiences. After its story seems complete and the trap is closed, the third act manages a whole new suspense situation as the protagonist is at the villain’s mercy in an entirely different fashion. Like Lawrence’s earlier film The Trollenberg Terror (1958, aka The Crawling Eye), it’s a remake of a script the director had already done for television (Jacques Gillies’ “The Gold Inside,” broadcast in an ITV strand entitled Theatre 70 in 1960) and carries over one of the stars (Andre Morell) from the original production (the other, Richard Warner, was replaced by Cushing). Gillies, a New Zealand-born specialist in gimmick crime-mysteries, and Lawrence reunited on television for “The Knife” (Knock on Any Door, 1965), “Depart in Terror” (Armchair Theatre, 1967), “The Wreckers” (The Gamblers, 1967) and several episodes of ITV’s Drama slot, “Somebody’s Dying” (Drama 63, 1963), “Traitor at the Gate” (Drama 65, 1965) and “The Assassin at the Door” (Drama 66, 1966). Cushing appeared in Gillies’ “Peace With Terror” (ITV Television Playhouse, 1962). All this stuff is lost or buried in archives. Though Cushing and Morell had just played Holmes and Watson for Hammer, British audiences might also have recognised a reunion of the stars of the Nigel Kneale television production of 1984 (1954), in which Morell also suavely tortured Cushing.

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Cash on Demand begins on December 23, with Santa Claus outside and snow falling, the staff of the Haversham branch of the City & Colonial Bank turn up for work, maintaining holiday cheer despite the

disapproval of their martinet manager Harry Fordyce (Cushing). In deft vignettes, the film establishes Fordyce (“I am not in the habit of ingratiating myself with my subordinates”) as a Scrooge analogue— Sanderson (Norman Bird) is seen checking a cold radiator as snow piles up outside and Fordyce criticizes an older woman clerk (Edith Sharpe) for displaying Christmas cards on her desk to show how popular she is. He is a creep on the point of vindictively sacking assistant manager Pearson (Richard Vernon), not so much for a minor infraction as for his ability to get on with the rest of the staff, including laddish clerk Peter Harvill (Barry Lowe) and office flirt Sally (Lois Daine). Pearson is clearly positioned as the Bob Cratchit analogue, appalled by his small-minded superior’s behaviour but unable to conceal the pity he has for the unlikeable man.

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Into the bank marches Colonel Gore Hepburn (Morell), a pukka gent with an easy-going air who represents himself as an inspector from the insurance company, making a surprise visit to check security arrangements. When Fordyce is alone with Hepburn in his office, he receives a call from his panicked wife, who says she and their son are being terrorized. Hepburn tells Fordyce that he has electrodes attached to her temples and unless the manager helps him rob the bank of £93,000, her wits will be permanently scrambled. The pompous,

Above: Harry Fordyce (Peter Cushing) and Col. Gore Hepburn (André Morell) in Cash on Demand. Photo: Tom Edwards.

squirming Fordyce has no choice but to co-operate and Hepburn takes a jovial delight in adding to his discomfort with barbed words (“I detest brutality. I want bank robberies to be smoother, more sociable”). The film plays in near real-time as Fordyce has to help with the robbery, and then take steps to stop his staff—whom he has nagged into being efficient—from foiling the clever plan.

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Screenwriters David T. Chantler and Lewis Griefer, working from Gillies’ ingenious premise, craft a perfect suspense-with-character film (it’s often funny, but never at the expense of turning the screws). A single element (torture by electrocution) feels like a holdover of Hammer’s habitual emphasis on the grotesque, but it has a vital plot and mood function. The upsetting phone call stresses that, for all of Hepburn’s charm, he’s a ruthless, dangerous man, despite the slight possibility that the over-the-top threat was designed to terrify Fordyce into collaborating without asking too many questions (in Out of Sight (1998), George Clooney robs a bank with just a phone—perhaps inspired by Cash on Demand). Lawrence, who worked mostly in television, does his best job of film direction: watch it back to back with the endearingly daffy but ramshackle The Trollenberg Terror, and you’d never guess the same man made both. It’s easily one of Cushing’s Above: Gore Hepburn (André Morell) implies a threat to Harry Fordyce’s (Peter Cushing) family in Cash on Demand. Photo: Tom Edwards.

best performances, a tour de force as a stiff, unpleasant character who is put through the wringer so he emerges a better, more sympathetic man (though Fordyce’s reformation in extremis is nicely understated; he doesn’t gush apologies, just allows that he might drop in on the staff’s Christmas drinks party).

Cushing whines and weeps with uncomfortable conviction, exposing this harsh man as weak and pathetic. As Frankenstein and Van Helsing, the actor is brisk and unflappable—though his mad scientist has a hysterical edge, especially when pleading not to be guillotined—but here he shows the mush inside the starch. Cushing was used to playing heroes who were in charge, like Sherlock Holmes, but Fordyce only has the illusion of being in command, even before his world starts caving in. He’s a humourless, ridiculous wet blanket and his sneers at his staff plainly come from insecurity. In 1984, Cushing memorably cracked up while Morell, as O’Brien, shoved rats in his face, but here, he is in a more complicated position, falling apart but having to keep up appearances. As in almost every Christmas-set movie, it’s snowing outside, but all the business about the Scrooge-like way Fordyce won’t heat the office properly is there to make it seem more uncomfortable when he starts sweating.

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In Cash on Demand’s third act, the police arrive with Hepburn in handcuffs, offering another double act of uptight and laid-back in the characterizations of stern, by-the-book Inspector Bill Mason (the often-

Above: Peter Cushing in Cash on Demand. Photo: Tom Edwards.

sinister Kevin Stoney, his distinctively rich deep voice oddly replaced by another actor’s) and relaxed Sergeant Collins (Charles Morgan, who had a career-long run of genial coppers, most notably as a regular on the underrated Victorian detective series Sergeant Cork (1963-1968)). Just when he thought the ordeal was almost over, Fordyce has to squirm even more as he tries to get round the fact that Hepburn has been caught absconding with the money. The crook now impishly tries to make it look as if the manager was his accomplice all along rather than an unwilling victim—at least for as long as it amuses the cheerfully malign criminal to keep up the pressure. Cushing’s love for playing with the props is demonstrated in the bank manager’s fussy rituals with galoshes (handed to a subordinate), the bank’s brass plate, his coat and scarf (hung up as if he were decorating a statue) and objects on his desk (a big family photo). The plot hinges on Fordyce’s devotion to his wife and son (“they’re all I have”) but Hepburn needles him about the chilliness of even that relationship— noting that the distressed woman uses oddly formal terms (“I beseech you”) as if she expects her husband to prize the bank’s money over her life and Fordyce’s son begs for his mummy, not his dad, when upset. Morell, usually cast as a decent chap, relishes being a bounder, making the arch, smooth-talking bandit a worthy companion to the gone-toseed-in-civvies officers of The League of Gentlemen (1999). His calm, jovially sinister presence—enlisting everyone to help his larkish crime like a wicked uncle bribing small boys with sweets—almost brings in some of Dickens’ supernatural spirit. Gore Hepburn might be a tormenting angel or demon, more concerned with shaking up Fordyce’s life than getting away with the money. When the bank manager is distracted, the bandit even slips a packet of five-pound notes into his pocket as a tip, which naturally falls out at the worst possible moment, making Fordyce seem horribly guilty.

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Cushing and Morell play off each other perfectly, with Morell at ease even when disaster threatens and Cushing sweating and tie-straightening through every minor hiccough. The underrated Richard Vernon (also held over from the TV version) contributes much in a key third role. Another “officer material” actor (in everything from Goldfinger (1964) to The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), with a great deal of distinguished television work), Vernon gives assistant manager Pearson a lower-class accent which suggests he’s had to work harder than Fordyce for his position and will be utterly destroyed if he loses it, while also showing a trace of the natural warmth and humour he’s had to suppress to work for this petty tyrant. Deep in the subtext is that neither Fordyce nor Hepburn are the commanders they seem to be, but Pearson is the man you’d want running this bank if you were a customer

or an employee. Like Bob Cratchit, he even has mercy for a man he’d be justified in throwing to the police in the finale. As one of the few properties the company retains rights to, this odd footnote in Hammer’s filmography is still occasionally mooted for a remake (last I heard, it was being considered as a vehicle for Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, though it would suit any matched pair of character actors). Cash on Demand is also remembered enough that elements of its plot have been recycled in more elaborate, less effective thrillers (the Harrison Ford movie Firewall (2006) is pretty much an action movie remake of Cash on Demand). Though very differently plotted, The Silent Partner (1976) is similarly set in a bank at Christmas and deals with the up-and-down relationship between a bank employee and an imaginative hold-up man. But these later films don’t have the touch of redemption that harken back to Scrooge’s conversion in A Christmas Carol. Reverting to Dickens at the end after the bad dream is over, Fordyce softens enough to contribute to his staff’s Christmas party fund as carols appear on the soundtrack. For such a small movie, it has a big impact—offering a textbook tightlyplotted suspense situation and an emotional, character-driven drama.

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Above: Peter Cushing in Cash on Demand. Photo: Tom Edwards.

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CHAPTER 15 OWEN WILLIAMS

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f all the BBC comedy series to be considered for a Christmas special in 2000, The League of Gentlemen was perhaps the least likely. The strangest and blackest of sketch shows, its remit wouldn’t appear to lend itself to festive cheer. And yet, somehow, The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special ended up making perfect sense. Drawing on Britain’s classic horror cinema and television comedy, as well as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it injected the show’s macabre, off-kilter sensibility into a familiar horror portmanteau format. The League of Gentlemen began its twisted life as a stage show in the early ‘90s, written by Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, and performed by the latter three. After winning a Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1997, the team transitioned their show to radio and then to television in 1999, where it quickly picked up a cult following.

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At heart it was a sketch show, although each of its three six-episode seasons featured a running plot thread. The threat of “New Road” bringing strangers to town connected the episodes of the first series and, in the second, a mysterious nosebleed epidemic stems from the dubious practices of the seedy butcher Hilary Briss. Series three changed the format slightly to concentrate on a single set of characters per episode: its six stories take place simultaneously and collide in the finale. But the set-up remained the same. Dozens of grotesque characters, all played by Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith, stumbling through their hapless lives in the fictional northern English town of Royston Vasey Left: A Steve Pemberton character collects alms for “fallen women.” Photo by Nick West © BBC Photo Library

(actually the real name of “Britain’s Rudest Comedian” Roy Chubby Brown, who had a couple of cameos as the town’s mayor). Of these characters, perhaps most famous were Edward and Tubbs (Shearsmith and Pemberton), the pig-nosed, serial-killing, married siblings who run the “local shop for local people” and keep their son locked in an attic. Pauline (Pemberton) was the tyrannical Job Centre officer who hated “dole scum” and was obsessed with pens. Harvey and Val Denton (Pemberton and Gatiss) lived in an obsessively ordered house and were parents to the twins from The Shining (1980). And Mrs. Levinson (Shearsmith) was in constant class war with her monstrous cleaning lady Iris Krell (Gatiss). The list goes on. The show was funny but it was bleak: spooky like The Wicker Man (1973) but with broader laughs. British horror cinema of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s was a touchstone, but so was the television comedy of the same era: the frequent drag performances evoked comedians like Dick Emery (as well as the Monty Python troupe), while the set of the Local Shop was designed to mimic the one in Ronnie Barker’s sitcom Open All Hours (1973-1985). It was entirely about the specific influences of its four creators, which you might have thought would make for a niche audience. And yet it managed to cross over to mainstream success.

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“We were never thinking about a large audience at all,” recalls Dyson now. “It was about a level of quality and pleasing ourselves. We’d never have put that together with a breakout audience. I remember standing in the foyer on the first night of our big [post-TV series] tour, in Bristol. We’d had to move venues because of the volume of tickets sold, Above: Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton as Local Shop-keepers Edward and Tubbs. Photo © BBC.

and we were watching the audience coming in, saying to each other, ‘Who are these people?’ There were old people and families… It just didn’t make sense. We would never have expected that sort of audience for what we were doing.” The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special aired on December 27, 2000, between the second and third series, and just before the theatre tour; a time when Dyson says the team was “flying, at peak creativity.” To an extent, it’s reminiscent of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas, an annual tradition in the 1970s that was revived by Gatiss himself in 2014 when he directed “The Tractate Middoth.” But Dyson says that, even more than that series, they were attempting to capture the vibe of the British film studio Amicus and, in particular, their 1974 horror film From Beyond the Grave. Like that film, The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special was conceived as a portmanteau horror: three separate stories with a fourth, wraparound narrative.

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“We were just completely trusted and left alone by the BBC,” Dyson recalls rather wistfully. “I think we’d talked for quite a while in terms of ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if…’ It started as a joke, as these things often do. We’d probably been thinking about it for quite a while without realizing it. And we wrote it very quickly, in just two or three weeks. We were sort of at the tail end of the old way of doing things, where the BBC trusted their executives and producers. There wasn’t the level of interference you get now. It was just, ‘What do you want to do?’ We had the idea of doing a Christmas special, and the response, was, ‘Yes, fine.’ There was no interrogation in terms of what it would be: none of the kinds of questions you get now, where these things are pored over.”

Above: Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson at London’s Frightfest, 2002 (Photo: Myung Jung Kim / © AP Images)

In the special’s linking premise, atheist Reverend Bernice Woodall (Shearsmith) attempts to lock up her church for Christmas Eve so she can go home to watch boxing on television. A dark episode in her past—something terrifying that happened to her mother, gradually revealed in flashbacks—means she has no love for December 25, but her attempts to sit it out are thwarted by three visitors who want to unburden themselves of their own problems. Since the confession box is full of thousands of duty free cigarettes, they each take a pew to tell their sorry tale.

The first is Charlie Hull (Pemberton), half of a toxic married couple with Stella (Shearsmith), given to vicious public arguments, often involving sexual humiliation (Stella likens sex with Charlie to “trying to shove an oyster in a coin box”). Charlie explains to Bernice that he has developed a passion for line dancing, but is having nightmares in which his big moment in a pub competition is sabotaged. As he tells it, Stella appeals to a mysterious masked cabal, and they attack him with voodoo mid-dance, causing him to fail spectacularly. But the price Stella must pay turns out to be the death of her lover, the gross Lee (Gatiss), and Stella is framed for the murder by Lee’s wife Donna (a guest-starring Liza Tarbuck). Having listened to the story with some skepticism, Bernice dismisses it as a “cheese dream” and sends Charlie home feeling somewhat reassured.

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“We’d quite shamelessly take elements of things that we loved and riff on them,” says Dyson, “so the masks and the turning up to a secret society in a taxi, that was consciously Eyes Wide Shut (1999). It opened

Above: The League’s homage to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Photo: © BBC.

when we were all out in L.A. doing a BBC America promotion, so we’d had that lovely experience, as Kubrick fans, all watching it together at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. That doubly embedded it in our consciousness.” Bernice’s second visitor is Matthew Parker (Gatiss as an old man with Bernice; Shearsmith as a young man in the flashback), haunted by the memory of a Christmas spent in Duisburg, Germany with the pederast choirmaster Herr Lipp (Pemberton) in 1975. Fighting off Lipp’s cloying

advances while staying at his house, he comes to believe that his host is a vampire. But it turns out that Lipp’s hideous wife, organist Lotte (Gatiss), is the real bloodsucker, along with all the choirboys, who she’s transformed because she and Lipp can’t have children of their own. After a confrontation at choir practice, Matthew flees the church as Lotte and the boys apparently devour Lipp (although he may have survived, since he and Lotte are regular visitors to Royston Vasey in the chronologically subsequent first two series). Back in the present day, Bernice sneers that he’s “not the only one who’s ever had a shit Christmas” and bustles the blustering Parker out of the door.

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The third visitor is Matthew Chinnery (Gatiss), familiar from the series as the world’s worst veterinarian, who always kills the animals in his care, often spectacularly. Fearing that he’s losing his sanity, he tells the story of the family curse, dating back generations, which led to his professional predicament. His great-grandfather Edmund Chinnery (also Gatiss), a talented and successful vet at the time, was tricked by Dr. Magnus

Above: Mark Gatiss as Lotte Lipp (as vampire!). Photo: © BBC.

Purblind (Hammer veteran Freddie Jones, another guest star) into touching some bewitched “monkey’s balls,” transferring Purblind’s affliction to Edmund and his genetic line for ever afterwards. “We were always going for archetypes,” says Dyson, “and W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw is obviously one of those. But the real touchstone for this part was [Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ anthology comedy series] Ripping Yarns (1976-1979). Mark and I especially were real admirers of that, and particularly of the episode “The Curse of the Claw,” which we both remembered being a bit scared by as kids when it first went out. One of my fondest memories of the Christmas special is that the BBC did a screening of it before it aired, and Michael Palin came to watch it. Sitting next to him watching it… I still weep at the thought! And he was so charming and gracious. Chinnery is quite a Palin-style character, and I think that was always probably a very conscious thing. Mark had actually already written that story in prose form, and we took that as a template and worked it up into a script.” In an unusually upbeat moment, Bernice reassures the present-day Chinnery that there are no such things as curses, that his affliction is purely psychological and that he needs only to believe in himself. He departs feeling restored, and Bernice, having undergone a Scroogelike transformation, decides that Christmas might not be so bad after all. And then Papa Lazarou arrives. Along with Edward and Tubbs, Papa Lazarou (Shearsmith) was The League of Gentleman’s breakout “star” character, despite only appearing in three episodes. He first arrived in Royston Vasey in the first episode of the second series, the ringmaster of his own utterly bizarre “Pandemonium Carnival.” Dressed in the traditional garb of his nominal job description (top hat, sparkly tails), he calls everybody “Dave” regardless of gender. His fingers are thick with wedding rings, which he takes from the women he kidnaps (catchphrase: “You’re my wife now”) and imprisons inside his circus animals. Lazarou appears to sport black-andwhite minstrel make-up, until it’s revealed in the third series to be his actual skin colour; though he occasionally uses foundation to disguise himself as a white man called Keith Drop. He sells pegs, and is vaguely based on a Greek landlord of Pemberton and Shearsmith’s former acquaintance. The fact that a character built out of Greek, Gypsy and minstrel stereotypes never caused any sort of racial outcry is testament to how utterly weird (and daft) the character is: somehow, he rose above any potential controversy. Or perhaps the League was just lucky to have created him in a time before social media. It’s hard to imagine that he’d “play” without comment today.

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As if Lazarou isn’t already peculiar enough, the Christmas special establishes that he’s also ageless. Bernice’s repressed memory turns out to be of Lazarou, dressed as Father Christmas, arriving at their home when Bernice was a little girl to snatch her mother. And, as she finally prepares to close up the church, the same dark Santa is silhouetted in the doorway, greeting “Dave” and saying how nice it is to see her again, “all grown up.” Lazarou takes her away, struggling in a sack, as the credits roll. An apparently shell-shocked BBC2 announcer, winding up that original broadcast, winced that she hoped the viewing audience wouldn’t have nightmares. “Papa Lazarou was much more explicitly demonic in the special than he had been previously,” chuckles Dyson. “He became supernatural. One thing we wanted to do that we couldn’t afford, effects-wise, was have his sleigh take off at the end. That was beyond our means. But we were just being playful, really. These stories all happen in a bubble, so we didn’t get bogged down in the whys and wherefores too much. I do remember watching it, in context, with all the BBC Christmas trailers around it, and realizing, ‘Hmm, this is actually quite dark…’”

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Crucially, the Christmas special was the first episode of The League of Gentlemen to eschew a laugh track: something Dyson attributes to wanting to make something deliberately filmic. “It felt right to drop it,” he says. “Having grown up as comedy fans, we had that default thing of there being something cheap about a laugh track. And then you

Above: Papa Lazarou (Reece Shearsmith) is revealed! Photo: © BBC.

start making stuff and you realize why it’s there: because stuff without a laugh track can be less welcoming… it’s a subtle thing. On the first series we actually had a studio audience. On the second series we didn’t: we played it all in afterwards. So it was real laughter, but it was to a screening. But after the Christmas special we decided we didn’t need it. We didn’t use it on the third series.” Dyson attributes the high production values—despite the BBC’s standard low budget for a one-hour show—to director Steve Bendelack, who has “a terrific eye and a real expertise” and was able to call in favours from London effects house Framestore, with whom he had a long-standing relationship. “For example,” Dyson offers, “I know there’s a scene where we added falling snow, from which they took elements they’d used on some Hollywood film or other. So we were getting absolutely A-list post-production stuff for essentially no extra money.” Despite the wintry setting, the special was filmed in the summer: “We had all the fun of shooting it in August, spraying Hadfield fields with foam snow! We let all the local kids come and play in it at the end of the day’s filming.” The Edwardian train station in the Chinnery chapter is, very deliberately, Oakworth in West Yorkshire—the same location used in The Railway Children (1970). The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special was macabre—even occasionally horrific—but it retained that mischievous twinkle the series had established. The characters remain, for the most part, awful human beings, but they’re all leavened with a pathos that means the humour, somehow, never feels mean-spirited. Apart from Papa Lazarou, obviously, who’s just berserk. Like the series before it, the Christmas special pulled off an almost unique balancing act. Spiritual successors like Little Britain (2003-2007) and Pemberton and Shearsmith’s own Inside No. 9 (2014-) followed, but nothing has ever been quite like it.

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“With the Christmas special we weren’t after horror so much as atmosphere,” concludes Dyson now. “I vividly remember the writing and the making of it. And how pleased we were with it. It had exactly what we were aiming for: the tone and the visual richness. In some ways it was the easiest thing we ever did.” It may have been gruesome, but “there was something about the whole experience that was just joyful.”

Interview with Jeremy Dyson conducted by the author.

Right: Local Shop on set of The League Of Gentlemen at Marsden Moor, Hadfield West Yorkshire. Photo: Simon Woodcock.

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CHAPTER 16 CAELUM VATNSDAL

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here always has been something uncanny about Christmas which, after all, is an annual day on which an hirsute, immortal creature dwelling in the far north and tended to by a population of servient dwarves, bends space and time to bestow gifts unto those whom, by criteria known only to himself, he deems deserving. Any concept so bizarre must naturally have many times tipped into horror, and must also, for nearly the same reasons, be particularly attractive to those of an avant-garde mindset. The horror of Christmas, and the essentiality of that horror too, is obvious. Terror is woven into the holiday’s DNA as surely as quasisurreal oddness. Of course there are the ancient, largely AngloSaxon traditions, like the child-eating ogress Gryla and her 10 annoying progeny, the Yule Lads; like the Krampus, about whom several movies have been made; like the Belsnickel, the Whipping Father and the Ugly Perchten. The names alone are scary. But the holiday as most of us know it is plenty creepy too: the omniscient intruder in the house at midnight, the pagan totems, the dwarf army. It may as well be Phantasm (1979). It is precisely the collision between this inherent scariness and the holiday’s better-loved, more beneficent image— an exquisite corpse of intertwined opposites, wreathed together like pipe smoke and holly—which specifically interests the eccentric, the creative blackguard.

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There is no shortage of authors, artists and especially filmmakers

Left: Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972) poster.

who have developed, or who may at any moment develop, an iconoclastic take on Christmas. This is a class of artist so broad the word “experimental” doesn’t quite cover it, and many of them don’t deserve or want that label anyway. They’re the people whose sequences of image, sound or word frequently make no conventional sense, but who also occasionally surprise with a completely commercial endeavor. Some, like Christmas Evil (1980) champion John Waters, drift from odd, angry works like Eat Your Makeup (1968) into the multiplex, and make a home there. David Cronenberg, a dedicated iconoclast and amateur Surrealist since his days making experimental shorts at the University of Toronto, did not hesitate to depict a shopping mall Santa falling victim to machine gun fire in Rabid (1977) before moving to safer holiday moments in his later films, like Sean Sullivan’s homely complaint that he has “no talent for tinsel” as he decorates the tree in The Dead Zone (1983). Other filmmakers, including Christmas Evil director Lewis Jackson, or To All A Goodnight (1980) director David Hess (better known for playing the brutish Krug in Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972)), spent entire careers gearing up for brief but memorable spasms of yuletide madness. It’s logical: the least Christmassy Christmas movies are those made by the directors least likely to make a Christmas movie at all. Curtis Harrington fits into this category, and so do Theodore Gershuny and Monte Hellman. Each of these filmmakers crossed the vale into the avant-garde early in their careers, but it was Harrington who nearly made it his métier. He began in the 1940s with evocative black-andwhite shorts that used the trappings of horror (ghostly figures, bewigged skeletons) to explore his own sexuality, and once that was figured out, as much as such things ever are, he moved on to evocative black-andwhite pictures exploring other, stranger waters. He made a film about the artist/occultist Marjorie Cameron, and another starring, and likely about, his parents. His great early feature triumph was Night Tide (1961), a cheap specimen ripe with scuzzy seaside atmosphere, mysterioso shadows, and Dennis Hopper in a sailor suit. He did time with Roger Corman, at the producer’s request cobbling together a goofy space picture out of effects borrowed from a Russian space opera Corman had bought, and shots of a grouchy Basil Rathbone pointing at things happening. From there he went mainstream in his own peculiar way with modish psychodrama Games (1967), and thence mostly into low-budget horror features, alternating energetic rip-offs like Ruby (1977) with creepy TV movies about cat creatures and killer bees. In 1971 he went to England and made his single stab at the Christmas horror sub-genre with Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?

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Thanks to its wordy, inquisitive title and dowager star (Shelley Winters), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? might easily be confused for a late entry in

Right: U.S. poster with the truncated title Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1971).

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the Batty Old Dame cycle that had been kicked off a decade earlier by the Misses Davis and Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and indeed this was likely the intention of American International, the film’s production company; but such a write-off would be inaccurate, and, in the viewer primed for axe-wielding pensioners and an avalanche of falling heads, would cause only disappointment. Nor did it help that Harrington and Winters had recently collaborated on a film of exactly that type: What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971), in which Winters did deign to bloody a kitchen knife or two. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? was co-written by the prolific Hammer Films scribe Jimmy Sangster and was probably not made by Hammer because by 1972 such material was far too tame for them. As much as it may turn off the thrill seeker, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? would likewise disappoint those craving holiday spirit in their horror. It’s incontestably a Christmas movie, but doesn’t go overboard on the signifiers—it never fetishizes holiday décor as does, say, Black Christmas (1974), which is all dark oak and star-filtered fairy lights. Auntie Roo herself keeps a modest Christmas, localizing her glitter and tinsel in a single room; though this year’s tree, the unctuous butler asserts, is “the best we’ve ever had.” As the butler is played by Michael Gothard, one is unsure whether to believe him.

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Auntie’s annual Christmas party for the local orphans, or at least that percentage of them lucky enough to be picked, is a two-day kiddie bacchanal featuring sumptuous meals, games aplenty, generous gift Top: Christopher (Mark Lester) and Katy (Chloe Franks) defend themselves against the batty Roo (Shelley Winters). Bottom: Judy Cornwell and Michael Gothard.

giving, and light operetta from ex-music hall showgirl Roo, who performs “Tit-Willow” for the kids. Included among the children are Christopher (Mark Lester) and Katy (Chloe Franks), a slightly creepy brother and sister who soon become the focus of Auntie Roo’s attentions; Katy, it transpires, reminds Roo of her own lost little girl, who died some years earlier in a bannister accident and is now kept badly taxidermied in the early Bates style up in the nursery, just a bundle of bones in a bassinette. In Katy, Roo has her little girl again, and will not let her go; she’s even willing to club a young boy with a stick of firewood to protect her situation. The kids in turn have read Hansel and Gretel, so they know what to do.

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Harrington should be at home in this mansion of showfolk—Roo’s husband was a famous magician and the attic is full of his stuff—but the same pall that dims the holiday atmosphere seems to hang over the instruments of prestidigitation. (Butler Gothard pulls a scary prank on the kids, but that’s about it.) Harrington relies on the supposed natural incongruence of horror and Christmas to lend the picture its strangeness, and evidently felt disinclined to salt it with any further avant-garde touches.

Above: Sinister dolls and coffins in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Photo: © American International Pictures.

Here then is an example of how a holiday setting can undercut or obviate the personal touches an iconoclastic filmmaker might otherwise have included. To be fair, this is a retrospective appraisal: in 1972, before The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and a thousand Santa slashers, Christmas and creepiness were not considered such natural chums. Having a Christmas tree in room adjacent to the scary goingson was good enough, and it was not yet necessary to stab people in the eye with ornaments, electrocute them with strings of coloured lights, or bake their skin into gingerbread cookies. Theodore Gershuny never had the career Harrington did. He was a proper New York bohemian, throwing over his first wife for a Warhol Factory girl and making himself a part of the city’s avant-garde scene. Almost from the beginning he was a genre filmmaker, but never seemed entirely comfortable within whatever genre he was trading in, nor quite sure how to play by its rules. His first feature, a 1970 espionage thriller called Kemek, featuring an aleatoric narrative told through somnolent voiceover, is a testament to this, and a later film, Sugar Cookies (1973), for which he is perhaps best known, is a psychosexual revenge drama heavily marbled with weird songs, goofy comedy and Warhol acolytes. Between these two pictures came his Christmas endeavor, Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), as relentlessly unfestive a Christmas movie as ever has been made. In deference to the season in which it’s set, the movie’s set decoration includes some ratty wreaths and a few stubby little Christmas trees indifferently decorated. In addition, distant, hollow-sounding organ carols play frequently on the soundtrack. But, as in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, great effort seems to have gone into divesting anything remotely festive of any drop of festiveness. Silent Night, Bloody Night opens on “the day before Christmas, in 1950,” in a small Massachusetts town as Wilfred Butler (Philip Bruns), the heretofore absent master of Butler House, opens his front door and rushes out screaming and in flames. Inside the house a cozier fire burns, and a strange person plays the organ. The house stands empty for 20 years, but soon word spreads that it is to be sold, and this news occasions a madman’s pipe-wrench escape from an Institute for the Criminally Insane. A he-man real estate agent (Patrick O’Neal), who initially appears to be the hero, is actually among the first victims; but not before he has a long scene with the town’s worthies: the mayor (Walter Abel), the sheriff (Walter Klauun), the switchboard operator (Fran Stevens) and a newspaper man played by John Carradine as a bell-ringing mute. Further killings ensue, all centred around Butler House, which itself was once an asylum for the insane; and eventually, in a memorable twist, the grandees of the town turn out to be the nowaged inmates of that very same asylum, who escaped (a black-andwhite flashback, in which they are played by other underground New

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Right: Theodore Gershuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972). Photos: Roy Patterson.

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York City personalities) and took up positions of influence in the village. Silent Night, Bloody Night is all atmosphere, but not, of course, holiday atmosphere. Like Kemek it features barbiturated narration from Gershuny’s wife, Mary Woronov, and is pretty shaky plotwise, but unlike the spy picture it stands as a genuinely effective example of its genre. Though rarely frightening it’s often disturbing and eerie, and the perversity required to cast John Carradine, one of the great film voices of the twentieth century, and then make him a mute, is admirable. When you make all the calculations, it’s probably one of the best Christmas horror pictures yet made. It was the one in which Gershuny’s genre interests and his inability to deliver straight-ahead material hit together at obtuse angles and meshed near perfectly.

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Silent Night, Bloody Night was Gershuny’s best film, and Silent Night, Deadly Night Part III: Better Watch Out (1989) may be Monte Hellman’s worst. Hellman started, as did so many, with Roger Corman. His early work included a monster movie that was low rent even for Corman; taking his turn directing The Terror (1963) for a day or two (a privilege he shared with every other tyro filmmaker in town); a few Filipino-set action movies; and the work in which he established his avant-garde bona-fides, two existentialist Westerns called The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966), made with his pal Jack Nicholson. Hellman continued down this path with variable results, and without Nicholson. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) was another anti-genre genre

Above: Mary Woronov and James Patterson in Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972). Photo: Roy Patterson.

film, and the picture Hellman is today lauded for the most; Cockfighter (1974), made for and tinkered with by Corman, was a strange drama in which Warren Oates takes a vow of silence until his prize fighting cock takes the championship; China 9, Liberty 37 (1978) was another weird Western; Iguana (1988) the tale of a castaway with a lizard face. The movies range, roughly in chronology, from excellent to merely interesting, but none of them was a popular success.

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After Iguana, Hellman was invited to make the third installment in a Christmas horror franchise he’d never heard of. If he’d even briefly been aware of the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, it was because of the mild furor that had greeted its 1984 release: parents were outraged at the early-evening TV ads depicting an axe-wielding Kringle, which had terrified their children and forced the unhappy moms and dads to prematurely reveal that Santa didn’t really exist at all. Reviewers, too, hated the film, so naturally it was a success, and the beginning of an increasingly irrelevant series of Christmas slasher cheapies.

Above: Laura’s (Samantha Scully) dream vision of Santa in Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1987).

The saga began with the murder of a mother and father by a criminal in a Santa suit; the surviving boy grows up in an orphanage under the care of a brutal Mother Superior, snaps one day once he’s become an adult, quickly procures a jolly red suit of his own and begins some holiday carving. Among other crimes, he impales Linnea Quigley through the chest on a set of deer horns, and eventually squares off against the vicious nun who tormented him in his youth. The sequel, with Billy’s little brother Ricky taking his place in the Santa suit, was largely the same thing again, literally so, as Silent Night, Deadly Night part 2 (1987) is substantially made up of footage from the first one. Hellman’s installment features Ricky (Bill Moseley) again, here introduced comatose in a hospital with his brain exposed in a salad spinner. His great nemesis, once he wakes up and leaves the hospital, is one of his fellow patients, a cranky teenage blind girl (Samantha Scully) who shares some psychic connection with Ricky. She’s travelling with her brother (Eric DaRe) and his girlfriend (Laura Harring) to see their beloved granny (Elizabeth Hoffman), who is herself a psychic; and Ricky makes his way there too of course. (The picture is inspired by Little Red Riding Hood as much as Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is to Hansel and Gretel.)

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As strange as Silent Night, Deadly Night III frequently is—dream sequences, paranormal grannies, cranial skylights, and so on—it never tips into surrealism; unless we count the scene in which the escaped maniac, in brain dome and asylum dress, sticks his thumb out for a ride and gets one. Only after the driver complains about the Christmas sweater he is forced by his wife to wear each year does he notice his

Above: Bill Moseley as Ricky in Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1987).

passenger’s curious appearance, and even then merely asks “You get a hair transplant or something?” (It is of course the last question he will ask anybody.) The decorative elements are not too far from those in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? or Silent Night, Bloody Night, though for a Christmas film shot in Los Angeles in April, one supposes they’re adequate enough. Grandma keeps a decently well-appointed tree, with blinking lights and tinsel and plenty of presents beneath, but elsewhere the festive decoration is wanting. At the hospital, unadorned wreaths hang like merkins on the hospital walls, and every other location, from a neighbour’s house to a local gas station, seems to share the same pathetic string of lights. Silent Night Deadly Night Part III is, at its core, a sad little movie, encouraging agonized pathos whenever Hellman’s name appears on screen, or on those few occasions where his style is discernable. In considering a Christmas horror picture, the tendency is to grade it according to a different set of rules: how Christmassy is it? How effectively does it undercut the jollity of the season? And, in keeping with the spirit of raving implausibility of the holiday itself, how weird is it? In fact, Silent Night Deadly Night Part III scores fair to middling on all these points, but, though Hellman has claimed a certain personal pride in the film, based on his experience of making it and the remarkable time constraints under which he worked, it’s by every other measure a step down for the director. Christmas horror is a subgenre of surprising variety and tone, and the subject of great affection. Those who love it, whether they be hidebound killer-in-a-Santa-suit traditionalists, or intrepid viewers willing to sacrifice a few axe murders or “naughty list” gags for an almost antiholiday atmosphere, all have their personal favourites, and of course it is the latter group who will most enjoy the movies described herein. Though in every way unsuited to the task of making a Christmas movie, Harrington, Gershuny and Hellman all did, and thanks to this very unsuitability made movies that in one way or another broadened the frontiers of the genre, even if the movies themselves were not always top-notch. Their eccentric tastes and unusual storytelling strategies worked both for and against the subgenre into which they were dipping a mistletoe, and there are enough commonalities between the three films—the shabby décor and the way they seem not to care about, or even at times to hate, the season they’re set in; the assumption that contra-positioning Christmas and horror is all the imagination and stylization required for the film to work as high-concept art—to imagine a through-line. Finally, it strikes me that, according to the scale we are left with, the tension between a contempt for Christmas and a thematic or mandated reliance on it is what ultimately makes a really valid Christmas horror movie. It’s too bad the gimmicks have taken over.

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CHAPTER 17 RALPH ELAWANI

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usan Sontag wrote in Plato’s Cave that “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” and in the Canadian filmmaking landscape, few embody this more than Robert Morin. The Montreal-based director is among those filmmakers who have routinely pushed the boundaries of subjective camera and storytelling. An acclaimed but still marginal filmmaker with a career-spanning propensity for sensitive subjects, the 67-year-old has gained a reputation as a steadfast defender of freedom of expression who frequently works with non-actors (including Morin himself), and seems most at home with stories set in huis-clos (i.e., behind closed doors) environments that explore the possibilities opened up by spatial, temporal and material constraints.

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Perhaps his most unsettling film—and that which proves to be his most vulnerable—is the real-life horror tale Petit Pow! Pow! Noël (2005), a Christmas-set story recounting 24 hours in the life of a deranged individual who decides to settle his family issues once and for all. Shot with a handheld camera in a hospital room on Christmas Eve, and starring Morin’s elderly father as he lived out his last days in a nursing home, Petit Pow! Pow! Noël sets the stage early on for what could be described as a grammar of suffering. As the narrator captures on film an elderly man he believes to be his estranged father, he employs all the objects in the room (including trinkets, cards, door, windows, photographs) to trigger painful childhood memories. He then uses these tools to justify why he plans on torturing, Left: DVD cover for Robert Morin’s Petit Pow! Pow! Noël (2005). Photo:

courtesy of Robert Morin and Coop Vidéo de Montréal.

humiliating and killing the disabled old man. Morin’s tale unfolds as the loss of human dignity reaches its apex when the protagonist volunteers to give his father a bath and punishes him with scalding water. However, as soon as reality interrupts the story, the paralysis that plagued the old man sees itself transferred onto the son, who turns out to be a chronic offender who has escaped from a mental institution. The founder of production center Coop Video, Morin has dealt with controversial issues since he began his career in the 1970s, including marginal individuals (Ma vie c’est pour le restant de mes jours, 1980), Canadian biculturalism (Yes Sir!, Madame, 1994), substance abuse (Quiconque meurt, meurt à douleur, 1998), racism (Le nèg’, 2002), child sexual abuse (Journal d’un coopérant, 2009), First Nations hardship (Trois histoires d’Indiens, 2014) and tax evasion (Un paradis pour tous, 2016).

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A recipient of Quebec film lifetime achievement award Prix AlbertTessiers, the Governor General’s Award and the Best Canadian Film Award at TIFF for his film Requiem pour un beau sans-cœur (1992), his work has been the subject of retrospectives in Quebec, France and Belgium. Despite these accolades, Morin wasn’t above publically calling out the ridiculousness of being nominated for two Prix Jutra (now Pris Iris), Quebec’s cinema awards, for his film Papa à la chasse aux lagopèdes (2009) that sold only about 300 tickets at the box office. As he put it: “It’s sympathy which I can do without.” I met with Robert Morin at his house in Montreal, some 11 years after Above: Robert Morin. Photo: Olivier Léger.

the release of Petit Pow! Pow! Noël, to discuss home videos, Christian mythology, literature and political correctness. By the strangest of coincidences, Morin had just got out of the hospital on that day. [The interview has been translated from French by the author.] Mythologically speaking, Christmas celebrates the journey of a couple to a place where they can safely give birth to a child. Petit Pow! Pow! Noël somehow turns this story on its head so that it becomes the return of the (alleged) child who is going to murder his father to avenge his mother. On several occasions you have spoken of the primacy of concept over narrative in your films. Could you tell me about the concept you had in mind for this film? It’s very conceptual, but at the same time, it’s perhaps the least conceptual of all my films, because it’s something I wanted to do with my father before he died. But it was still a concept. It takes place over one night, the unity of time is very tight. Inevitably, there’s urgency, as this unity of time calls for it. This character — who we learn is an escapee — knows he has very little time to accomplish what he has in mind. If you think of Quebecois films that mix holidays and violence, two really stand out: Petit Pow! Pow! Noël and André Forcier’s Night Cap (1974). In both cases, violent acts are perpetrated among members of the same family. From a directorial point of view, can you tell me about the impact of familicide on the audience? Christmas is a family celebration, first and foremost. Or should I say: a celebration of family obligations. If one wants to attack the spectator (which is my intention), then there’s nothing like cracking the false security bubble that family represents. It’s remarkable that your character goes from one institution to another, much as if these were the only places where he can function.

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It’s true! I had not calculated it that way, but it’s true. Ultimately, this is someone who takes refuge and empties his heart. And we learn that he has done it several times. This kind of urgency, the unity of time helps it a lot. And it takes place during nighttime because there is just way too much action going on during daytime. There is less potential interference or nurses to stop it. That’s part of the concept. And the fact that it’s passed off as a home movie that the character is shooting…

Yes, in fact it’s a bit what he does. He blames his father and we witness this double plot twist. I did the same thing in a couple of films, like my last one [Un paradis pour tous (2016)] and Papa à la chasse aux lagopèdes (2009). It’s as if the story had two propellers. That is to say, there is a plot, but throughout, you learn why the character is screwed and how he screwed himself. Through his anger, the character reveals the reason behind it. It could be called a double narrative.

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At some point, your character says: “It’s not every day that one becomes a memory.” It reminded me of Victorian-era people who photographed the dead.

Not just the dead! The ersatz; people were trying to photograph ghosts, ectoplasm... It’s almost as if the home video suddenly became a death film. Well, that is to say, we know this is where it’s going. It’s inevitable. The plot is told from the killer’s point of view. It’s as if you gave a camera to Jason Voorhees. Imagine Friday the 13th (1980), but from Jason’s point of view. You could hear children watching TV in the basement. In my film, the monster has the camera. I sometimes feel that the holiday season is like a cyst or a benign tumor Above: Father and son : André and Robert Morin. Photo : Coop Vidéo de Montréal.

that we inherited from Christianity. We have simply learned to deal with it. The fact that you are using it as a vehicle for tragedy brings back a sacred dimension that you somehow end up exposing as not-sosacred. What do you think? Well, that’s the “political” aspect of the film. Christmas, to me, is the celebration of good conscience. The festival of hypocrisy. The overflow of generosity concentrated in a single day sets the stage for wacky and grotesque scenes that highlight the absurdity and the dehumanization that take place in CHSLDs [Centre d’hébergement et de soins de longue durée; Quebec nursing homes]. It’s the equivalent to a pie-in-the-face contest in a camp full of starving refugees.

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The film’s temporality gives it momentum and makes it even more sadistic in the eye of the viewer. Do you think the same exercise would have been possible if you had filmed during a different period of the year? Actually, I think this momentum you mention is intimately tied to the writing process and the concept behind the film. Christmas is one of the busiest periods of the year in nursing homes. It would have been difficult to find a better excuse for the protagonist to creep in and impersonate a family member. Above: Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen pay a visit to the patients. Photo : Coop Vidéo de Montréal.

Was the huis clos a deliberate choice from the get-go? Yes and no. From the moment I decided to do something with my father, I was limited by his disability. The huis clos is something that I value and that has served me well. My next film will also be held in huis clos. I consider it the ideal tool for tragedy. It makes things easier. It keeps you from focusing on something else… Exactly. And it allows the dramatic structure to take shape. That’s tragedy... the character puts himself in deep shit. The huis clos allows for nuances. The character becomes multidimensional. It’s the ideal space for a playwright. Were there scenes that you planned on shooting but that ultimately proved to be too difficult for your father, physically speaking? My father let me do all I had in mind. Of course, a few times, he’d grumble during take five or six, but no more than any other actor I’ve worked with. Before shooting your film, did you research the genre? Not at all. I didn’t do any research in terms of holiday celebrations, traditions or films that dealt with the subject. I simply chose to shoot a fiction during that time period because, in my opinion, Christmas really calls for rebellion. You have talked about literature and theater as art forms that progress faster than cinema because they do not necessitate comparable monetary investments. Do you still hold that opinion?

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Yes, especially with theatre. In fact, when there is cash involved, there is always pressure to make “seductive” art. My least seductive films are the ones that were also the least expensive to produce. At some point you get into seductive recipes because you know what buttons to push. And self-censorship kicks in when you come to understanding how the machine works. It’s like squirrels in a cage pushing buttons for their peanuts. Cinema is a very slow art form because the majority of people who make movies, in my opinion, are storytellers, not visual artists. When people judge a film, they generally do so based on a script; based on the story they’re being told. It’s a problem that’s been following cinema since its inception. One could say the same about literature and the contingencies of forms and styles, no?

When film arrived, the illiteracy rate was of maybe 80%. The only way to read Dostoyevsky became the screen. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made millions on the back of illiteracy, by making substitutes for novels and stories with romantic heroes. Cinema is an art that has developed a lot more through storytelling than through “plasticity”, if I can say so. It’s an art form that has evolved very little since D.W. Griffith. Sure, there are dollies now and everything, but the language narrators generally use in cinema comes directly from the 1920s. It has evolved in terms of resolution, colors, etc. But the formal structure, the one we use to tell stories, has not changed much. There are not that many artists who have “attacked” cinema or who have shown an interest in using it from a different perspective than that of storytelling. Of course there are certainly people like Kenneth Anger and others who are more interested in experimenting with film. But often, in formal terms, you could basically put movies end-to-end and think they were shot by the same director. So cinema is somewhat ossified by its narrative aspect. There are exceptions, as I said. And in more recent years, as far as “mainstream”/Hollywood films go, we could think of Birdman (2014) and Boyhood (2014) as truly remarkable concepts. Speaking of language, in Petit Pow! Pow! Noël the storytelling takes place in the room. You go from one object to the other, much like you have done in other films, and then build your story around them. I find this approach similar to a father telling bedtime stories. Many of these items were not in the room, of course. I planted them there to tell a story. The idea was, in formal terms, to rise up to a more novel-like quality of storytelling. That is to say I wanted people to imagine/visualize the drama, rather than to simply see it. The idea of suspense is quite common in cinema. With this film, I wanted suspense but from a subjective point of view, which is unusual. Dramatically speaking, that affects me more. And this is an idea I play with a lot. By doing so, I move away from the classic shot-reverse-shot and the 160° axis. Actually that may well be what will force me to retire one day…

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What do you mean? When I’ll have gone around the fucking block enough. There are still limits to what you can do with 2D. And even if we have 3D, it has to add something to your work. It’s a bit like the low-angle shots; many people did it before Orson Welles, but it took him to make low-angle shots meaningful. It’s still a poor medium, when compared to others such as dance. It’s a medium stuck in its own machinery. The actual tools are where inventiveness gets stuck. It’s not the case with painting, for example: you can paint on the ground, up in the air, on doors.

I know that you appreciate the work of Sam Peckinpah and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I would be curious to know if their take on violence had an influence on your work. Especially Fassbinder, in films like Martha (1974), where sadism really settles in gradually. That’s a good example, but Martha really didn’t come to mind when I was working on Petit Pow! Pow! Noël. Nevertheless, the idea of amplifying sadism is still there. But in the case of Martha we witness the protagonist’s astonishment as her husband makes her suffer for no reason, whereas in Petit Pow! Pow Noël, we have the total reverse situation: we follow the protagonist as he explains why he wants his father to suffer.

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During a moment of madness, your character talks about citizens who will one day become “responsible” and start killing those who suffer, so they don’t turn into a financial burden for society. This idea of “responsible citizen” and civil cops makes me think also of the new PC thought police and the rise of the political righteousness. Don’t you think? I think everyone seems to be in seduction mode right now… and representation mode as well. It’s like intolerance to gluten. It makes you special so you jump on the bandwagon. The idea of fragmentation Above: Robert Morin’s very own take on the shower scene. Photo: Robert Morin.

and atomization of the people is what will drive us right into a wall, in my opinion. It’s similar to the inquisitor’s game: the judge is more perverse than the accused. We are in a world where mystical landmarks do not really exist anymore— here, at least. There remains only rectitude. It makes me understand why people turn to religion, that is unless they impose it on others. But really, we’re in the Costco of identities. I mean, for example, the other day, I wanted to go see a screening of Dominic Gagnon’s film Of the North (2015), and there was a whole cohort of people who were there because they wanted his head. You say to yourself: “Where’s Voltaire?” You know: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I mean, if you do not like his opinion... Well, in Gagnon’s case, to what extent was it an opinion, per se? Even if it had been one! Your duty is not to block it, but to produce another one, a different one. That being said, for Aboriginal people, victimization is more than just a reality. It’s far from being an invention. It’s systemic. They went through a huge process of formatting. They were just bulldozed. But we need to keep in mind that the only function of art is to disturb. This is the kind of damage that political correctness does. It’s a bit like preventing [controversial comedian] Dieudonné to get on a stage. Let him come and speak. And if we need to prosecute him, we’ll do it afterwards. Simply stop him and you’ll end up with a bunch of [Marie] Le Pen copycats who actually accept his ideas as true. We are in a society that gives itself the appearance of a free state, but that is increasingly constrained by all kinds of stuff. And my own generation is the worst. I mean, will we have a common project at some point? What’s the role of our media / mediums then?

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The history of our media is the story of our growing individualization: you isolate yourself from others and don’t need to have direct contact with people. It’s not something I see as very reversible. And it comes with a form of pacification that makes people easy to manipulate. The only thing that brings people together becomes their basic instincts: to shit, eat and fuck. People can’t seem to come together for some common goals. And from the moment we all see ourselves as “consumers” who believe wealth is an end in itself, people like Paul Desmarais, Donald Trump and others turn into kings. All that fear of control that George Orwell staged was of no use. We formatted ourselves. I think that when you hear people say, “as a consumer, I have rights,” you’re basically done.

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CHAPTER 18 ALEXANDRA WEST

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eleased a few weeks before Christmas 2007, Franck Khalfoun’s P2 made just over $2 million, garnering it the uncelebrated title of the eighth-worst opening for a major studio release ever, as calculated by the website Box Office Mojo. On its surface, P2 appears to be watered-down “torture porn,” in which a beautiful woman is terrorized in a parking lot by a madman at Christmas, but a few film critics noticed it as an effective thriller that deviates from the expected narratives and tropes by playing on the notion of the camera’s gaze in the lead characters’ perceptions of events. The duelling perspectives encapsulate a fight for female independence that is heightened by the pressures and perceived obligations of the holiday season that ultimately drive the characters to their breaking point.

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When New York Magazine critic David Edelstein coined the term “torture porn” in 2006 he opined on the way filmmakers like Eli Roth, James Wan and even Mel Gibson had utilized blood-soaked film frames to entreat an audience’s emotions and reactions:

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But torture movies cut deeper than mere gory spectacle. Unlike the old seventies and eighties hack-’em-ups (or their jokey remakes, like Scream), in which masked maniac punished nubile teens for promiscuity (the spurt of blood was equivalent to the money shot in porn), the victims here are neither interchangeable nor expendable. They range rom decent people with recognizable human emotions to, well, Jesus.

Left: Angela (Rachel Nichols) in P2 (2007). Photo: Steve Wilkie.

A year later, in 2007, the torture porn subgenre appeared to have run its course, as audiences grew bored with the formula that made an impact on genre films post-9/11. These films were viewed as employing weak narrative devices that served little more than to get hapless victims from one torture scene to another with little atmosphere, character development or suspense. The thrills were in the seemingly endless gore that these directors were happy to deliver. After the initial hype of films like James Wan’s Saw (2004), Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Alexandre Aja’s 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, the subgenre gained a reputation as nothing more than cheap thrills, with many knock-offs following these early films’ gory blueprints. However, P2 notably diverges from the horror template that saturated the market for the previous decade. Roger Ebert noted “Yes, I know, it sounds like a formula slasher film, but it’s actually done well, and in the current climate at least most Women in Danger films end up with Men in Danger.” Though often considered torture porn or “survival horror,” P2 is actually indentured to the New French Extremity, a film movement that prevailed as an enfant terrible in genre cinema from roughly 1998 to 2008. New French Extremity was named by TIFF programmer James Quant and explained by him in Artforum magazine as:

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Cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement.

These films explore the tension between human desire and violence. Unlike Torture Porn which is simply an exercise in pushing an audience’s boundaries, New French Extremity seeks to explore the effects of violence on the human body and psyche often stemming from historical traumas rooted in French soil or even nearby countries such as Belgium.

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P2 was produced and co-written by Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, the French filmmakers behind High Tension (2003), who began working in Hollywood and became part of the horror remake boom of the new millennium. After middling success with remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Aja and Levasseur began working on a concept for P2 based on stories and news reports of assaults happening to women in parking garages in their native France. The story was developed by the team, joined by sometimes actor and soon-to-be director of P2, Franck Khalfoun.

“It was really after High Tension we were thinking about finding a decent location where we could do a survival horror film and the idea came to me very quickly,” Aja told horror website Shock Till You Drop upon the film’s release. “[The parking garage] was a nice set-up to do a High Tension survival or slasher kind of film. To direct it myself was a little too close to High Tension, so we teamed with Franck. In working with him we decided to go with the psychological aspect, the one-to-one angle. The idea was to explore the fear of the parking garage but in a more psychological way than the kind of maniac or slasher approach.” P2’s parking garage setting is both close to the populated world, but also deeply removed from it. This location functions as a resting place in which workers transition from personal life to corporate life, and vice versa. In the context of the Christmas season, P2 imbues the physical space with a cold aesthetic; it becomes an emotional and physical jail in which characters must reconcile the choices they’ve made in their personal and professional lives during the most wonderful time of the year. Under the North American puritanical complex, Christmas is one of the few holidays observed by institutions across the continent. It attempts to bring families together by existing apart from the American “can-do” work ethic, but also exacerbates the isolation of those who do meet expectations of a family life. Throughout the film, P2 continually challenges society’s notions of Christmas or the holiday season. Khalfoun’s film opens with the camera gliding through the barren parking lot which makes up the setting for the majority of the film. The faint sound of synth-based music rumbles slowly under the shot before quickly giving way to Eartha Kitt’s rendition of “Santa Baby,” eventually focusing on the lock of a car trunk. After a beat, the shot is punctured by a screwdriver breaking through the lock to reveal the eye of the person trapped inside the trunk. “Santa Baby” ends abruptly as the trunk flies open, pushed by hands that are cuffed together at the wrist. This scene is not only an effective misdirect for the rest of the film, as it lulls the audience with the staid notion of the holidays by using a familiar Christmas song standard, it also nicely sets up the juxtaposition of the film—the quaint, commercialized vision of an idyllic Christmas, mixed with the sometimes confining and suffocating family expectations of reality.

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The plot of P2 follows Angela (Rachel Nichols) as she tries to leave her office building on Christmas Eve. She sends her assistant home and talks to her colleague Jim (Simon Reynolds), forgiving him for an indiscretion at the office holiday party. But when Angela gets to her car to head off for her family’s Christmas festivities, it won’t start, and not even friendly security guard Thomas (Wes Bentley) can help. After a failed attempt to call a cab, she returns to the parking garage where Thomas suddenly

knocks her out with chloroform and ties her to a chair. Coming to, she discovers she is wearing a party dress at a pseudo-Christmas dinner he has prepared for just the two of them. The rest of the film plays out as a cat-and-mouse game with Angela on the run and Thomas in close pursuit. Thomas is convinced that Angela will be his romantic partner, she just needs to realize it. Witnessing the murder and mayhem that Thomas creates in order to keep her tied to him, Angela decides the only way to escape and overcome his will and desires is to fight back. In the commentary on the P2 DVD, the director and writers reveal they chose a Christmas setting because they felt it was believable that an office building would close and a parking garage would be deserted, heightening the sense of isolation and adding to Thomas’ psychosis. Khalfoun elaborates in the commentary that everyone is expected to be with their families during this time of year, allowing the audience to feel more for Angela because she is so alone. Angela’s family readily accepts that, as someone who puts her career first, she won’t make it to Christmas dinner, even as Thomas coerces her into lying about why. Herein lies the true horror and fear of P2—a societal expectation (being with your family on Christmas) that is co-opted by male gaze or fantasy (Thomas’ capture of Angela). The film goes even further to illustrate that “male fantasy” is, in fact, a female nightmare. If Christmas is a time for family, P2 subverts that by valuing independence and self-sufficiency over communal ties which prove meaningless in a crisis as male fantasy threatens to subsume female agency.

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The term “male gaze” was coined by scholar and writer Laura Mulvey

Above: Angela (Rachel Nichols) in P2. Photo: Steve Wilkie.

in her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In the essay, Mulvey identifies the male gaze as the camera’s gaze that continually seeks to sexualize and fantasize the female body. This gaze is problematic because it robs female characters of agency and renders them as sexual objects for male consumption, or to support a maledriven narrative, rather than allowing women to become fully formed characters in their own right. As Mulvey states, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” Though Mulvey centres her argument of the male gaze on Freudian analysis and film, the theory has been adopted by scholars from multiple disciplines and applied throughout art, media and life. As writer and cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian put it when discussing women in video games:

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The male gaze manifests when the camera takes on the perspective of a stereotypical heterosexual man. An indisputable example of this is when the camera lingers, caresses, or pans across a woman’s body—although it’s not always that obvious. In games, it can be as simple as the ingame camera resting so that a character’s butt or breasts or both are centerline, it can be cutscenes that rest on a woman’s butt, it can be clothing that they are wearing or the way they talk, or it can be as basic as the way a female character moves around the game world.

Above: Angela (Rachel Nichols) and Thomas (Wes Bentley) in P2. Photo: Steve Wilkie.

And, prior to Mulvey’s work in 1975, writer John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing stated that “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” Women on film often find themselves subverted to this gaze because there is a displaced notion that adherence to and achieving this looked-at-ness will grant them safety, security and a place in society. At the beginning of the film, Angela is not coded to be looked at by cinematic standards. She wears sensible business attire and, while she is attractive, she does little to draw attention to herself or to her physical appearance. Once Thomas captures her, he places his male gaze and his desire to gaze upon her on her physical appearance. When she wakes up tied to a chair at his manic Christmas dinner, she is wearing a revealing white dress that she has never seen before and strappy high heels. Her hair is down, and she has on smudged lipstick. Angela has been overtaken by Thomas’ need to look and his expectations of what he would like to look at, robbing her of her independent identity.

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Thomas’ gaze, which controls the first half of the film, is patriarchal normality. In this gaze, Thomas believes he can rescue Angela from the loneliness and isolation by offering himself as a romantic partner and preparing a festive (if kitschy) Christmas dinner for two, but the emphasis on Christmas “togetherness” quickly becomes an imposed fallacy. Thomas confesses that he loves her (something he says he developed after watching her via CCTV camera) despite her “sins.” He believes that, if he can prove his love, Angela will return it.

Above: Angela (Rachel Nichols) and Thomas (Wes Bentley) in P2. Photo: Steve Wilkie.

The initial “transgressions” that draw Thomas’ attention to Angela are those typical of a professional woman, such as staying late to complete assignments at the cost of her own personal relationships. In these characteristics, Thomas sees Angela as a kindred spirit as they are both alone by society’s standards, a feeling exacerbated by the holiday season. However, while both Thomas and Angela are ultimately alone, Angela’s isolation has been self-actualized by choosing a career over family, while Thomas has had isolation thrust upon him. Though she may be isolated, the demands of Christmas mean that this is supposed to be the one night of the year where Angela makes it home to her family, the one time that someone will notice if she doesn’t arrive. Thomas uses Angela’s independence against her by making her call her family to tell them she’s sick and won’t be there. Her sister is unsurprised (“Angela, you know it’d be nice if you put your family ahead of your work sometimes”) while her mother, though concerned, understands. Khalfoun trains the camera steadily on Angela’s face as she tries to maintain her composure; Thomas threatens her to one side and a single tear rolls down her cheek, implying that Angela now understands how deeply she has isolated herself, how little anyone depends on her outside of work, and thus how in danger she truly is. Once the office closes for Christmas, she is no longer needed. Khalfoun continually moves the camera in closer on Angela’s face, emphasizing the emotional distress and turmoil that encases Angela in the nightmare of the male gaze. Thomas tells Angela that the phone call to her family is the best Christmas present anyone has ever given him. He then presents Angela with a Christmas gift, a VHS tape taken from the CCTV monitors which documents Angela’s colleague Jim assaulting her in an elevator after the office Christmas party. Thomas mutters that “these guys always do whatever they want,” implying that his psychotic desire for Angela is unlike Jim’s drunken pass at her. In Thomas’ mind, Angela belongs to him, he has a right to her. Thomas suggests they go for a stroll and takes Angela to his car and drives them down to a lower parking level. He remarks that he’s watched Angela drive out of the building so many nights that he can’t believe he’s in the car with her. In his mind, Thomas has elevated Angela to a cinematic character; the flickering television screens which he monitors the building with have allowed him to view Angela through the camera’s automatic perception of the male gaze.

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The scholarly work done on the role of CCTV cameras in society notes that they eerily mirror the male gaze discussed by Mulvey. As Global Health professor Gavin J.D. Smith wrote of his findings, “by anticipating the disciplinary gaze of the CCTV cameras, individuals will conform

to various contextual rules and regulations by displaying appropriate, controlled behaviour.” This “controlled behaviour,” as Smith puts it, lends itself to the male gaze that Thomas uses to monitor the daily goings-on of the parking lot. Angela poses no threat to Thomas or security, she is an enigmatic figure who he codes as lonely because of her solitude and her long work hours. In this, we see that the gaze afforded Thomas is one that society condones and expects and one that Angela has fallen victim to. The role of narrative independence is also central to P2. Thomas’ objective throughout the film is to bend Angela to his will and his narrative which he has created for her—that of the sexualized, docile, feminine woman. Author Sady Doyle wrote of the importance of narrative control in her book Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock and Fear… and Why:

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The privilege of controlling your own narrative is easy to take for granted. It’s easy to confuse for a right; to assume that, of all the people in this loud and crowded world, you’re the best person suited to tell the world who you are, or what you are, or what your actions and emotions mean in context. Yet we know that narratives can be stolen, and weaponized. […] All too often, losing your story means that if you make a decision people don’t like […] they feel entitled to hurt you. It means being subject to a hostile, unasked-for, all-consuming intimacy: having other people claim ownership over your body, your sexual history, your medical history, your emotional life, your future.

While Doyle is speaking to the larger context of mass culture’s hold on women’s bodies, looking at it through P2’s lens speaks to why this distinction is important, especially in a scene when Angela realizes the extremes that Thomas is willing to go to and how unrelenting he truly is. In this scene, which takes place as the pair drive around the parking garage, Thomas reveals that his actual Christmas present to Angela is to allow her to administer a nightstick beating to Jim, who he has tied to an office chair, to prove to her co-worker that she isn’t a “slut.” But when Angela refuses, Thomas repeatedly drives the car into Jim, smashing him against a walls until he dies, his guts spilling out.

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As this sequence escalates, Khalfoun switches from shooting both Angela and Thomas within the same frame to framing them separately to highlight their vastly disparate interpretations of the proceedings. As the car repeatedly strikes Jim, the camera alternates between Angela’s increasingly terrified and hysterical reactions and Thomas’ fortitude and

Left: Angela (Rachel Nichols) fights back in P2. Photo: Steve Wilkie.

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pleasure as he completes what he believes is an act of love for Angela. The scene ends with a final hit of the car to Jim’s head, which sprays blood on the windshield, both negating and marking Angela’s gaze. No longer is Angela trying to play along in Thomas’ gaze to preserve her safety, she realizes she must fight back and, in doing so, increase the risk of violence against her body and her narrative. It’s at this point that Angela seizes an opportunity to unlock her car door and flee into the darkness of the garage. Thomas chases her, beginning the cat-andmouse chase that consumes most of the film. For the first half of the film, the camera (and therefore the audience) is firmly aligned with Angela; her discoveries are our discoveries. We fear Thomas, never knowing when he will strike. However, the turning point in P2 comes when, after nearly being caught several times, Angela uses an emergency fire axe to destroy the surveillance cameras that allow Thomas to watch her. As she destroys the cameras, Thomas lip-syncs to Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” playing over the intercom. In this action, Angela not only prevents Thomas from keeping tabs on her but also asserts her authorial independence over how she is perceived and watched; she takes back her ability to be looked at and objectified. Angela’s gets increasingly angry throughout this sequence, while Thomas seems to devolve deeper into his psychosis. Khalfoun again marks each of their gazes as decidedly different, and plays with two vastly different but parallel internal narratives. Specifically, while Thomas is content to devolve into a world that embraces filmic elements such as lenses, screens and accompanying music, Angela’s narrative is marked by her insistence on reality and the dismantling of the filmic elements which characterize Thomas’ perception. This shift is further highlighted by a subsequent scene in which Angela, in the empty security booth, discovers a video of Thomas touching her while she was passed out. Her rage grows as she is subjected to Thomas’ gaze of her body and her person. The way Thomas asserts both his physicality and emotions on Angela’s unconscious body in the video is a fully realized and terrifying example of Mulvey’s theory, one that Angela cannot look away from and cannot undo.

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Thomas arrives and, after a short struggle, Angela is knocked out again. When she wakes up, she is in the trunk of a car—a return to the film’s opening scene. Once she escapes, Angela has also effectively broken free of Thomas, creating a narrative shift for the last third of the film in which Angela no longer simply attempts to evade her captor, but actively seeks her freedom even if she has to confront Thomas. By revisiting the opening of the film, Khalfoun highlights the moment when Angela is no longer a captive and victim, but is able to assert and maintain control over the narrative, thus overtaking Thomas’ desire.

Interestingly, after Angela frees herself from the trunk of the car, the camera then starts to follow Thomas. Angela has become the unknowable factor in the narrative, breaking away from the camera’s gaze. In the film’s final moments, Angela handcuffs Thomas to a car and goes for help. As Angela turns her back on him, Thomas descends into a fit of rage, calling her a “cunt.” Angela stops and sets the car ablaze, continuing her journey out of the parking garage, towards safety. Firetrucks pull up to the building as she walks away from the camera’s gaze and towards her own chosen narrative, one that the camera cannot follow. Ultimately, Angela’s journey through the film is transgressive and seeks to undo the professionalized normalization she has undergone in an effort to maintain her perceived status quo—which, in reality, offers her no protection. While P2 is about the emotional and violent struggle between Angela and Thomas it also emphasizes the outdated and patriarchal notions of the holiday season, eschewing the heteronormative Christiancentric time of year as not only outdated, but dangerous. The illusion of the “holiday wonderland” of togetherness and hope dissolves as she ultimately breaks away into an entirely new and unknown narrative. In this way, P2 uses its self-reliant female lead and Christmas setting to reexamine the holiday season’s imposed notions of togetherness, which the film equates with a loss of agency. Angela’s fight for independence is marked by her fight to break from the male gaze of the camera and to ultimately control her narrative and her actions.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Doyle, Sady. Trainwreck: the women we love to hate, mock, and fear and why. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2017. David Edelstein. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” NYMag.com. Accessed March11, 2016. http://nymag.com/movies/ features/15622/. Khalfoun, Franck, Alexandre Aja, and Grégory Levasseur. “Commentary.” P2. Directed by Franck Khalfoun. Written by Franck Khalfoun, Alexandre Aja, and Grégory Levasseur. Summit Entertainment, 2007. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1989, 14-26. Quandt, James. “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.” Artforum. Accessed March 13, 2016. https://www.artforum.com/inprint/ id=6199. Smith, Gavin J. D. Opening the black box: the work of watching. New York: Routledge, 2016. Turek, Ryan. “Exclusive Interview: Alexandre Aja.” ComingSoon.net. October 11, 2013. Accessed March 15, 2016. http://www.comingsoon.net/horror/ news/708115-exclusive-interview-alexandre-aja.

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n irony pervades the central story of Christmas. The lowly yet celebrated birth of Jesus is, according to Christian theology, the culmination of his mother’s immaculate conception, a dangerous journey to escape a mad king, and a series of ancient prophecies foretelling the arrival of a messiah—a Christ child destined to sacrifice himself for the sins of man. Whatever one thinks of the theology, it forms a narrative in which darkness (both supernatural and natural, emotional and intellectual) may not equal light, but remains indispensable to the story. Thus, mainstream Christmas narratives almost always revolve around threats to family (It’s A Wonderful Life (1943)), the usurpation of the true meaning of Christmas by consumerism and other forces (A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)) or the need to cling to a worldview that embraces the possibility of the supernatural in a cynical world (Miracle on 34th Street (1947)). Why should Christmas horror be any different? Far from deserving of simple labels like sacra-religious or blasphemous, Christmas horror narratives, more often than not, emerge as decidedly complex even in their simplest most exploitive forms, and are often symbolically concerned with the elements highlighted in the Nativity narrative, especially that of the sanctity of family, the Christ child and the human need for redemption.

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In all types of Christmas tales, the idea of the family is almost always treated as sacred. That is to say, in these stories, families and the fates of families are often the central preoccupation of the narrative or that which sets the narrative in motion. In Christmas-based horror, family relationship dynamics are often presented, at the very least, as deeply Left: Béatrice Dalle in a provocative poster for Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s À l’intérieur (2007).

broken. Often they can even be termed “unholy families.” When the family fails in Christmas-based horror, it’s almost always seen as a tragedy that has horrific consequences. This can be seen in Chrstmas horror films as diverse as Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Sheitan (2006), Dead End (2003), À l’intérieur (2007), Gremlins (1984) and Calvaire (2004).

Eyes Wide Shut features a holiday narrative that deals with a deeply broken family. For the film, Stanley Kubrick and co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael adapted Dream Story, a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler. In Schnitzler’s version, the husband and wife protagonists are Jewish and the story takes place during Carnivale. Interestingly Kubrick changes not only their ethnicity (they are effectively WASPs in his film), but sets the story in modern day and swaps Carnivale for Christmas. The symbolic effect of this ethnic switch is amplified further by the casting of mainstream movie stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (married at the time of filming) as Dr. Bill and Mrs. Alice Harford. This, and the modern day Christmas setting, help create a portrait of mainstream white privilege that’s at the heart of what Kubrick is after. He creates a family that has all the trappings of success; wealth, social standing and good looks, and puts them in the middle of the most idealized of family scenarios—the Christmas holiday.

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Above: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Bill and Alice have an outwardly idyllic Central Park New York existence. They have all that money can buy and dote on their seven-year-old daughter Helena (Madison Eginton). But while attending a lavish Christmas party thrown by one of Bill’s upper class patients, the couple are separately tempted towards infidelity, leading to Alice’s frank confession of sexual fantasies about a mysterious Naval officer they met on vacation some time earlier. Hurt and questioning the validity of his marriage, Bill begins searching for his own sexual adventures when a friend tells him about a secret sex party, a masked event for the uber-rich. Obtaining a mask and cape he arrives at a huge country estate and bluffs his way in. This introduction of physical masks into Eyes Wide Shut may have seemed more organic in the source novella but Kubrick doesn’t just shoehorn it into his Christmas theme—the whole film is about masks. The Christmas party, with all of its nostalgiadriven elegance, is at least a front for something darker, a place of temptation. Bill even “covers up” for his wealthy client at the party when one of his secret lovers needs medical attention. Bill’s wife then at least partially unmasks the nature of her secret sexual life. By the time Bill gets to the mansion and ritualistic orgy/masquerade party, he has been well established as a man growing uncomfortable with secrets and masks, unable to consummate his sexual fantasies out of a growing sense that he does not belong in the dark world those fantasies have drawn him to. This is confirmed as other masked figures drag him into a makeshift court of judgement where they proclaim him an interloper, literally unmask him and then threaten him with execution. He is saved only when a masked prostitute (who unmasked, had befriended him earlier in the film) comes forward to take his place.

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The appearance of this female savior speaks, as does much of the film in general, to the issues of doubling and mirroring. While a deep exploration is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth briefly examining the way

Above: Masks of all kinds abound in Eyes Wide Shut.

that mirroring applies to the female characters in the film. All of the female characters except one are highly sexualized or dominated by powerful men. The film opens with a shot of Alice disrobing and, later, we see her soldier (a dominant male figure) fantasy in graphic detail. The prostitutes and the costume shopkeeper’s daughter seem under the constant threat of violence and exploitation, as do the female members of the orgy tribunal. Only Helena escapes this sexualization. Or does she? The film ends on a conversation that Alice and Bill have while Christmas shopping in a toy store with Helena. While the conversation implies that the adults have learned important lessons and thus strengthened their relationship, the visuals tell another story as Helena, ignored by her self-absorbed parents, walks toward a pair of well-dressed older men examining a teddy bear. Kubrick, a notoriously detail-oriented director, seems to remind the audience that it may already be too late for this family—the trap has already been set for their daughter in a world where all women assume the role of toys for the men who run things from behind their masks. If the Harfords are not an unholy family in the sense of being evil, they are one in the sense that they are a sort of parody of the idea that families are holy at all. Another part of the nativity story perhaps less associated with Christmas horror are the wise men who visited Joseph and Mary to worship at the birth of their son. Sheitan, produced by and starring Vincent Cassel, not only incorporates all the characters of the nativity very neatly but does so while upending nearly everything about the story. The wise men are a group of decidedly unwise young troublemakers (all of different ethnicity and religious background, much like their classic depiction) who are thrown out of Club Styxx after one of them picks a drunken fight. Yasmine the bartender (Leïla Bekhti) opts to leave with them and a beautiful young woman named Eve (Roxane Mesquida), who invites everyone to her remote country farm house. Styx, of course, is also the name of the river in Greek mythology that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld also called Hades, a place much like the Christian Hell. After crossing that boundary, this group of unwise young people steal gas and food, trashing a service station as they make their escape.

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Upon arriving, Eve introduces the group to the slightly deranged housekeeper Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary. (Both parts are played by Cassel, though Mary isn’t seen until later in the film.) Joseph introduces one of the wise men, Bart (Olivier Barthelemy), to a young, provocatively dressed girl he calls his niece Jeanne (Julie-Marie Parmentier). But, by this point, viewers will likely be uncertain of Joseph’s intentions. He has already made a veiled come-on to Bart about skinny

dipping at a nearby hot springs and his unfaltering stare and yellow teeth, constantly bared in what could be called a vicious smile, ooze depravity. In the original Nativity story the wise men came to worship the baby Jesus, but the object of this group’s intended worship is clearly sex. Previously, Bart starts the bar fight over a failed come-on and dreams of sex on the long car ride. Thai (Nico Le Phat Tan), the Asian wise man, agrees to go to Eve’s house and later humps a pillow he’s named Eve in the living room for Bart’s entertainment. Eve and the other girls egg the wise men on at the hot springs, with Jeanne even going so far as to begin masturbating a dog and to fake the beginnings of rape by a group of farmhands to get a rise out of their visitors. Sheitan even has Eve bring the group a tempting bowl of apples as they warm their hands by the post-dip fire.

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After dinner, the wise men attempt to claim then denounce religious belief until one of their members tells them they should be frightened they may be under the influence of the Sheitan, Arabic for the Devil. Joseph then tells the story of a man visited by the Devil in his dreams. Offered the chance to become invincible, the man rapes his sister whereupon the devil tells him that, after the resultant child is born, the clock will chime 12 times and the man must give the child as a gift to Satan.

Just as the wise men gave Jesus precious gifts, so must this group of unwise men. Eve shows Thai and the group around a workshop filled with dolls in various states of disrepair early on in the film. In addition, Mary’s hands are seen affixing a lock of hair—torn from the scalp of one

Above: Vincent Cassel in Kim Chapiron’s Sheitan (2006).

of the visitors—on one of the broken dolls, and promising that Daddy will bring baby a wonderful gift. Joseph too, has cut fabric from Bart’s wet clothes, leaving little doubt what types of gifts the men will have to offer. In the end, the doll is given the final gift—a pair of eyes plucked neatly from the sockets of the still-screaming donor. Sheitan takes a group of unwise men, devoid of any real spiritual conviction, and forces upon them the role of witness to a spiritual reality. Joseph and his readymade family of wife/sister and farmhands are single-minded in their devotion to Satan, eager to do whatever it takes to usher in a new dispensation. The end shot, a close-up of Cassel as both husband and wife excitedly interacting with their newborn, is the finishing touch on what must be Christmas horror cinema’s most unholy family. Jean Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa’s Dead End finds the locus of the unholy family in a line uttered near the end of the film by patriarch Frank Harrington (Ray Wise) just before his demise, “All we wanted was a nice Christmas. Is that so much to ask?!” It’s the cry of families everywhere and a great many hilarious holiday comedies can be reduced down to that single piece of dialogue. But the difference between those more lighthearted films and Dead End is how very serious it is about the nature of family dysfunction.

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The deeply dysfunctional Harringtons are an unholy family on a forced pilgrimage to the dreaded relatives’ Christmas dinner—which also means they have to endure a long, torturous evening car ride together. Besides Frank, the travellers include mother Laura (Lin Shaye), teenage daughter Marion (Alexandra Holden), her boyfriend Brad (William Rosenfeld), and Richard (Mick Cain), the cynical teenage son. The sun has set, the drive is long and Frank narrowly avoids a head-on collision when he briefly falls asleep at the wheel after taking a shortcut. The ensuing story is certainly strange but its compelling by the way of Twilight Zone episodes like “The Hitchhiker” (1960) and “Five Characters in Search of An Exit” (1961) (itself a marvelously unsettling Christmas narrative). There’s a mystical sense of characters being gathered together so that a great truth can be revealed—and a dark insight it proves to be.

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The family, post shortcut, is now driving on an endless road. There is no star to follow—no holy destination and no miracle left to gather round and celebrate. As the family bickering turns into a full-blown verbal melee, Marion suddenly announces she’s pregnant in an effort to break the tension. While this scene, like many others in the film, draws laughs, Left: Ray Wise and Lin Shea as parents on the edge in Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa’s Dead End (2003). Photo: A.F. Archive. Above: The Twilight Zone’s influential episode “The Hitchhiker” (1960).

it offers no relief since the pregnancy is unplanned and the baby’s father is a casualty of whatever supernatural force is stalking the family on their journey. Instead, the film offers Marion as a compelling if inverted sort of Mary figure. Likewise, a character called simply the Woman in White (Amber Smith), who carries a swaddled infant later revealed to be dead, also seems a symbolic stand in for Jesus’ mother. Of course, the Woman in White is dead too, killed in the head-on collision the family thought it avoided. There is no miracle child, only a mysterious hearse which collects the bodies as they fall along the eternal road the family is trapped on.

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As indicated by Frank’s final line about only wanting a nice Christmas, it seems that Dead End revolves around not wanting enough, or at least not really wanting things that would have drawn their family together. At one point, driven mad by the death of her son Richard, Laura blows the back of her head off with a commandeered shotgun and begins fondling the area of her brain that holds the orgasmic memories of an affair. What hurts Frank more is hard to tell. Is it watching his wife suffer? Or just hearing her moan with pleasure at a remembered illicit touch? “What’s the world coming to?” intones Frank at another key moment in the film. What’s the world coming to indeed.

Above: Alexandra Holden and Ray Wise in Dead End. Right: Alyson Paradis as unenthused mother-to-be in À l’intérieur. Photo © Momentum Pictures.

Unmistakably Marian themes are also explored in À l’intérieur, the New French Extremity film entry known in North America as Inside. Following a car accident which takes the life of her husband—but not her unborn child—Sarah (Alysson Paradis) has lapsed into anger and indifference regarding her pregnancy. Months later preparing for an induced birth months later on Christmas Eve she wants nothing more than to get the birth over with. Not exactly the narrative attitude associated with the Virgin Mary, whose Magnificat song of praise paints a picture of humility and pure joy at the thought of her immaculate conception. Of course, Mary’s pregnancy would have been anything but simple in her time. It’s easy to imagine the anxiety of having to explain the nature of the baby’s parentage in a culture that ostracized those who became pregnant outside of marriage. Thus, the circumstances surrounding the pregnancies of these two women render them sympathetic in unique ways. That night, a young woman (Beatrice Dalle) knocks on Sarah’s door asking to use the phone. The mysterious woman eventually works her way into the house and pursues Sarah with the intention of cutting out and stealing her unborn child. In the process, everyone who comes into contact with the struggling pair is slaughtered, leading to a gory battle royale between the two women. But though this may sound like simple horror movie plotting designed to accommodate gore and action, it’s worth noting just who dies in the film. First, the absence of Sarah’s husband underscores her sense of aloneness in a unique situation. She is, in a sense, driven from her spiritual home by the fragmenting of normal family ties inviting a comparison to the unwanted flight of Joseph and

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Mary who fled to escape Herod’s wrath, thus becoming essentially homeless. Sarah’s crushing isolation is reinforced by the deaths of Sarah’s boss, who has stood by her offering practical help, her mother (whom Sarah accidentally kills herself), and the police officers who are unable to protect her from the baby-stealing intruder. But perhaps À l’intérieur’s most profound statement takes place in the climactic tour-de-force showdown between the two women. Here, the film plays with the idea of motherhood as something ferocious and primal. Once the audience realizes that the mysterious woman was in the other car in the accident that claimed her husband and her own unborn child, the film becomes a ferocious battle between the two women to become a mother. And though one woman is certainly more sympathetic, both seem like two sides to the same coin marked, “Motherhood will not be denied.” As the two women fight, Sarah goes into labour and scissors that had once seemed so horrifying in earlier scenes take on the mantle of surgical tools needed to save the baby’s life. The woman, her face virtually burnt off during the fight, rescues the child and settles into a rocking chair, kissing it gently. Motherhood is shown to have a dark side, akin to a sort of martyrdom. This theme plays out through Christianity in general, but especially in the character of the Virgin Mary who, in order to become pregnant with Christ, had to take on a repugnant socially unacceptable role, unable to explain her situation to many and ultimately giving birth in abject means. Both Mary, Sarah and the mysterious woman give themselves up utterly for the child—their one hope.

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Above: Sarah (Alyson Paradis) gets her fight back in À l’intérieur. Photo © Momentum Pictures.

Of course, at the centre of the nativity is the story of a supernatural being brought into the world through human birth. Christmas horror films have a large number of less-than-immaculate conceptions wherein the birth of a supernatural creature brings chaos and death rather than hope and peace. Gremlins is probably the best of the classic Christmas horrors that mine this area, a film that has more than a passing resemblance to Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). An inversion of that film’s George Bailey, whose life is the epitome of self-sacrifice, Gremlins’ father/failed inventor Rand Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) is a misguided and self-absorbed dreamer. Town miser Mrs. Deagle (Polly Holliday) is an easy match for the Capra film’s baddie, Mr. Potter. And Kingston Falls, the small town that the gremlins ultimately destroy, is almost unmistakably based on Frank Capra’s idealized Bedford Falls. There’s even a portrait of noted actor Edward Arnold, who Capra often used as a heavy, above Mrs. Deagle’s stairs. But where It’s A Wonderful Life contains only benevolent supernatural beings, Gremlins contains a mix of both cuddly and classically demonic-looking creatures.

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The film opens with a not-so-wise man, Rand Peltzer, looking for a lastminute Christmas gift in the mystical orientalized antique and oddities shop of Mr. Wing (angels anyone?), a mysterious, caul-eyed, pipe smoking Chinese man. The setting of the scene is pure genre—clearly the shop is more than just a shop, and is the locus of magical goings-on. Pelzter decides to purchase a Mogwai, a small caged creature with a sweet singing voice, as a gift for his son Billy (Zach Galligan), but Mr. Wing (Keye Luke) refuses to sell, saying that the Mogwai carries too much responsibility. He shuffles away, but Wing’s grandson makes a backdoor

Above: Rand Paltzer (Hoyt Axton) enters the mysterious shop of Mr. Wing (Keye Luke) in Gremlins (1984). Photo: © Warner Bros. / Amblin Entertainment.

deal with Peltzer. Thus the origin of the gremlins (in so far as the film is concerned) is Promethean. Fire has been stolen from a magical place, secreted away from its rightful owner. But in this case, it’s not a catalyst for man’s independence from the gods, but a reinforcement of how badly man needs oversight.

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The Mogwai, christened Gizmo, is a preternatural, perhaps even supernatural gift—a childlike innocent that’s not too far removed from the idea of the Christ child. He’s even swaddled early in the film and “born” in the lowly manger of the financially struggling Peltzer household. As with the Christ child, Gizmo also comes into his narrative relatively powerless. Like the reduction of faith into the real-life horrors of blind institutionalized religion, the Mogwai’s innocence is perverted by man’s carelessness and greed, and something awful emerges from him. The eponymous gremlins start out as slightly skewed, less agreeable aberrations of Gizmo. But soon they become entombed in sticky shrouded eggs that hatch to reveal their final form: gibbering, scaly creatures who delight in destruction and death. A dark film, Gremlins was a direct inspiration for the creation of the MPAA’s PG-13 rating. Director Joe Dante pulls out all the stops in making his gremlins seem genuinely dangerous sadistically violent creatures. Above: Billy (Zach Galligan) and Pete (Corey Feldman) amazed that the Gremlins have multiplied. Photo: © Warner Bros. / Amblin Entertainment.

The sense of the gremlins as agents of cosmic judgement is clear—they trash the Peltzer Christmas tree, kill the high school science teacher, chase Mrs. Peltzer around with knives, run the town snowplow into an old couple’s house, and descend on the widow Beagle as a group of lethal carolers. But what these less-than-immaculate conceptions are judging is the cornball nostalgia associated with Christmas movie characters by applying all the wrong genre conventions to them. The high school teacher is straight out of 1980s cinema in general, while the stalking scene with Mrs. Peltzer is suspenseful in the tradition of Hitchcock. The sequences involving the old couple, the snow plow and the death of Mrs. Deagle are straight out of the Warner Bros. cartoons that Dante always finds ways to reference in his movies. Gizmo imitates Clark Gable on TV. The gremlins invading the town reference pop culture of all kinds.

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Gremlins’ final confrontation features Billy and Gizmo locked in a duel to the death with the leader gremlin, Spike, at the local shopping mall. Watching Spike hunt Billy using weapons taken from the store’s sporting goods section underscores the idea of how gifts can become the problematic centrepiece of the holiday season. The film stops short—but not too far short—of suggesting that mere sentiment is a bad Above: Kate (Phoebe Cates) is terrorized by the Gremlins. Photo: © Warner Bros. / Amblin Entertainment.

replacement for deep reflection on the source of Christmas wonder. Dante goes to great lengths to assign Gizmo the role of hero and he even kills off the evil gremlins with sunlight—a spiritual symbol of no small significance in Christian theology representing truth and power. Of course, the end of such revelation is Nativity interruptus as Gizmo is reclaimed by the irked merchant. He is a childlike gift that even the good-hearted Billy is not yet ready to receive. The concepts of unholy families, less-than-immaculate conceptions, and the desire for narrative that leaves room for the supernatural, are all present in Calvaire (also known as The Ordeal), the bleak film debut of Fabrice du Welz. Calvaire begins with a young, not very talented singer named Marc (Laurent Lucas), who finishes his annual performance at a nursing home, a place where he’s made some small but meaningful impact. But soon an elderly inhabitant of the home enters his dressing room and awkwardly propositions him in an attempt to recapture her own faded memories of the all-encompassing love he sings about in his pop tunes. Marc is too flabbergasted to even comfort the woman, who runs out of the room in tears. Later, a nurse comes to say goodbye and slips him a naked photo of herself, which he also recoils from. Whatever temptation the women might have represented, Marc’s fantasy appears to be being admired without intimacy. He seeks to escape this inner desert by climbing back into his van, heading off to perform at a Christmas celebration where he hopes to be discovered by a big-time producer. Instead, Marc is stranded near a small, fog-shrouded village that seems to rise out of nowhere from the mist. Taking shelter at an inn, Marc finds himself in dinner conversation with the owner, Bartel (Jackie Berroyer). Bartel claims to have once been a great comedian but, in reality, is simply a desperately lonely and somewhat odd old man. Yet, even after Bartel shares the tragic story of his long gone unfaithful wife Gloria, Marc is unable to allow himself to extend true compassion.

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The next day, Marc takes a walk in the woods and discovers a group of men in a stable watching another man copulate with a pig. For Marc, it’s weirdly reminiscent of the mental image conjured by nostalgic descriptions of the manger scene and connects back to the idea of the inn. Deeply disturbed, Marc is knocked unconscious by the insane Bartel while attempting to escape, and tied to a chair made to assume the role of the innkeeper’s unfaithful wife, Gloria. Marc’s hair is roughly shorn, he’s forced to wear Gloria’s dresses and is even mock crucified, beginning a process of suffering which relates back to the film’s alternative title, The Ordeal. A religious term that refers to the sufferings of Jesus, “ordeal” connects back to the concept of the mystery of that anguish in which humankind’s sins were forgiven. Simultaneously, the

Right: Laurent Lucas in Calvaire (2004). Photo: Luca Etter.

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film showcases Bartel’s desperate, mad and decidedly unholy attempt to rebuild his family by forcefully re-gendering Marc. Gloria is a name based in Latin and is commonly translated as glory. In Christian theology, glory is something that belongs to God akin to worship. Thus Marc has already begun a symbolic process of redefinition through suffering. When the other men in the village discover what has taken place, an all-out war over ownership of “Gloria” ensues in which Marc is raped, Bartel is killed and the young singer escapes into the wilderness pursued by a band of villagers. It’s never explained exactly why the village is made up entirely of madmen nor why Gloria would have bedded them, but these details give the village a mythic air. It seems to exist in its own special time and place, suspended between the world of the real and the world of—for want of a better term—the spiritual. As a backdrop for Marc’s suffering, it becomes especially poignant when he’s chased across the marsh by the villagers. One of them—who killed Bartel and is bent on having “Gloria” for his own—falls into quicksand, using his dying breath to call out to Marc/Gloria asking if she loves him. Marc says, “Yes,” lending one more metaphysical grace note to the narrative. Marc has changed, willingly assuming the role of comforter. Still lost in the wilderness, he has at least tasted what it means to reach out to another with hope.

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Christmas horror is represented by a very large and always growing

Above and right: Martyrdom and redemption in Calvaire (2004). Photo: Luca Etter.

body of work. Using everything from potent satire to terrifying suspense and nauseating gore, the films that have become the go-to viewing for macabre Christmas celebrations take the holiday, and the real world its ideals attempt to find a place in, with a grain of salt. But they also often feature a deadly seriousness that links the Christmas holiday back to its spiritual roots. While this is not the only way to interpret these films, each one offers the sense of both the space between the stars and the star of the Nativity itself. These stories are peopled by characters who need reminders of why hope and peace, and even spiritual redemption matter. They are, in turns, redirected, rebuked, and even surprised by hope in the midst of intense darkness.

BI BL I OG R A P H Y

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Bohlmann, Markus P.J. and Sean Moreland. Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. Ehrlich, David. “Why ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is a Bizarro Holiday Classic” Rolling Stone. December 17, 2015. Kord, T.S. Little Horrors. How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016 Miller, Cynthia J. and A. Bowdoin Van Riper. Divine Horror: Essays on the Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Diabolical. Jefferson: McFarland, 2017 Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1970s. Jefferson: McFarland, 2002. Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1980s. Jefferson: McFarland, 2007. Rasmussen, Randy. Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005.

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CHAPTER 20 ANDREA SUBISSATI

K

iller kids are nothing new to the horror genre—it’s a cultural taboo that has shocked and titillated audiences as far back in cinematic history as 1956’s The Bad Seed—but The Children pushes the taboo a step further by situating the horror in the most wholesome of holidays: Christmas. Released in 2008, and not to be mistaken for the 1980 film of the same name, The Children is the third genre outing for British director Tom Shankland, after the 2002 crime-thriller No Night is Too Long and the 2007 horror/thriller W Delta Z (aka The Killing Gene). Based on a story by Paul Andrew Williams, Shankland wrote the screenplay and directed the film about a holiday family gathering gone horribly wrong when four young children suddenly fall ill with a mysterious ailment and begin a seemingly calculated homicidal campaign against their own parents.

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The concept is a stretch, but critical response in the UK was generally positive nonetheless. Although fans praised the film’s shock value, inventiveness and attention to character development, critics lamented the overall ambiguity of the central plot device. Whatever caused the change in the children is uncertain throughout and remains unexplained straight through to the end credits. The camera makes pains to show the children’s early symptomatic vomit to be teeming with live bacteria, but it’s unclear whether this is to be interpreted literally or metaphorically, and what it all means. Set just after Christmas, as sisters Elaine (Eva Birthistle) and Chloe (Rachel Shelley) unite their families for a festive gathering, The Children’s yuletide Left: Miranda (Eva Sayer) in The Children (2008). Photo: Matt Nettheim.

setting is clear and present throughout. The familial gathering is half-felt and half-forced (in typical holiday fashion), and Christmas decorations are displayed prominently throughout the house. It may seem at first that Christmas is merely a pretext to bring this family together in a snowy, isolated environment, with Shankland getting great visual mileage of the freshly fallen snow and its stark contrast to red blood. However, a deeper look into the film’s themes reveals a more intimate connection with the jolliest of holidays—specifically, that Christmas signifies a dark rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, most visibly through the myth of Santa Claus. Prior to the early 19th century, children, particularly those of the working class, were largely considered miniature adults who were expected to contribute financially to the household as soon as they were physically able. It was due to Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jaques Rousseau that childhood was reconsidered as a distinct phase to be treated with protective fantasy while being guarded from the harsher realities of adulthood. The line between childhood and adulthood was further articulated by the emergence of adolescence, characterized by the biological changes of maturity. But there’s more to adulthood than the sudden onset of body hair, breasts, a cracking voice and acne; one of the first major cultural checkpoints between childhood to adulthood occurs at Christmas with the brutal realization of the reality behind the holiday magic (such as making arrangements to visit the family you love/hate and shopping expeditions that sap your sanity as much as your savings). Take Santa Claus, for example; most of us have gone through the process of learning that he’s not real without severe psychological damage, but it isn’t exactly a magical comingof-age. Not only are you in on Mom and Dad’s little white lie of Santa Claus, you’re now expected to perpetuate it among your younger family members so as not to “spoil their fun.” The fact that this nasty process of myth-building and sudden debunking is so widespread belies the way that this revelation not only changes us as people, but it changes the yuletide holiday completely.

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The Children is a film whose bold concept belies its subtle commentary. This chapter will begin with an examination of intergenerational conflict, and the ideal of the perfect family. Next, Christmastime will be considered with regard to the hegemonic propagation of the Santa Claus myth and its role as a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Finally, a thematic look at The Children’s underlying themes will serve to illustrate that, in spite of all the violence and bloody murder, the film is really about one of the fundamentals of life—that our children inherit the world we’ve created for them, for better or for worse, and we shouldn’t be surprised if they’re less than impressed.

G ENE R AT IO N N E XT In the most basic sociological sense, maturity can be understood as the transition between thinking that your parents just don’t understand to wondering just what the hell kids today are thinking. This kind of intergenerational conflict first captured the attention of social scientists in the 1950s with the Baby Boomer generation. Loosely defined as those born between 1940 and 1960, this generation not only represented a notable population increase but a particular sense of discord and revolution in maturity. From Beatlemania and Jack Kerouac to JFK and Vietnam, it was time for change and the Baby Boomers had the angst, the numbers and the fertile economic conditions to make it happen. Even today, as the Baby Boomers coast into the golden years, they still hold tremendous economic and cultural clout—from the retirement cruise industry to high-end skincare lines, aging boomers essentially created the midlife crisis as a marketable phenomenon and an opportunity to simultaneously flaunt their wealth and bemoan their mortality.

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Baby Boomers were among the most rebellious of generations for a number of reasons, but chiefly because they grew up in a time of great cultural change, and the reason subsequent generations have earned their own titles and characteristics is because the culture hasn’t stopped changing. Indeed, it’s changing faster than before; Generation X (born between the early ‘60s and the early ‘80s) didn’t have a war to

Above: Ominous British poster for The Children.

rally against, but increasing heterogeneity combined with MTV and globalization opened up a slew of other concerns to which their Boomer parents simply couldn’t relate. In fact, the demarcations between Gen X and Gen Y (also known as the Millennial Generation, referring to those born between 1980 and 2000) demonstrate that the rapid cultural and technological change brought about by the internet age has made the generation gap that much wider. And so it goes—the circle of life has come to include a tumultuous period in every nuclear Western household where not only are adolescents unable to relate to their mom and dad, the advice they’re receiving for navigating the world has become patently useless and irrelevant. Most scholarship on intergenerational conflict looks at how it affects the workplace, now that these three distinct generational groups might be working together at the same time. Obviously, there’s less scientific speculation on the idea of one group deciding to gang up and murder the other, but horror movies have provided representations of the anxieties of aging and the intergenerational transition of power for decades. While many popular examples of horror films featuring killer children offer up a comforting, other-worldly explanation (as in Village of the Damned (1960), The Omen (1976), Pet Sematary (1989)), more modern entries like Cub (2014) and The Boy (2016) are arguably far more terrifying as the evil is not only human and innate, but oddly innocent. It could be argued that every generation thinks the subsequent one is preposterous, arrogant, spoiled and sure to bring about the inevitable heat death of the universe. However, few stop to consider that our children learned what they know of the world from us, which can be a disquieting idea when dealing with young sociopaths and murderers. Even if we don’t explicitly teach callousness, cruelty or violence, we do have a measure of control over which traditions are passed down and which ones end with our generation (and by “we” I mean as a society, over which individuals actually have significantly less agency). Regardless of what you practice in your home or how strictly you police your children’s online activities and TV watching, mass media is inevitable in the internet age, and mass media’s primary concern of keeping capitalistic traditions alive might be why Christmas

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reigns supreme among holidays in the Western world. This wouldn’t be a problem, except, as The Children implies, the Christmas season embodies one of the most insidious and overlooked examples of how we inadvertently impair the next generation.

L I A R L I A R , Y U L E T IDE F IR E Moses’ holy stone tablets condemned bearing false witness, but even if you don’t drink of that particular brand of Kool-Aid, there are numerous cautionary tales warning against the evils of lying; many of which are aimed squarely at our young. From Pinocchio to Matilda Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death (an actual poem by French poet Hilaire Belloc from 1907), we make it clear to our young that lying is at worst, a sin, and at best, a faux-pas, but cracks in that rule appear around adolescence, when the imperative to behave under the scrutiny of adults bows to the desire to be well-liked by your peers. The “little white lie”—or so we’ve termed an untruth we deem harmless— is given a social pass because it’s believed to be motivated by the right reasons, perhaps to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. From there, we develop an understanding that lies exist on a spectrum of sorts, ranging from sinister manipulation on one end and clever diplomacy on the other. The deciding variable of that scale is apparently the liar’s intention—to lie for one’s own edification is frowned upon, whereas to lie in the service to our fellow person is acceptable. So if we take this as our guiding principle regarding the Santa Claus myth, where do we land on the sliding scale? Or, to put it another way, who is this lie meant to benefit, exactly?

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Left: Nicky (Jake Hathaway) and Miranda (Eva Sayer) Above: Leah (Rafiella Brooks) and Nicky (Jake Hathaway). Photos: Matt Nettheim.

When philosophy professor Dr. David Kyle Johnson posted an article on Psychology Today’s website entitled “Say Goodbye to the Santa Claus Lie” in December of 2012, the reading public wasn’t exactly warm to the idea—so much so, that Johnson wrote another article the following year to address the outrage and hate mail he received, along with a book entitled The Myths that Stole Christmas: Seven Misconceptions that Hijacked the Holiday (and How We Can Take It Back), published by Humanist Press in 2015. In the book, Johnson expands his argument into seven myths that focus on a specific element of Christmas that is based on staunchly defended misconceptions—that there is a war on Christmas, for example, or that Santa Claus is a modern-day incarnation of the real historical Saint Nicholas—but it’s myth #6 that examines the idea of Santa Claus being a “harmless” lie for parents to tell their children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of Johnson’s arguments against the Santa lie make perfect sense. For example: isn’t it more important to teach our children to show gratitude to real people who spend hardearned money on gifts rather than venerate a false idol? Johnson also points out that the revelation that there is no Santa Claus is an inevitability—there’s virtually no chance of your child not finding out the truth eventually and, according to Johnson’s empirical research, many people remember this experience well into adulthood as a humiliating and painful one. Additionally, Johnson points out the poor parenting value of manipulating children’s behaviour in the hope of material reward; as much as good behaviour should be rewarded and bad behaviour punished, the use of Santa as a “parental crutch,” as he puts it, is essentially threatening bad behaviour with lack of reward instead of punishment. Even Pavlov would agree this form of social conditioning is ineffective (not to mention lazy) parenting. Needless to say, Johnson’s articles and publications have many Christmas fundamentalists clutching their pearls, and he receives decidedly less-than-festive hate mail every holiday season. The critics’ usual ammunition tends to be one of the following: that Johnson hates Christmas (that’s an ad hominem), that Johnson is arguing against exposing children to any form of fiction or fantasy (hello, straw man), that Johnson feels that children should be exposed to all harsh realities of life as soon as possible (slippery slope) right down to the good old fashioned “who are you to judge my parenting?” While clearly an illustrative exercise in demonstrating logical fallacies, these passionate objections also demonstrate how near and dear the Santa lie is to North American families—the topic of Santa is evidently as controversial as abortion and gun control.

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There are, however, some well-reasoned arguments in favour of the

Santa Claus myth. Child development expert Charles Smith, from Kansas State University, argues that Santa is a shared cultural icon of kindness and benevolence. Santa embodies the festive season, and the perpetuation of his existence reflects our cultural commitment to ensuring our children feel happy and special. However, Smith also cautions against the use of Santa as a disciplinary measure against bad behavior—it can be confusing to children that Santa is kind enough to deliver presents to little girls and boys all over the world but has zero tolerance for whether they eat their vegetables one night. One thing that Smith and Johnson agree upon is that the idea that Santa Claus is harmless if approached as a fun game of playing pretend; but if children ask their parents if he really exists, conscientious parents should come clean—doing so avoids the potential damage of parental trust that Johnson cautions against in his book. But when the jig is up, it’s up for good. There’s no going back. You swallow your shame at having been so childishly gullible. Most of us silently accept this sudden and irrefutable evidence that there is no magic in the world, and simply wait until we can exact vengeance on our own offspring, because it’s hard to break that tradition. By the time we’re of parenting age, we’ve seen enough of the world to tell a little white lie that makes the holidays more interesting for kids. Maybe your kids are awful and the idea of a flagrant parenting crutch isn’t as egregious as you thought before. And thus, the cycle continues.

P R OB L EM C H IL DR E N On the surface, The Children is a tale of a magical Christmas family gathering going horribly wrong. The killer kids taboo, combined with the nasty portrayal of the sacrosanct yuletide season, is darkly humorous, heightening the shock value of the gruesome murders perpetuated by adorable tobogganing tots. Underneath the surface, however, the film taps into the common theme of innocence lost, but the added critique of the festive setting makes it that much more poignant. While there’s no specific reference in the film as to whether the sick children actually believe in Santa, it’s clear that they are getting a peek behind the cheery, magic facade of the season. And as the adults increasingly embody the less festive realities of the holidays, the sickness takes a turn for the worst.

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The setting of the film is one familiar to most Western families: rebellious teen Casey (Hannah Tointon) is being forced to spend New Year’s Eve at her aunt Chloe’s with her family when she’d much rather be spending it with her friends at a party. As her family goes through the usual holiday motions of drowning familial tensions in passive-aggressive jabs and boozy egg nog, she hatches a plan for one of her friends to

pick her up after dinner and attend the party. Her plans are waylaid when her young stepsiblings and cousins fall mysteriously ill, beginning with apparent sickness before moving on to a weirdly organized tribal killing spree. Casey is at the center of the film in several ways—Elaine had conceived her as a teen herself, and it’s revealed that Casey knows her mom had either considered or attempted to abort her. As such, not only do Casey and her mom have a uniquely sharp edge to their intergenerational clash, Casey represents a middle ground between the hapless parents and the children who run amok. This position is significant in a number of ways—she’s too old to share the children’s excitement of a postChristmas bounty of toys and young cousins to play with. She’s also too young to partake in the adults’ passive-aggressive mind games, as well as the copious amounts of booze they’re consuming (although she accepts a glass of whiskey once, and joins her unclein-law Robbie (Jeremy Sheffield) for a secret marijuana cigarette in the greenhouse). She’s in between worlds, which is at once her blessing and her curse—while her mom and aunt Chloe are unable to physically defend themselves against the attacks of their own children, Casey is the first to see things for how they are and act accordingly. However, when the idea of their precious little angels being killers proves to be too much for her stepdad Jonah (Stephen Campbell Moore) to accept, Casey becomes the scapegoat and is blamed for everything before being beaten up and locked upstairs in a room.

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As for the adults, as thrilled as they initially were about spending New Year’s together, a vicious sibling rivalry between Elaine and Chloe rears its ugly head. Elaine and Jonah are envious of Chloe’s sprawling Left: Casey (Hannah Tointon) hides out in the greenhouse. Photo: Matt Nettheim.

country home, and Chloe has a bad habit of trying to one-up her sister in the parenting department by intervening when Elaine’s daughter Miranda (Eva Sayer) starts acting up. The rivalry escalates when the murders begin, with Chloe accusing Elaine of being the apple that didn’t fall far from their alcoholic mother, who was not invited to the festivities. Jonah is obsessed with a business opportunity involving traditional Chinese medicine and harangues Robbie to invest. Jonah also shows a proclivity for displacing his anger when things don’t go his way; to violent effect, when it comes to Casey. Overall, these supposed grown-ups are clearly more concerned with the performative aspects of parenting and maintaining appearances than actually doing what is best for their kids. The film presents Christmas as a complex and confusing situation for the children, who watch as their parents greet one another with all the enthusiasm and magic of the holiday spirit, before proceeding to spend the weekend taking turns posturing, arguing, drinking and taking jabs at each other. What they experience throughout their visit isn’t kids’ stuff—the adults have their own agendas and insecurities at stake and they drink and make sexual innuendo right in front of the kids, confident that their behaviour is going unnoticed or at least misunderstood. As the adults get cruder, the kids get sicker and start acting out violently—a situation that engenders even more blame and accusations between the adults. None of the parents are able to imagine, much less accept, the idea that the children are responsible for the violence because they, as adults, are responsible for the children. This muddling of what children are and aren’t capable of, mired with what parents should and shouldn’t do in front of them, is a chilling reflection of society’s ever-shifting boundaries that separate

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Above: Leah (Rafiella Brooks) succombs to sickness. Photo: Matt Nettheim.

the innocent kids, the self-centered teen, and the beleaguered adults. The fact that all the chaos in The Children goes down against the magical backdrop of Christmas, a holiday held sacred for the sake of the children’s wonder and joy, point to the ways in which Christmas represents the line between the initiated (adult) and the uninitiated (child). For Paulie (William Howes), Leah (Rafiella Brooks), Nicky (Jake Hathaway) and Miranda, a line has been crossed that their parents don’t understand any better than they do. Then there’s Casey; too old to play with the kids and too young to play with the adults, she finally succumbs to the mysterious disease when her mother accepts her both as her beloved first-born and as the adult who correctly assessed the situation and was able to get them both out of there alive. If we interpret this disease as an allegorical loss of innocence, Shankland’s story becomes a nihilistic and accusatory tale about how patronizing our young doesn’t bode well for their (or our own) future.

CONCL US I ON The Children is a scathing critique of the biological family unit, one that is forced to take a back seat to the shocking horror elements, but shows through nonetheless. On the surface, shots of soggy mittens, toboggans and bright yellow play tents conjure fond nostalgia (for those of us who grew up in snowy climates, at least), but Shankland zooms in to the family unit so closely, we can see that the familial fabric is so threadbare, it comes apart quite easily at the seams. Family members turn on one another when things go from bad to worse, and the idea of blood being thicker than water comes under direct fire. We don’t choose our families, but we remain beholden to them in some capacity for the rest of our lives and we choose if and how to love and protect them. While the Baby Boomers rallied against the Vietnam war in their youth, the children of tomorrow must contend with the so-called war on Christmas. Seventeenth century Puritans forbade the celebration of Christmas, and today, American Conservatives are decrying its erasure in the name of political correctness and cultural inclusion. Essentially, we’ve built up the holiday to be so secular and commercial that it dominates our economy, and yet we’re quick to bemoan how kids today don’t appreciate the “true” meaning of Christmas. But how could they? From the hassle of preparation to the snide remarks at the dinner table and the revelation of the Santa Claus lie, we’re not exactly setting the best example of a time that’s to be held holy.

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Apologies to social conservatives and conspiracy theorists everywhere, but there’s no war on Christmas. Society changes as the result of numerous concurrent factors, and the smart society is the one that

Elaine (Eva Birthistle) and Casey (Hannah Tointon) try to escape. Photo: Matt Nettheim.

adapts to change. The real dangers to be faced by the next generation are becoming apparent in the form of mass public shootings and hate crimes, motivated by those who cling desperately to the more comfortable world they know, even if that world is intolerant of others’ beliefs and dismissive of basic human rights. We’re tempted believe that we’re doing kids a favour by protecting them from reality when, as The Children strongly suggests, we’re passing down a grand legacy of self-destructive behaviour. Truthfully, it’s hard to tell which is more insidious: the fact that we lie to ourselves about it or the fact that we’re so convinced of our own lies that we spread them down to our young. That’s a question for another chapter (and most likely, another horror movie), but if you won’t take it from me, take it from The Children—we’ll get ours in the end.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Connelly, Mark. Christmas: A History. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co, 1999. Johnson, David Kyle. The Myths That Stole Christmas: Seven Misconceptions that Hijacked the Holiday (and How We Can Take It Back). Humanist Press, 2015. Kansas State University. “K-State Child Development Expert Says the Magic of Santa Claus is No Lie.” Posted December 7, 2009. https:// www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/dec09/santa120709.html Lowe, Scott C. Christmas—Philosophy for Everyone: Better Than a Lump of Coal. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Psychology Today. “Say Goodbye to the Santa Claus Lie.” Posted December 17, 2012. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/platopop/201212/say-goodbye-the-santa-claus-lie Psychology Today. “The Santa Claus Lie Debate: Answering Objections.” Posted December 9, 2013. https://www. psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201312/the-santa-clauslie-debate-answering-objections Taylor, Paul. The Next America. New York: PublicAffairs

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CHAPTER 21

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ené Manzor’s 1989 French yuletide yarn 3615 Code: Pere Noël is surprisingly violent for a Christmas action thriller. A “home invasion” nail-biter that provides a sinister twist on Santa’s annual domestic visits to fill the stockings of well-behaved girls and boys, Manzor’s film features his son Alain Lalanne as the nine-year-old child protagonist Thomas, who uses a remote controlled security system and homemade weapons to defend his castle-like home against a Santa-suit clad intruder (Patrick Floersheim).

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Released the year before the similarly plotted Christmas classic Home Alone (1990) but featuring a much darker edge, 3615 Code Pere Noël borrows from not only ‘80s action films but also from the killer Kris Kringle slasher movies of the era. It all starts when the spiteful Santa who works at the mall that Thomas’ mom manages is fired, and he decides he has to have his revenge on the family. Connecting with Thomas via Minitel, an early ‘80s online service, Santa is able to pinpoint the location of the mansion where Thomas and his sick grandfather (Louis Ducreux) have holed up. But what he doesn’t know is that Thomas, having set up cameras to catch the real Santa in the act, is more than ready to take on any unwanted holiday intruders, remaining just out of grasp by navigating the estate’s secret passages, including a hidden room full of toys that any kid would drool over.

Left: Alain Lalanne in 3615 Code: Pere Noël (1989). Photo: Marie L. Manzor.

We met with Lalanne in Montreal, where he now lives and works as a visual effects artist, to talk about working with his dad on set, the reaction to the film, and why the film remains special to his family. An extended video version of this interview appears on the European Blu-ray of 3615 Code Pere Noël released by Le Chat Qui Fume and Camera Obscura Film distribution for Christmas 2017.

How did you begin working as an actor? It was on my father’s first film, Le Passage (1986). I was playing in Alain Delon’s office while they were preparing the film, and Delon said, “Why are we casting another little boy in the film and not your son?” And that’s how it all started. I did an audition, and that was pretty much it. I don’t think there were really any other kids who auditioned after that. It was never really a career, it was more a game that I played for a long time. Your next film role was the lead in 3615. Did your father write the film thinking you would star in it? Yes, more or less. He didn’t hold any auditions or casting calls and I think it was in everyone’s mind that it was going to be me. I was nine, and for me it was just a continuation of what I did in Le Passage. My dad began writing 3615 about the time that I stopped believing in Santa Claus, which inspired him to write the film. My parents really made a production out of Santa every year. The doorbell would ring, there’d be footprints in fake snow in our hallway (even though it didn’t snow in Paris at that time of year). They did everything to make the character of Santa Claus exist. Looking back, I think my father was mourning the fact that his son was becoming an adolescent, and that’s what was behind it. But from the moment my dad stepped on set, he became my director. However, once he said cut, he was my dad again. It was automatic. When we were working, his tone changed, and I could see the two personas he navigated.

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What did you bring to the character of Thomas that may not have already been in the script? By not necessarily playing a part, but rather by playing a child’s game, I brought a freshness to it. When I watch children playing today, I think that’s something child actors bring with them. I probably brought some of my own personality to it, which all actors do to a certain extent, but much less consciously than an adult actor would have done. I think

Right: Alain Lalanne in 3615 Code: Pere Noël (1989). Photo: Marie L. Manzor.

I brought elements that were already part of the character because I really believe that my father wrote it with me in mind, so there was already a parallel between me and my character at that time. Your character is introduced by a sequence with a reference to the Rambo and Rocky movie franchises. Were you a fan of those kinds of movies? Yes, totally—I remember going to see Rocky IV (1985), where he fights the Russian, and jumping and cheering in the final fight scene. My father and I watched a ton of movies together, he really introduced me to cinematic culture—and not just highbrow stuff, but also Rambo, Rocky, and Schwarzenegger movies, which are actually very violent but were really popular at the time. I’d come home from watching those movies and I’d play and act them out. 3615 was made at the end of that era, so it paid homage to all those earlier films.

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What do you think of the haircut you have in the movie? It was really of its era. The last time I saw a picture of it I thought, “My God, it’s just like Axl Rose’s haircut from the early ‘80s.” I think it’s really that—it was that era of rock, of ‘80s or early ‘90s metal. It’s so funny to me now. Clearly not a haircut you’d see anyone wearing today, and anyway, I don’t think I have enough hair to pull it off now. Do you remember which locations were real and which ones were built in a studio? I believe the scenes in front of the castle, and everything that happens in Paris at the beginning of the film was all shot on location. But most of it was filmed in a studio, including the scenes in the woods. That was really something to see as a kid, a forest built in a studio! I had such a great time in the studio; I was allowed to walk around the studio by myself and there were lots of toys there, so it was a really special place for me. I remember they were shooting a Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro film next door, and I used to go and play on their soundstage. We were like a family, in this small studio in the suburbs, so it was a great fun for me. What’s your memory of your secret room filled with toys that appears in the film? It was unbelievable! In between my scenes, I either studied with my tutor, because I was still going to school while we were shooting, or I was playing in that room. The first time my uncle Francis saw the room—he’s like a big kid—he decided to sleep there overnight. It was every child’s fantasy, and for three months I could just go there and play whenever I wanted. It is probably the set I remember most vividly.

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In the film, your character Thomas accesses a kind of primitive internet service called Minitel. Can you briefly explain what Minitel was?

Minitel was a rudimentary precursor of the Internet. In France, people could connect their desktop computer to Minitel by dialing a telephone number, which was 3615, and it made that noise when it connected that we all remember from the early 2000s. It was just text, there were no graphics or anything, but you could do searches, read news stories, play games. I had one, but I didn’t use it that often. What do you remember about Louis Ducreux, who played your grandfather?

I’d seen him play a grandfatherly character in Un dimanche à la campagne (1984), so I thought of him as a grandfather immediately. He was really special, and he really gave me a taste for the classical approach. I remember him telling me about the people he’d met; he’d been good friends with Picasso, with Dalí, which was extraordinary. I’m sure he told me stories that were inappropriate for a child my age! Your father told me that he avoided introducing you to Patrick Floersheim before you did your scenes together, so that there would be real tension between you when you met in the film.

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Worse than that—my father and my uncle Francis told me that Patrick was a terrific actor, but that he was crazy and therefore dangerous. They said I should never, ever be alone with him. At first I was scared, but Patrick loved kids—he was a father himself—so he wasn’t able to be mean to me, or even go along and pretend to be crazy. About three hours in, I was sitting on Patrick’s knee and we were laughing and joking. But I do remember on the first day of the shoot, I ran into him outside and he tried to act crazy. Top: René Manzor on the set. Bottom: Thomas (Alain Lalanne) using Minitel, an early form of internet service. Photos: Marie L. Manzor.

He became a family friend, and I only have fond memories of him. What’s your memory of the sequence when he attacks you and Louis Ducreux inside the car?

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characters and was very intense.

I remember that when he punched through the window he cut himself quite badly. The crew taught me how to drive for that scene, because I had to start the car and drive the first 100 metres myself. The stuntmen had to show me how to drive a manual transmission, which is pretty amazing for a nine-yearold. It’s one of the key moments in the film, the first big clash between the

Another tense scene takes place on a fake roof where you run away from Floersheim. Even though it was a fake roof, it was still elevated, probably two or three meters. But that was a little high for me at that time; I suffer from vertigo. At one point, my character slides down and hangs off the roof—I actually enjoyed it, it helped me get over the fear, even though I hurt myself a bit. I was always getting hurt—I was barefoot all the time, running through fake snow and salt and caves; all these places with rough flooring, so it was tough physically. My entire family was there during that scene; my parents, all my uncles

Above: Thomas and his grandpa (Louis Ducreux) in some masculine bonding. Photos: Marie L. Manzor.

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Above: “Santa” (Patrick Floersheim) terrorizes Thomas (Alain Lalanne). Photos: Marie L. Manzor.

and me. And we spent the whole day shooting it together. It didn’t feel like a workday, it was a day with my family. Every time I watch that scene I can’t help but think of that, so it’s very special to me. Your father doesn’t like the effect, where we see you hanging from the roof. What do you think about that effect, now that you work in the field? Yes, currently I manage a team of VFX artists, as well as the budget end of things, which I really enjoy. Having a rapport with artists, directors and producers, and managing their interactions has been easy and enjoyable for me; I probably get that from my father. But I really don’t think that particular sequence is so bad; all visual effects age poorly, but the film itself hasn’t. My father doesn’t like it because he strives for perfection at all times. Funnily enough, two years after I started working in visual effects, I realized my boss Pierre Buffin worked on the effects for 3615. The world is like that—we find our way back to the people who’ve made a difference in our lives.

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What do you remember of your revenge scene when you set all the traps to hunt the evil Santa Claus? I remember it was just it was a long sequence with many short set-ups, so it went very quickly, and a lot of it was planned on the fly. My father always hurts himself during every shoot. He’s so focused on what he’s

Above: Right: Alain Lalanne in 3615 Code: Pere Noël (1989). Photo: Marie L. Manzor.

doing that he doesn’t notice the dangers around him. In the shot where the trap opens and Santa Claus falls in, he tried to recreate this extreme low-angle shot from Citizen Kane. During one take, my father was inside the trap below, holding the camera. But he was standing up instead of sitting as was planned, so when the trapdoor opened, which must have weighed 100 kilos, it smacked him right in the head and he went flying. So he was knocked out for a few minutes, and when he came to, he jumped up and said, “OK, let’s go,” and just kept on filming. Do you have a favourite scene in the film? As a viewer, I love the entire introduction to Thomas, where we see him playing, because I think it captures what my father was trying to reproduce. I can see my father reliving his own childhood by the way he put that sequence together. When I watch my father’s films, I think of him. Did you meet Bonnie Tyler, who sang the film’s theme song? She played a show two days before the shoot started and I went to see her. I spoke English very poorly at the time—it was before we moved to the United States—so there were some communication issues, but I remember she was very nice. I met her again 10 or 15 years later— she didn’t recognize me of course, but when I told her who I was, she remembered and it was a really nice encounter. My memory of her was that a big star was coming on set--with Delon, I was too young to see him as a big star, he was more like an uncle. But Bonnie Tyler to me was the first real star I ever met. You could just tell by her presence. What was your reaction when you saw Home Alone? At the time, I remember just thinking, “This movie is very extremely similar to 3615.” But I understand my father’s reaction. He was stunned because 3615 was his baby, you know? It was a bit like someone messing with our child. It came out quite soon afterwards, and I’m not really a fan of it. I never have been.

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Do you remember anything about the critical and popular reaction to 3615? They were very different. It was one of France’s first genre films, and I remember going to see it in the theatre, and being stopped afterwards because people recognized me. But I’m not sure the critical reviews were as great; the critic from L’Écran fantastique liked it, but they’d always been fans of my father’s and supported his career from the beginning. Also, the film had a very long life after it was released on video.

People talk about it to this day. I’m often approached by people I don’t know who recognize me— mostly in Frenchspeaking countries— and they’ll say, “My God, you’re the little boy from 3615! That movie changed my life!” It happens a lot! It makes me very happy that the film is coming out on Blu-ray now, too; I like when old films are brought up to date and restored for a new generation. Movies need a second life sometimes! And this particular film is like a family heirloom; it’s a piece of art that belongs to our family. I’m very proud for myself, for my father, and for my entire family. Your father showed me a picture of you and Christopher Lee at the Fantafestival in Rome, where you won an award for best actor. Christopher Lee presented me with the award. I was a bit too young to realize who he was. About 10 or 15 years later, I ended up working with him—not as an actor, but as a production assistant. I showed him the picture, and he took the time to go to lunch with me and tell me stories. Those two hours we spent, with him telling me all about his life and how he met his wife and everything, that was all because of that festival.

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How did starring in 3615 change your life? Hollywood came knocking right afterwards and two years later, we moved to the United States. Also, acting in both Le Passage and 3615 helped me to discover myself, because they dealt with topics that were really important for those particular moments of my life. Both times, I played someone my own age so the stories were relevant to my experiences at the time. Le Passage was learning about death. 3615 was learning about becoming an adult. Finding out that things are not always what they seem, that life isn’t so simple and growing up can be painful. 3615 is really a metaphor for growing up, of leaving childhood behind and moving into adolescence.

Above: Alain Lalanne meets Christopher Lee at the Fantasfesitval in Rome, 1989. Right: Alain Lalanne as Thomas. Photos: Marie L. Manzor.

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CHAPTER 22 ZACK CARLSON

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hen one considers Santa’s place in the halls of holiday horror, happy memories are conjured of the red-suited saint impaling Linnea Quigley on antlers in Silent Night Deadly Night (1984), or running his hand up mom’s stockinged thigh in Christmas Evil (1980). The tradition of Sa(n)tanic imagery goes back to preChristian times in the form of the murderous, child-pilfering Krampus. But prior to his ‘80s stint as a murderous sex criminal, Santa navigated the genre film world as a heroic savior, defending all good boys and girls from the spawn of Hell and the war-mongering inhabitants of the red planet in the children’s films Santa Claus (1959) and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).

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First established by name in the late 1700s, Santa Claus was already a couple centuries old when he starred in a disorientingly demonic epic from prolific Mexican director René Cardona. Simply named after its protagonist, the 1959 film deceptively opens with the requisite warmth and holiday cheer. Santa sits grinning in his North Pole fortress, toodling away on a massive pipe organ while pre-adolescent stereotypes from every nation dance and sing for his pleasure. Two children approach him with a devil-shaped firework on a stick. When he lights its tail-fuse, the viewer is whisked directly into the flaming underworld, where devils and demons gleefully cavort. Suddenly, a booming voice sounds: “I, Lucifer, King of Hades, command you! The time is here for you to abandon the pits of hell. If you do not succeed in making all of the children of Earth do evil, you will be Left: José Luis Aguirre ‘Trotsky’ as Pitch in René Cardona’s Santa Claus (1959).

punished.” Sure enough, Lucifer’s number one go-to devil, Pitch (José Luis Aguirre), agrees to these terms. He pledges his undying allegiance to the cause, “by the horns of all things satanic.” He then teleports to the Earth’s surface and immediately instigates an underage rampage of sub-pubescent misdemeanors. Kids begin to turn their backs on Christmas, and one delinquent pipsqueak even throws a rock at a Santa effigy, an act that shocks Claus to his very core.

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Pitch spends much of his time leaning inches away from children’s ears and instructing them to commit G-rated atrocities. He eventually focuses his attention on one impoverished girl, Lupita (Lupita Quezadas), and spends the rest of the film attempting to convert her to the left hand path. His primary objective is to make Lupita shoplift a doll from the nearby store, thus beginning her spiral into lawlessness and misery. Once Santa finally leaves his living room to go on his appointed rounds (which is past the halfway point of the movie), Pitch initiates an all-out war against the forces of Christmas. He uses every tawdry, spineless method at his disposal to ruin Santa’s progress, all of which are rebuffed by Saint Nick’s steadfast devotion to shoving toys under trees. Though the devil primarily resorts to childish pranks, he arguably crosses the line when he whispers in the ear of a sleeping father, “There’s a prowler out Above: Pitch (José Luis Aguirre ‘Trotsky’) watches over Lupita (Lupita Quezadas) in René Cardona’s Santa Claus (1959).

there. He’s going to kill your wife and children. Defend yourself. He’s going to murder you. He’s going to murder you!” Pitch’s ultimate plan is finally revealed when… he gets Santa stuck in a tree. “You will starve to death, and I will rule the earth!” All right. The horror in Santa Claus isn’t relegated to his brushes with the Prince of Darkness. Instead, the bulk of it lays in its bizarre aesthetics and the uneasy effect they have on the viewer. For instance, Santa makes regular use of a talking computer with huge, spongey, fleshy lips. He peeps at kids around the globe via a telescope with a protruding, blinking eyeball. His reindeer are bone-white robotic clockwork constructs that make choking human noises when wound up. The black arts enter the picture with the mid-film introduction of Merlin, who toils away in Santa’s hideout, brewing a boiling pot beneath a quasi-pentagram.

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Potentially most horrific is the icy fist of reality present in conversations between Santa and his live-in children. As they watch one family through the intrusive periscope: “The only thing this child wants is the love of his parents.” “Don’t they love him, Santa?” “Maybe they do… Maybe they don’t.” Left: Santa (José Elías Moreno) shows the kids the wonders of his North Pole fortess in René Cardona’s Santa Claus (1959).

To test these adults’ devotion to their son, Santa later prepares them an alcoholic cocktail that he says will “burn their throats if they don’t feel love.” Even segments intended to be whimsical instead feature foreboding surreal imagery. Lupita dreams that she’s surrounded by dancing dolls, each one a looming burlap nightmare with drooping posture. At the end of their choreographed routine, they encourage her to steal and tell her (in a strained, raspy whisper) that stealing doesn’t matter because she “already must be evil.” Rather than shy away from overt traditional references to Hell and Satan, this kids’ film embraces them, way beyond reason. People complain of Pitch’s sulfuric odor, and he later breathes fire through a telephone receiver. The word “Hades” is repeated at least three times—more than in any other children’s film. Even a family’s bulldog happens to be named Dante. Prolific director Cardona has 145 directorial credits. He earned his bread and butter in the exploitation industry, yet Santa Claus is possibly his most enduring work. Well, it’s a toss-up between that and Night of the Bloody Apes (1969). Only one of those films featured actual footage of open-heart surgery—I’ll let you guess which. Santa Claus’s cheapness contributes to the feeling that it was not intended for children, much less humans. The devils wear too-tight red suits with visible zippers, their shiny, plastic pointed ears wiggling along as they speak. Everything seems as if it was shot in a single warehouse that was outfitted in an endless array of two-dimensional sets. This seems to be a universal symptom of any exploitation filmmaker who dared dip his toe in the world of family filmmaking. Pioneering gore legend Herschell Gordon Lewis cranked out Jimmy The Boy Wonder (1966) and The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967), while drive-in schlock master Al Adamson attempted to disinfect his reputation with the talking chimp epic Carnival Magic (1981). In each case, the aesthetics resemble a forbidden back-alley production seen through the slats of a fence.

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Santa Claus was picked up by Miami’s “King of the Kiddie Matinee,” K. Gordon Murray, an entrepreneurial American film distributor who made a cushy living re-cutting and re-dubbing Mexican films for U.S. audiences. Murray took a special interest in this feature, allowing it an unusually hefty running length (94 whole minutes!) and even personally handling the narration duties. His belief in the film turned out to be wellfounded; it was a smash success, and became the only kids’ feature to rival Snow White (1937) in box office longevity, which surely garnered

shrugs and frowns from Disney accountants. Both films played in matinee rotation for over three decades, which means that tattered 35mm prints of Santa Claus were somehow still running in the most god-forsaken theaters into the 1990s, befuddling the offspring of people who’d been traumatized by it the first time around. Spurred forward by his inexplicable victory, Murray churned out another decade’s worth of Santa-flavored projects. From Santa’s Enchanted Village (1964) to Santa’s Fantasy Fair (1969), the holiday depths were plumbed ruthlessly. Most of these were short subjects used as shameless filler to spruce up—you guessed it—yet another theatrical tour of the original Santa Claus film. Heartless cash grabs like Santa’s Giant Film Festival of the Brothers Grimm (1969) showcased a few minutes of Santa’s chubby smile, followed by whatever public domain content could be hurriedly stitched together.

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Murray wasn’t the only exploitationeer to adopt a kamikaze approach to children’s holiday entertainment. Nudie kingpin Barry Mahon took an early ‘70s break from films like The Sex Killer (1967) and The Diary Of Knockers McCalla (1968) to jump on the reindeer-driven bandwagon with the animated Santa And The Three Bears (1970) and — much, much more importantly — Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1970). The

Above: Barry Mahon’s Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1970).

latter is a sadistically surreal, glacially paced adventure that’s summed up well in its IMDB description: “When Santa’s sleigh gets stuck in Florida, he tells a group of kids the story of Thumbelina.” But back to 1964. Five years after Santa vanquished the undying evil of Lucifer’s minions, the next frontier was, of course, to conquer the martians. By this point, American filmgoers were a decade deep into the alien invasion genre. Beginning with 1953’s War of the Worlds, fears of a global communist takeover had manifested in an endless big-screen parade of black-hearted, godless creatures bent on annihilation. It just took a decade or so for creators to realize the obvious truth: the interstellar attackers’ first target would clearly be Saint Nick.

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Like Cardona’s film, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians opens at Santa’s headquarters. Right off the bat, production values are markedly higher than in the preceding adventure. The icy caps of the North Pole have been painstakingly sculpted with storybook precision. The elves are immaculately dressed, and the toys on the assembly line gleam

Above: Lobby card for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).

with all the promise of Christmas morning. Meanwhile, on the twisted surface of Mars (which closely resembles the nightmarish terrain in Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965)), the emotionless citizens are dismayed by the affection that their children show for Santa Claus, who they watch through interplanetary cable TV. Particularly obsessed are pint-sized green-skinned Bomar (Chris Month) and Girmar (Pia Zadora in her first-ever screen role). In desperation, the martian parents conjure ancient sorcerous demigod Chochem (Carl Don), who explains Christmas to his followers and says that the children of Mars must learn to have fun. The martians fear their offspring becoming loud playful nuisances (like Earth children), but nonetheless decide that Santa Claus must be kidnapped and brought across the solar system.

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That’s the basic setup. Admittedly nothing too horrific, but what follows is a nonstop onslaught of attempted kid-slaying and cold-blooded Santacide. The martians kick off their kidnapping mission by also abducting two Earth youths (why not?) and dragging them up to the sub-zero climes of the Arctic. After the kids (Victor Stiles and Donna

Above: Lobby card for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).

Conforti) narrowly escape a vicious polar bear, villainous martian Voldar (Vincent Beck) unleashes his robot Torg, who he commands to “crush and kill the children.” Torg obeys to the best of his rectangular, stilted, iconic-movie-scrap-heap-robot ability, but the kids survive to join the shanghaied Santa on a spaceship to Mars. And the mortal danger isn’t over yet! Mid-way through the journey, Voldar again tries to wipe out the children, as well as Santa, by jettisoning them into the airless depths of space. That’s a heaping helping of attempted child murder for a family Christmas film. As you’d expect, things gradually take an unfortunate turn for the innocuous, and Voldar’s plots against Santa and the kids descend into zaniness and antics. The only moment of terror in the film’s second half is the look on Pia Zadora’s face as she struggles to recite her dialogue. All in all, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians feels like the low-low-budget Lemon Grove Kids movies from notorious exploitationeer Ray Dennis Steckler (who kinda physically resembles the film’s would-be martian Santa Dropo, “the laziest man on Mars,” played by career nebbish Bill McCutcheon). Everything is gooned out for maximum effect, and the soundtrack is layered with various twinks and dweedles as the roster of Broadway actors (and not-so-Broadway actors) ham it up to the wildest extreme. The chief offender is Vincent Beck’s Voldar, whose bloodthirsty rage towards kids and Santas everywhere is constantly at a boiling pitch. Beck was a local with lofty Shakespearean aspirations who’d go on to appear in major films and television opposite everyone from Al Pacino to Bob Denver. Voldar was his first role, but he’s possibly most familiar to genre fans as corrupt, scenery-chewing Judge Sinclair from William Lustig’s 1982 masterpiece, Vigilante.

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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was helmed by gun-for-hire Nicholas Webster, whose filmmaking resumé bounces around like a kitten in a washing machine. Seemingly a pick-up man for TV studios, Webster would pop in to do an episode of a western, then a live drama series, and then an installment of Get Smart (1965). How he ended up shooting a bunch of green-skinned community theater actors in an airplane hangar in Long Island remains a mystery, but he was hip-deep in NY commercial work at that time, so odds are that this film was more of a for-hire job than a passion project. Though worlds apart in content and style, both Santa Claus and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians share a bizarre threadbare unease, a lack of awareness of what constitutes entertainment, and—most relevant

Top right: A theatrial matinee ad for the U.S. release of Santa Claus (1959). Bottom right: Elves at work in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).

here—a deeply discomforting lack of coherence. They also position humankind against its basest fears, from the depths of Satan’s kingdom to the frigid reaches of space, with only an iconic jolly fat man as our barrier. Like his Christmas counterpart Jesus Christ, Santa was a muchneeded fictional guardian from the forces of villainy. He stood steadfast against our most base instincts: greed, corruption and hatred. And, in the movies discussed here, he was our tour guide in the war against threats from within and beyond the Earth. Through it all, Santa’s presence reassured us that there was a reward for a life of purity and truth—even if that isn’t necessarily true (it isn’t.) Holiday horror would certainly mature through the subsequent decades, as Santa was swallowed in the shadows of black Christmases and deadly nights. But these deceptively innocent early films, made for children but strange enough to appeal to adults, were our first steps into the everdeepening yuletide darkness.

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CHAPTER 23 ANDREW NETTE

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he festive season encompasses more than just December 25th; it spans nearly a fortnight of celebrations that peaks on New Year’s Eve—one last raucous celebration before what for most people is the start of the working year. A week of overeating, gift giving, family time and, as far as much of Australia is concerned, excessive alcohol consumption. It’s a joyous time for some, but for others a blur of family and financial pressures, exhaustion and isolation. “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie,” a 1973 episode of the television anthology horror series The Evil Touch (1973-1974), is an unnerving and frightening depiction of the tail end of the festive season as a brutal struggle for survival. Set in the summer—the season in which the Christmas holidays fall in Australia—there is no snow, no mistletoe hanging from the doorframes and no close-knit, merry family festivity to ring in the new year. Instead, a somewhat desiccated family unit, comprised of a middle-aged wheelchair bound woman and two young frightened children, are left to fend for themselves against a homicidal gangster. Australia’s drinking culture, which goes into overdrive around Christmas and New Year’s, and the effect this can have, is central to the story of a time of celebration turning into something much darker.

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In his 2001 book Terror Television, John Kenneth Muir—one of the few critics to examine The Evil Touch—refers to the show as “the horror anthology that slipped through the cracks of time.” Despite being wellreceived in the United States, the 26-episode series was dropped from its Australian network after just four episodes, and has never had a home video release. Left: The Evil Touch host Anthony Quayle, 1970 (Photo © Rolf Adlercreutz)

The Evil Touch is unique in the context of early Australian television production in that it was produced in Sydney, but was specifically made for the U.S. market. America was a huge supplier of television content to Australia in the 1960s and ‘70s and, with few exceptions, the flow rarely went the other way. The show’s creator, producer and sometime director, Mende Brown was a New Yorker who moved to Australia in 1970 to set up his own company, Amalgamated Pictures Australasia.

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In veiling its Australian origin with generic U.S. settings, The Evil Touch gives many episodes a chilling sense of narrative unreality, including “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie.” Landmarks and characteristics that could have identified Sydney or its locales are deliberately rendered anonymous for the U.S. audience. The storytelling style is non-linear, characters and events are given little context and there is usually no sense of narrative conclusion. Australia has been called “the land of upside down”: the seasons are inverted from those of the northern hemisphere, the scholastic calendar begins in February, water goes down the drain counter-clockwise, even the constellations in the sky are the other way around. So the Left: Ad for the Australian premiere of The Evil Touch in The Herald, July 13, 1973.

Australian setting for this tale of yuletide terror sneakily emphasizes the myriad ways it overturns audience expectations concerning key narrative signifiers. These include the wheelchair and the how it is used in film and television to denote physical affliction; the family unit and the expectations of togetherness that families are supposedly the focus of over the holiday period; the notion of a “friendly visitor” for the holidays (whether Santa, Baby Jesus or the Three Wise Men); how children witness and experience these domestic incursions; and the supposed good cheer of the holiday season. An essential element in the way “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” plays with these tropes is the excessive consumption of alcohol, another key aspect of how Christmas is celebrated in Australia. This was as true back in the early ‘70s when this episode was made as it is now.

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“Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” opens with a raucous New Year’s Eve party in a ground floor dwelling of a modern beachside apartment block. Upstairs, wheelchair-bound Aunt Carrie (The Haunting’s (1963) Julie Harris, in one of her two Evil Touch appearances) babysits children David (Rory Tacchi) and Rosie (Regina Tacchi). A visibly exhausted Aunt Carrie tells the children to go to bed so she can finish work on a freelance article, promising to wake them at midnight to celebrate. In an adjacent apartment building, neighbour Frank Bigelow (Kevin Miles, later of Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)) shoots a mobster who has come to collect an outstanding $20,000 debt. Standing over the body, Bigelow notices Aunt Carrie staring at him through the window and realizes he has to eliminate her as a witness. Above: American producer Mende Brown at a Sydney press conference to announce The Evil Touch, Sydney Morning Herald, October 7, 1971.

Once Aunt Carrie’s dilemma has been revealed—that the murderer is aware she saw him—we cut to the opening monologue by the show’s host, English actor Anthony Quayle, who invokes a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III to describe the moment when their eyes lock: “Like silent statues or stones that breathed, they just gazed at each other and turned as pale as the dead.” The reference is not without meaning; Richard III was renowned for raucous Christmas season feasts, and the Elizabethan Christmas in general was marked by a period in which societal roles were destabilized. This is an obscure signal that, in the scenario about to play out, Aunt Carrie will subvert audience expectations. The rest of the episode consists of Bigelow trying to break into the apartment while Carrie fends him off with a series of weapons, including a rolling pin and a carving knife, wounding him badly and only making him more determined to finish her off. The foundation narrative of “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” is the 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story “It Had to be a Murder.” This story has inspired several screen adaptions in which, having witnessed a crime, disabled characters must then fend off attacks by their perpetrators, often in the face of uncaring or disbelieving authorities. While Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window is the best known example, a far superior film is Roy Rowland’s Witness to Murder (1954), released the same year but overshadowed by Hitchcock’s comparatively tame effort. In Witness to Murder, a woman (Barbara Stanwyck) witnesses a girl being strangled to death by her neighbour from her bedroom window, but is unable to convince the police, who believe she either imagined it or is

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Top: Anthony Quayle in The Evil Touch. Middle: James Stewart in Rear Window (1954). Bottom: Barbara Stanwyck in Witness to Murder (1954).

simply delusional. A 1990 episode of the Tales of the Crypt TV series, “Mute Witness to Murder,” took this trope further by depicting a young woman (Patricia Clarkson) who, on seeing a murder in the apartment directly opposite hers, is so traumatized she is rendered mute, only to be placed under the care of a doctor (Richard Thomas) who is actually the murderer. In this episode, rather than dealing with disbelieving neighbours and police as in Witness to Murder, Aunt Carrie has to deal with an apartment full of drunken partygoers, too inebriated to pay attention to her pleas for assistance or take even the slightest notice of the murderous events happening just above them. This could be read as a microcosm of the larger, indifferent city around her on New Year’s Eve, depicting the so-called festive season as a world of booze-fuelled adults who are unaware and uncaring of any suffering around them. Confined to the apartment by her wheelchair, Aunt Carrie’s only immediate link to the outside world is a telephone. But when she calls Lieutenant Baker, a policeman who lives in the apartment hosting the party, the ringing phone is drowned out by revellers singing “Auld Lang Syne” as the clock strikes midnight. When someone does eventually pick up, he only drunkenly shouts “Happy New Year!” before wandering off to rejoin the party. Another partygoer is too inebriated to comprehend Aunt Carrie’s plea for help and hangs up, believing it to be some kind of prank.

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“Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” presents an interesting variation on the standard screen home invasion story, in which the victims

Top: Patricia Clarkson in “Mute Witness to Murder” (1990). Above: Julie Harris and Kevin Miles in “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” (1973).

are usually helpless due to their isolation. In this case, Aunt Carrie is nearby a large group of people, but is still effectively isolated as they are too drunk to help her cope with the threat. In fact, the drunken party provides a convenient cover for Bigelow’s comings and goings. No one thinks twice to look at another person on the street late at night on New Year’s Eve, and Bigelow can essentially hide “in plain sight.” The party depicted in the episode seems to directly reference Australia’s drinking culture, which dates back to the country’s establishment as a white colony in the 1780s by convicts and their keepers transplanted from the United Kingdom. It was here that heavy drinking—particularly gin, or “mother’s ruin,” as it was referred to—had a devastating impact. Alcohol played a key role in Australia’s early colonial history, helping to ward off hunger and often used as part payment of wages, and was also a factor in Australia’s only military coup in 1808. An early colonial practice colloquially known as “work or bust”—a prolonged drinking spree after a lengthy period of labour in the bush—survives today as “binge drinking.” Despite its prevalence, Australia’s reputation for excessive alcohol consumption has seldom been depicted in graphic detail in local film and television. A well-known exception is the representation of drinking and male bonding in Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 adaption of the Kenneth Cook novel, Wake In Fright. Other examples include Bruce Beresford’s 1976 film, Don’s Party, in which a suburban Sydney party goes off the rails due to alcohol, and Blue Murder, Michael Jenkin’s definitive 1995 television drama about Sydney organized crime in the 1980s and 1990s, in which heavy drinking is central to the relationship between corrupt cop Roger Rogerson and arch criminal Neddy Smith. Perhaps the most prevalent depiction of alcohol consumption on Australian screens are the oftengruesome Transport Accident Commission advertisements on the effects of drink driving, which started in the early 1980s and always become more explicit and frequent around Christmas.

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Also of interest is the episode’s inclusion of a wheelchair. As Hannah McGill put it in the December 2015 issue of Sight and Sound, the wheelchair has an interesting pedigree in film, seldom appearing without some attendant indication of misery or misfortune. “As the most obvious external signifiers of physical disability,” she says, “wheelchairs of course function frequently as straightforward emblems of affliction.” Indeed, Aunt Carrie’s predicament is reminiscent of Tiny Tim’s disability in Charles Dicken’s 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol. “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” both abides by and departs from this thematic strand of the wheelchair as a major weakness, in that while the wheelchair prevents its user from mounting as robust a defense as she would like against Bigelow, it arguably also leads the killer to underestimate her.

Crucially, it is the noisy, drunken nature of the festive season itself, and not her disability, that is the main impediment to Aunt Carrie warding off her intruder. “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” also disrupts the supposed norm of a happy nuclear family enjoying the holiday season together, and indeed the nature of the holiday season itself. Central to this is the fragmented character of David and Rosie’s family unit. Presumably, their father has left the kids at home in the flat in the care of Aunt Carrie while he goes out to celebrate the New Year, although this is not directly stated. The children’s mother is not mentioned at all. For their part, the children appear to have little cheer about the New Year, and seem almost hard-bitten compared to the trusting nature of many onscreen children in festive films and television episodes. From a young, impressionable age, children are handed down the lore of a “safe” intruder that finds his way into their home on Christmas Eve to deliver presents—an intruder who won’t appear until little boys and girls are asleep. The yuletide season

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is thus packaged with a caution against “witnessing,” and while Aunt Carrie invites the kids to get out of bed to leap into the New Year only moments before, they dawdle, making her the sole witness to the crime—and she is effectively punished for what she’s seen. But David and Rosie are not the typical enablers of this

Top: Poster for Bruce Beresford’s Don’s Party (1976). Bottom: Rory and Regina Tacchi as David and Rosie in “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie.”

midnight visitor. Unlike the naïve infant who happily lets an escaped psychopath dressed as Santa into the house in the similarly themed “And All Through the House” segment of Amicus portmanteau film Tales from the Crypt released the same year, David and Rosie are recruited as active participants in the fight against the trespasser. That the children are so readily prepared to help fight off Bigelow, and are so effective, hints at the possibility that this is not the first time they have had to defend themselves against a violent adult. They are hard-boiled versions of MacCauley Culkin’s character in the 1990 comedy, Home Alone, in which a boy mistakenly left behind by his vacationing family has to deal with two burglars, or its French precedent, 3615 Code: Père Noël from 1989, David even retrieves his father’s gun and brings it to Aunt Carrie and, although she is unable to properly use it, it still leads to Bigelow’s demise. When Bigelow grabs the gun away and turns it on the wheelchair-bound matron, it misfires, horrifically wounding his face and blinding him. When he lunges for her, she trips him up and sends Bigelow over the balcony, plunging to the ground past the apartment full of oblivious partygoers. The Evil Touch shares traits with other 1970s television anthology programs like Night Gallery (1969-1973), including an omnipotent and enigmatic host (debonair British actor Anthony Quayle) and the sense of an otherworldly moral force operating to correct wrongs. As Muir puts it, “‘70s horror anthology television is full of murderers, adulterers, greedy businessmen, and other bad men and women who are mysteriously punished for crimes they would otherwise get away with.” In this instance, Bigelow, who shouldn’t have had any trouble dispatching Aunt Carrie, gets his comeuppance due to a misfiring pistol. The ending, a freeze-frame on Bigelow mid-fall, leaves a strange blunt force sense of satisfaction, but is also jarring and unresolved. The story feels disembodied, almost ethereal, like a snippet of a vaguely remembered nightmare or “a low grade transmission straight from hell,” as Muir describes the series in his book—certainly how it appeared to me when I first saw repeats of episodes on late night Australian television in the early 1980s.

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“Poor Aunt Carrie. In a few minutes, horns will toot and people will shout and celebrate the dawn of the New Year,” says Anthony Quale in his introduction to the episode. “The only question is, how much of that New Year is Mister Bigelow going to let you live through?” “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie” shows the festival season can be a joy to some, a fight to survive for others. It can, literally, be murder.

Right: Australian publicity for The Evil Touch. Top: TV Week, August 4, 1973. Bottom: TV Week, July 21 1973.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y McGill, Hannah. ‘Wheels in Motion.’ Sight and Sound, December 2015. Moodie, Rob, ‘A Brief History of Alcohol Consumption in Australia.’ The Conversation. February 25, 2013. https://theconversation.com/a-briefhistory-of-alcohol-consumption-in-australia-10580. Mortan, Alan. The Complete Directory to Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Television Series: A Comprehensive Guide. United States: Alan Mortan, 1997. Muir, John Kenneth. Terror Television, American Series, 1970 – 1999. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2001.

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CHAPTER 24 DAVID BERTRAND

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n the not-so-olden days of continental Europe, Old St. Nick wasn’t quite so jolly. With the help of his minions, he was a child-stealing, terror-dealing nocturnal menace; a mischief-maker; a murderer; a demon; a god. While specific details of the character’s mythology veer wildly from region to region, they share a grim, malevolent root story. Santa, by whatever name he’s given, is an omniscience to be appeased and feared; but over the years, his persona has been flip-flopped through centuries of church influence and advertising copywriting into a friendly, joyful gift-giver. Although North Americans have seen plenty of sinister Santas on the silver screen, these creepy European variants have been mostly absent from onscreen horror. Whether this stems from a hesitancy to revisit a pagan past, a lack of filmmaker interest, or a shortage of funders willing to sponsor anti-seasonal cheer remains unclear. However, there are a few notable exceptions: Dick Maas’ Sint (2010) from the Netherlands and Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) from Finland—released mere months apart—paved the way for a return to the frightening Christmas of European folklore, setting the scene for onscreen permutations of the Germanic devilish horned Krampus in more recent years.

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Yet the spectre of older Yuletide horrors looms over some American films too. When Grandpa shakily intones to his horrified grandson Billy in Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) that, “Santa Claus only brings presents to them that’s been good all year, to the ones that ain’t done nothing naughty. All the other ones, all the naughty ones, he punishes!” the Left: Fog-shrouded St. Nicholas enters an orphanage, in Dick Maas’ Sint (2010). Photo: Courtesy of Dick Maas.

audience isn’t sure if the man is off his rocker or just faking a senilityborne psychosis to torture the poor kid. Either way, there’s a good bet Grandpa was born in Europe, immigrated to America, and in a sudden flash of seasonal alertness, recalled the warnings from the Old Country— probably by his own grandfather—hoping to spook him to obedience.

OL D WOR L D GH O U L S O F Y U L E In North American Christmas lore, we are threatened with coal in our stockings as punishment for bad behaviour. But in almost every European Christmas legend, the response to a year of persistent disobedience is kidnapping or abuse. Most early mythological incarnations of Santa Claus haunt the land to punish or cause mischief, but with the right offering they can be appeased, or even persuaded to do good deeds. By comparison, the popular image of Santa is of a gift-giver first and foremost, begrudgingly repealing his presents only for the truly undeserving, trading a new toy for something unpleasant but innocuous. Here’s a short list of suspicious European Santas. The Bishop of Myra Santa Claus, as North Americans know him, is directly descended from the Dutch Sinterklaas, who in turn was inspired by the historical St. Nicholas, born in Lycia (present day Turkey) circa 280 A.D. and made famous as the bishop of Myra (now Demre). St. Nicholas is the patron saint and protector of children. Like Christ, the bishop is associated with actions of selfless assistance to others in need, and for performing outright miracles. In one of the most prevalent tales, he finds dowry payments for a poor man’s three daughters so they can be married and saved from a life of prostitution. The most ghoulish St. Nicholas story is also the most preposterous—three children are lured by a butcher and/or innkeeper to their home, murdered, cut up and cured in a barrel with salt to be sold as ham or meat pies (in other versions of the story, they are older students who are drugged, robbed, and murdered). When Nicholas happens upon the house, he recognizes what has transpired and resurrects the victims from their gruesome fate.

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Krampus In Germany and Austria (with variants in Croatia, Slovenia and elsewhere), Santa Claus/ St. Nicholas has a counterpart, Krampus. This horrifying demon-goat monstrosity sports cloven hooves, horns and a long tongue. He thrashes chains, carries a bundle of branches tied together for flogging bad children and a sack for kidnapping kids to eat, drown or bring with him to the Underworld. He walks the street during Krampusnacht on December 5, the night before St. Nicholas Day. Ded Moroz In Russia’s wintry wilderness lives a wizened white-beard, robed in a blue or red coat with magnificent embroidery. Ded Moroz lives up to his threatening name; his mythological predecessor was Morozko, a god of cruelty, frost and ice. Rare Exports director Jalmari Helander refers to the Russian Santa as “Mr. Frost,” a man married to the unforgiving winter, with a beautiful snow maiden daughter (sometimes granddaughter), the popular character Snegurochka. Like Batman’s Mr. Freeze, Ded Moroz has the power to refrigerate people and landscapes at will. Although the Russian Orthodox Church declared Ded Moroz a demon along with other pre-Christian gods, the legend persisted of a wise old man who could wreak icy havoc if not appeased.

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Joulupukki, the Yule Goat Scandinavia, Finland and Iceland have roots in the Germanic tradition of anthropomorphic beings, trolls and villains. The Finnish Joulupukki, or Yule Goat, is a hybrid animal-humandemigod that lives in the no-man’s land of Korvatunturi between Finland and Russia. This terrifying creation was not a gift-giver in its original incarnation, but rather a night prowler to be feared, with a whip made of bundled twigs. Rare Exports returns the Yule Goat to its

most unfriendliest of origins, while also adding some new twists to the myth—such as making Joulupukki the size of a giant and in charge of a legion of minions. Julenisse, Jultomte and Julemand The Scandinavian nations of Sweden, Norway and Denmark share a Santa progenitor in the form of little redcapped gnomes called Nisse. In the Scandinavian pre-Christian era, these tiny old men were ancestral spirits; caretakers of farms living in the burial mounds of the original farmhouse dwellers. They were also mischief-makers who needed to be appeased with a bowl of porridge and a jug of beer (a huskier meal than Santa’s milquetoast milk and cookies). Nisse could do serious harm to livestock and people when displeased—a notable story involves the slaughter of a farmer’s best milking cow when the Nisse couldn’t see any butter on its porridge offering. Later realizing that the farmer had simply put the butter at the bottom of the bowl, the Nisse stole a cow from a neighbouring farm to replace it. Under early Christian rule, accusing someone of harbouring Nisse on their farm was akin to an accusation of witchcraft. The Norwegian Julenisse (Christmas Elf)—Swedish Jultomte, Danish Julemand—stems from this older tradition, but absorbs the characteristics of the North American Santa Claus: a red-capped giftgiver with friendly, gnome-like helpers. Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet In the Netherlands, the Sinterklaas celebration is held on December 6, St. Nicholas Day, marking the historical saint’s death in 343 A.D. Sinterklaas is more overtly Christian/Catholic in character than any other Santa incarnation, wearing a bishop’s mitre upon his head that links him directly to the Bishop of Myra. Riding a pale horse, Sinterklaas arrives on a steamboat to give presents to good children, and to take the bad ones back to Spain to endure unspecified punishment. Sinterklaas is aided by his Moorish servants, the Zwarte Pieten (singular: Zwarte Piet), who dress in colourful Renaissance court outfits and offer presents and

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candy to well-behaved kids, but also beat the disobedient, leave them with coal or—as in the film Sint—capture them in burlap sacks to haul them off on the steamboat. Recent yuletide seasons have seen the Dutch deeply divided over the Black Petes, who are well-loved and embedded in the culture, but seen by many as outdated racist caricatures. It’s popular tradition in the country to dress up as Zwarte Piet for a night of seasonal debauchery and mischief, resulting in throngs of white-skinned Christmas revelers in blackface make-up. A United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2015 urged the Netherlands to discard the character. One common defense of the pro-Black Pete argument is that they aren’t in blackface at all, but rather black from being covered by chimney soot. Responses to the controversy have included expanding the variety of facepaint colours to ambiguous, playful tones like purple, blue and red, or to use spotty make-up to resemble soot stains. The Yule Lads and Yule Cat Iceland is home to 13 friendly Yule Lads—trolls who deliver candies into good children’s shoes for 13 nights leading up to Christmas Eve. They weren’t always friendly, though: in 1746, a public decree was issued to prohibit parents from frightening their children with fiendish tales of the mischievous Yule Lads and their giant Yule Cat, Jólakötturinn—a hungry, menacing murderous feline that ensures you are dressed appropriately in the right Christmas sweater. It’s expected that you procure new clothes for Christmas in Iceland, but if you don’t, whether due to laziness, poverty or inattention, you could incite Jólakötturinn’s wrath and be devoured as a Christmas feast.

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La Befana—The Christmas Witch Italy is home to La Befana, the Christmas witch, who delivers gifts to good kids (and coal to bad ones) on January 5. She is one of the few leading roles for a female mythological figure in a Christmas narrative. Unfriendly and obsessed with sweeping her broom, the story goes that she was so busy in her work that she missed her chance

to deliver a gift to the newborn baby Jesus, but makes up for it by delivering gifts for children on Epiphany Eve. Other stories have La Befana’s children dying of plague or being put to death, leaving her to donate their belongings to Jesus. Like Santa Claus, Julenisse and others, La Befana should be appeased with an offering of food and drink such as a sensible glass of wine, and a plate of sausage and broccoli. Kallikantzaros In nearby Greece live the Kallikantzaros, underground goblins that emerge only from Christmas Day until Epiphany (January 6). For 12 nights, the Kallikantzaros haunt the streets, luring people into the cold to freeze to death or jumping them from behind. While it’s a bad omen for a child to be born at this time, as the baby may transform into a goblin, parents can take preventive measures by binding their offspring in tresses of garlic or applying open flame to their toenails. Another trick is to leave a colander on your doorstep, as the goblins are compelled to count each hole until sunrise (a task they can never complete, since they cannot count the number three—a holy number). Père Noel and Père Fouettard The French and Belgian Père Noel is similar to the North American Santa Claus except for the addition of an accomplice, Le Père Fouettard (Father Whipper). A sinister, filthy, scragglyhaired drifter, Le Père Fouettard follows Père Noel dispensing lashings with a whip, stick or bundle of tightly tied twigs. By trade an innkeeper or butcher (depending on who’s telling the story), it’s said that Le Père Fouettard and his wife brutally slit the throats of three rich kids on the way to boarding school and stole their money. St. Nicholas finds out about it, resurrects the children, and makes Le Père Fouettard his assistant. This is the only European Santa Claus tale to make murder and resurrection part of the canon. (It’s unclear what happens to Père Fouettard’s wife.)

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Samichlaus and Schmutzli In Switzerland, the local Santa Claus Samichlaus has a helper named Schmutzli, who delivers punishment to naughty kids with a broom made of bundled birch twigs. Like Zwarte Piet or France’s Père Fouettard, Schmutzli is Santa’s less glamorous and dark-faced assistant. However, what makes his appearance stand out is neither dirt, soot or skin tone, but a ghoulish, spectral, featureless blankness beneath his shroud, making Schmutzli not unlike A Christmas Carol’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

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D EATH B Y S IN T E R K L A A S With such a catalogue of rogues, villains, demons and criminals, it’s hard to believe there is such a dearth of cinema exploiting the dark and dangerous terror potential of the European St. Nicholas mythology. By comparison, the standard North American evil Santa story is a simple,

Above: St. Nicholas (Huub Stapel) rides into town to loot and pillage, in the prologue from Sint. Photo: courtesy of Dick Maas.

straightforward juxtaposition—Santa Claus is the ultimate in good, so the “twist” is to make him badder than bad. Holiday horrors Sint and Rare Exports, both released in time for Christmas 2010, make meat of a richer, existing lore. Dutch director Dick Maas hates Sinterklaas and the associated festivities. Known for his work in the horror/thriller canon, including The Lift (1983), Amsterdamned (1988), The Shaft (2001) and Prey (2016), Maas always wanted to make a Sinterklaas horror film, which finally saw the light of day with Sint (known in North America as Saint).

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“We are brought up [with the Sinterklaas legend] when we are young,” explains Maas. “For eight long years our parents tell us a lie, that there is a Sinterklaas and he gives us presents. And I always said, well, you can’t ever trust parents again. When they lie to you the first eight years of your life—what else are they going to lie about?” The film opens with Maas’ imaginative new backstory for St. Nicholas. In the 15th century—specifically, 1492, the year the last Moorish stronghold fell in Spain, bringing the region once more under Christian rule—St. Nicholas, a Catholic bishop-turned-criminal, anchors his galleon to invade a port town, only to die by fire along with his motley gang of thieves in a blaze set by retaliatory villagers. The story goes that, whenever the anniversary of St. Nicholas’ death—December 5— Above: Actor Huub Stapel and director Dick Maas on the set of Sint. Right: A reveller dressed as Black Pete is skewered by a real Zwarte Piet in Sint.

coincides with a full moon, Nicholas and his Zwarte Pieten return to hunt the world and claim a few souls. In a second prologue set in 1968, a boy named Goert and his siblings get ready for Sinterklaas’ arrival, laying out shoes filled with hay and carrots for Sinterklaas’ horse (a Dutch tradition). While Goert is out checking on the pigs, St. Nicholas and the Petes storm the home and brutally murder the boy’s family. Goert bears witness to the surreal and terrifying sight of Sinterklaas astride a rearing steed on the roof of their home. Flashing forward to current day, where it’s the eve of the next resurrection, Sint introduces two characters whose worlds will soon collide amid a mountain of violence. Frank (Egbert Jan Weeber) is a university student mostly concerned with his love life and hanging with his friends. Humiliatingly dumped during a classroom secret Santa giveaway by his girlfriend, he sets his sights instead on her friend Lisa (Caro Lenssen). Meanwhile, Sinterklaas survivor Goert (Bert Luppes) has grown up to be a hardened veteran detective, causing eyes to roll around the cop station with his seasonal doom and gloom insistence that a new Christmas massacre is just around the corner. Frank and his pals dress up as Sinterklaas and two Black Petes for a night on the town, but are caught in a melee with the real, resurrected Zwarte Pieten, resulting in the savage deaths of Frank’s friends. As a swath of murder cuts through Amsterdam, Frank is wrongly fingered as the prime suspect, fleeing for his life and from the cops. Meanwhile, Goert goes rogue on his hunt for the killer Claus. Eventually, it’s up to Goert and Frank to destroy Sinterklaas, his ship, his legion of undead killers, and put an end to the Christmas curse once and for all.

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The Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pieten of Sint murder every adult they come across, but make an exception for children, who they kidnap in sacks and load onto their ghastly, ghostly galleon to take back to Spain. (Maas doesn’t think the marauding Spaniard angle of the Sinterklaas mythos has ever led to serious political turmoil between the Netherlands and Spain.) In a thunderously cynical finale, the heroes blow up the galleon as it sets sail, killing Sinterklaas and all his minions on board, as well as a few hundred kids. Sacrificing the few to save the many? The government and media quickly collude to hash out a drastic cover-up of the events that transpired, concocting a bevy of “accidents” to explain the spate of deaths. The popular myth of a gift-giving Sinterklaas is implied to be an idea dreamed up by a nervous confluence of Church and State, attempting to keep the awful truth hush-hush. St. Nicholas’ “rogue bishop” backstory is never fully explained—maybe it will be in Maas’ proposed Sint sequel— but one can guess that St. Nicholas, amid the brutal wars of Christianization, found his true calling in narcissistic hedonism and the violent taking of “gifts,” pairing old world barbarism with modern Christmas greed.

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Maas’ open contempt for the “stupid festivities” of the season makes the film enjoyable: “The elements we all are brought up with, what Sinterklaas is—well, it’s this guy who is on a white horse, and he goes around all the rooftops, and he puts presents in chimneys. And if you are naughty, the Black Petes put you in a sack, and take you to Spain of all places. Nobody knows why that is, but that’s the story of Sinterklaas! The Black Petes in Holland have a bunch of twigs tied together. It’s called a ‘roe’ and they use it to hit children. So the Black Petes, on the one hand they are very threatening to children, on the other hand they throw candies. So if you are sweet you get candy, and if you were not sweet, they will hit you with the sticks.”

Above: Conceptual sketch by Mateusz Ozminski of Sinterklaas’ ghost ship in Sint. Photo: courtesy of Dick Maas.

Addressing the ongoing blackface controversy over Black Petes, Maas is quick to laugh off the pro-Pete argument that the popular characters merely have their faces stained black from the soot of going down a chimney, but neither is he convinced that the Petes are as offensive as others claim. In any event, the gore trappings of the horror genre mean that Dick Maas’ Zwarte Pieten characters in Sint are oddly less controversial than their familiar, family-friendly variants. Maas presents them not as white Dutch men in blackface and red lipstick imitating Moorish slaves, but as fire-charred criminals slathered in SFX makeup. Their faces are dark because they’ve been horrifically burned.

R E VE L R Y, DE B A U C H E R Y & O DIN

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When the winter winds blow and the Yule fires are lit, it is best to stay indoors, safely shut away from the dark paths and the wild heaths. Those who wander out by themselves during the Yule-nights may hear a sudden rustling through the tops of the trees—a rustling that might be the wind, though the rest of the wood is still. - Kveldulf Hagen Gundarsson, The Folklore of the Wild Hunt and the Furious Host

Above: Black Petes prepare to lay waste to Amsterdam in a still from Sint.

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While in North America Santa is a well-known fan of milk and cookies, the traditional door-to-door visit from spectral strangers at yuletide has its roots in drunkenness, gluttony, hunting, raping and pillaging. Sint’s vision of Sinterklaas, as established in the prologue, reaches beyond Christianity and the borders of the Netherlands. Paganism and the old gods of Europe are intertwined with the development of the Santa Claus story, spanning back to the pan-European myth of the “Wild Hunt”— ghostly hunters galloping across the sky like Santa’s snow-chariot with flying reindeer. Known by many names, the Wild Hunt is the original Yuletide terror, tracing back to the pre-Christian belief that spirits and ancestors haunt the skies at yule time. The souls of the dead were believed to be whisked away on the winds of a storm, only to return with the terrible winds and thunder of mid-winter. First you would hear the sounds, and then would appear a phantasmal leader on horseback, his legions of hunters, and their hounds— harbingers of pestilence, death and hardship. In the Nordic branch of the tradition, at the head of this armada of these “Ghost Riders in the Sky” was Odin, the god of wind and the dead, astride his eight-legged steed Sleipnir. It’s not far off from the Sinterklaas tradition, where St. Nicholas rides a pale horse, or even Santa’s reindeer-drawn sleigh. Odin has many names, including “jólfaðr” (Old Norse for “Yule Father”) and “jólnir” (“the Yule One”), but has always been the yule visitor who flies through the skies as people shutter their doors. Sometimes members of the hunt would enter homes, causing havoc and stealing food and drink.

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The classic Dutch tradition is to post your Christmas “wish list” to the front door for Sinterklaas to see during his nightly visit. But in Sint, there is a bastardized reversal, as St. Nicholas hammers a list of demands to a door, asking for food, booze and other desirables, preparing to ransack the town if his requests aren’t met.

Above: Peter Nicolai’s Arbo’s Asgårdsreien (1872) features Odin leading the “Wild Hunt.”

Likewise, the Odinic, pagan stories have given rise to a Scandinavian Winter Solstice tradition of young drunk men costumed as raucous, thirsty spirits. During Christmas and Twelfth Night (January 5, Epiphany Eve) in Norway, it was customary to leave a sheaf of grain to feed the horses of the hunt, and to supply food and ale for the hunters. Those that didn’t were punished, their property ransacked. Both the real and imagined hordes of the Wild Hunt find parallels in Sint’s marauders, clickclacking across rooftops and breaking down doors.

S A NTA FO R S A L E Most of the older yuletide tales are neglected or forgotten, the darker peculiarities long ago written out of the narrative. Worldwide, they have all been subsumed into the red-jacketed gift-giver tale of Santa Claus—a friendly and marketable persona for prime shopping season. Director Jalmari Helander (Big Game) believes the transmogrification of the Finnish Joulupukki to “Coca-Cola Santa” was spurred by more than the expected American/corporate influence—it’s also an indicator of changing social mores.

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The Joulupukki is known for whipping children with a tight bundle of twigs. But these beatings—which, like Santa’s gifts, would be delivered in actuality by the parents—are no longer culturally permissible, and in fact forbidden in most countries by law. The threats of the Joulupukki are more like those of a mythical boogeyman, less like a cruel punishment you might fear from your own father. Rare Exports‘ charming blend of horror and comedy introduces a world that is as bitter cold and utterly male as John Carpenter’s The Thing (there are no female cast members), a gruff place for men and boys who can fend for themselves and don’t flinch at walking outside pantsless to go pee in subzero temperatures. Above: Conceptual art by Mateusz Ozminski for Dick Maas’ Sint. Photo: courtesy of Dick Maas.

Two village kids, Pietari (Onni Tommila, director Helander’s nephew, and also the star of Big Game) and his pal Juuso (Ilmari Järvenpää), sneak into the fenced off area of Korvatunturi Mountain—a no-man’sland separating Finland from Russia—where a mysterious archeological dig is underway. Funding the expedition is a businessman who believes the real Santa Claus is buried deep in the mountain, encased in ice. The slumbering creature they dig up sure looks like Santa, but he turns out to be just one of hundreds of similar naked minions, slaves to a much more terrifying Yule Goat.

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Back in the village, preparations are underway for the annual reindeer round-up, where migrating reindeer are corralled, butchered and sold as meat—the primary income source for the entire community. However, the villagers soon discover that the reindeer herd has been ripped and torn to shreds near the Korvatunturi Mountain site’s busted security fence. Pietari blames himself for this travesty but, thanks to his surprisingly vast personal library of books on Finnish Christmas mythology, deduces that something much more hideous is afoot. As children go missing from their beds only to be replaced with creepy wicker dolls, it’s up to Pietari, Juuso, and their fathers, Rauno (Jorma Tommila—Onni Tommila’s actual father, and brother-in-law of director Jalmari Helander) and Piiparinen (Rauno Juvonen) to end this horror, Above: Publicity photo from Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010). Photo: © Cinet.

save the kids, and take out the giant melting Yule Goat controlling the killer “Santas.” In the process, they dream up an ingenious new entrepreneurial business to make up for their lost reindeer meat revenue: training the naked, old, pacified minions to play the part of Santa Claus, shipping them around the world as highly prized—and highly priced— “rare exports.” Rare Exports offers a complex mix of ideas for both Finnish and foreign market viewers. It cleverly subverts the tale of the Wild Hunt, with humans hunting gods and legendary creatures instead of the other way around. Like Odin, Pietari and Piiparinen swoop in from the skies, riding a thunderous airborne chariot (a helicopter), herding and terrorizing the masses below.

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For North Americans, the reindeer is an animal we associate exclusively with Santa Claus, the magical flying beasts that pull Santa’s sleigh through the sky on Christmas Eve as he travels the world. In Rare Exports, the yearly slaughter of reindeer is how the men of this isolated northern outpost earn their living. As serious as a farmer’s crop ruined by blight or hail, the evisceration of the animals leaves the residents facing the real threat of starvation and disastrous financial ruin. The naked old “elves” with long white beards are human in appearance Above: One of the naked “Santas” from Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale spies a child. Photo: © Cinet.

only; they are driven by seemingly no other modus than to kill reindeer and sniff out and hunt children, bagging them in sacks to bring to their leader, the giant Yule Goat Joulupukki, trapped in melting ice inside a hanger. (Helander has an idea for a big budget sequel to Rare Exports where the Yule Goat itself runs rampant). A defining characteristic of the modern Christmas narrative is consumerism, no matter where you live. And when it comes to the evolution of Christmas traditions, promoting gift-giving and communal celebration encourages a sales boom—whereas fear and isolation behind locked doors does not. Playing on this, the film’s final punchline is one of Christmas cinema’s most wickedly funny and disturbing ideas: that those shopping mall Santa Clauses who crawl out of the woodwork each December, on whose laps our children sit to make their wishes, are actually well-trained, pacified, demon-elf drones dug out from the icy bowels of Finland (as opposed to local retirees trying to make a few extra bucks for the holidays). According to Helander, “The idea came up because I saw some old Finnish Santa Claus pictures. It’s not that long ago when Santa was a very scary character. And I started to think, what happened? Why did it change so much in such a short period of time? I started to think that there must be some kind of conspiracy going on, why everybody suddenly believes in this ’Coca-Cola Santa.’ What happened to the original one? Finally my brother came up with the idea: what if Santa Clauses would be like really expensive whiskeys or cigars or something? That there are people who are actually hunting them, and selling them?”

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Finland is an excellent example of how quickly a mythological tradition, no matter how deeply imbedded, can shift. As recently as Helander’s father’s childhood, Joulupukki was a creature to be feared. According to Helander, “In Finland, if you’ve been a really good boy,

Above: Approaching the hanger that houses the giant Joulupukki in a block of ice in Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Photo: © Cinet.

you don’t have to see Santa. That was the basic idea.” Move forward a generation, and this aspect has been written out of the national mythology. Amusingly, the young boy at the heart of Rare Exports seems to possess approximately 40 library books on the topic, full of ghoulish and terrifying artwork of Joulupukki tearing animals apart, hunting for children and boiling them in a giant pot. Rare Exports is intriguing because, as satirical and over-the-top as it is, it brings some early Finnish Christmas traditions back into the limelight. Set in a rugged, frigid, male world at the end of civilization, and absolutely removed from the glossy detachment of urban living, the children here are familiar with death and blood out of necessity. Spirits, monsters and terrible beasts don’t seem imagined or silly in the northern darkness.

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Top: Piiparinen (Rauno Juvonen), Aimo (Tommi Korpela), and Rauno (Jorma Tommila) pose with some captured “Santas” in Rare Exports. Above: Illustrations created for Rare Exports by Lauri Ahonen. All images © Cinet.

The Finnish Santa Claus is attributed to a real geographical place— Korvatunturi is a borderland separating Finland from Russia. Both of these northern nations have towns they promote in tourist brochures as the “real” home of rival Santa Clauses. The Santa Claus Village near Rovaniemi, Lapland is a central part of northern Finland’s economy. As is Veliky Ustyug, a historically preserved city in northern Russia that began promoting itself as the home of Ded Moroz to attract tourist dollars. Contrast these locations with Santa Claus’ home in the North Pole—a nearly unattainable geographic point on sea ice, 817 km from the nearest permanently inhabited spot on the globe (Alert, Nunavut). Interestingly, Helander is surprised to hear that Canada has only jolly old St. Nick as our Santa figure. I don’t blame him for supposing that my snowy northern nation would have its own cruel winter god. Regrettably, there isn’t much of a connection between the supernatural cannibalism of the Algonquian Wendigo and the European winter solstice gift-giver/ punishment-deliverer (though I’d like to see that movie).

302 D ON’T M ES S W IT H C H R IS T MA S A great deal of dark mythology was excised during the centuries of transposition of the Santa Claus tradition to North America. Possibly, this is the result of finding a new one-fits-all narrative for the American cultural melting pot. For the horror film fan, much was lost in transit in terms of terror possibilities as well.

Above: Riley (Per Christian Ellefsen) gets face-to-face with one of his caged discoveries in Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. © Cinet.

When pressed to name a few other subversive, darker-edged Christmas stories from Europe prior to the release of his film, Helander says: “I don’t recall anything, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to do Rare Exports. The whole concept almost feels like a secret, where the younger you are, the less you know of the old traditions. It was actually really hard to find anything about it, just some really rare drawings or postcards.” Likewise, Dick Maas says that, “There are a lot of movies about horror with Santa Claus in the States. I’ve seen a few of them, and I thought, ‘why haven’t we ever touched the subject here in Europe?’ Sinterklaas is such a big thing here in Holland, just like Santa Claus is in the United States. I wanted to play with that tradition, and see if I could come up with a story. Basically, I hate Sinterklaas. I hate the festivities. So I tried to make fun of it.” In many European nations, making films is difficult if not close to impossible without government funding and incentives. Similarly, it’s a challenge to make a film that cuts the throat of a beloved holiday tradition. Imagine pitching a killer Santa movie to a bureaucrat holding the public purse—it must seem to go against any sense of good taste, public interest and conceivable marketing logic. Maas and Helander pruned their ideas for years before their films were greenlit, with Helander making two extremely popular Rare Exports short films before the feature was given permission to proceed.

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Both Sint and Rare Exports were financially successful around the globe and both Maas and Helander wrote and pitched sequels, though neither has been made. Like the parents’ action groups that protested Silent Night, Deadly Night in 1984, Maas took a lot of heat in the Netherlands from Sinterklaas societies, and even from a fellow filmmaker who was up in arms over the now iconic poster of a sinister Sinterklaas on his steed: “We had a fellow, a colleague of mine, also a director, he started a whole thing about it. He went to court, even tried to prohibit the poster. He was busy working on a Sinterklaas movie for children that came out the year after this. Well, he had maybe a little agenda, but he helped the movie. We got a lot of publicity about the controversy.”

Above: Director Dick Maas and a charred-face Sinterklaas share a grin behind the scenes of Sint.

While films like Sint and Rare Exports uncover a fascinating mythology, the older Yuletide traditions that they present may not exactly align with the more heartwarming Santa Claus stories of say, A Miracle on 34th Street. And yet, they’re still essential—for the North American audience, these films represent a refreshing departure from our own tired, fretless narrative, while to the people of the old continent, they serve as an important reminder of the true nature of pre-capitalist Christmas. Long before gift-giving and goodwill took the spotlight stage, the holidays were a time of drunkenness, criminal mischief, paganism, Odin worship and child abuse—and these timeworn tales help shine a light on why it’s still important to acknowledge Christmas’ cold, dark roots.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Biography.com Editors. “St. Nicholas Biography,” Biography.com. http://www. biography.com/people/st-nicholas-204635. Gundarsson, Kveldulf Hagen. “The Folklore of the Wild Hunt and the Furious Host,” Mountain Thunder, Issue #7, Winter 1992. https://lumineboreali.net/ threads/the-folklore-of-the-wild-hunt-and-the-furious-host.252/ Helander, Jalmari. Skype interview with the author, May 2016. Maas, Dick. Skype interview with the author, April 2016. McLean, Morven. “Schmutzli: The Swiss Santa’s Sinister Sidekick,” Swissinfo.ch, December 5, 2008: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/schmutzli--the-swiss-santa-ssinister-sidekick/7082046 Moose. “Norwegian Elf: Nisse,” My Little Norway, December 21, 2008: http://mylittlenorway.com/2008/12/norwegian-elf/ Reis, Charles. “The 5 Most Terrifying Krampus Legends From Around the World,” The Ghost Diaries. http://theghostdiaries.com/the-5-most-terrifying-krampuslegends-from-around-the-world/ Sengupta, Somini. “U.N. Urges the Netherlands to Stop Portrayals of ‘Black Pete’ Character,” The New York Times, August 28, 2015. Sokolskaya, Eugenia. “Grandfather Frost: More Than Just Santa Claus,” Russian Life, November 18, 2014: http://www.russianlife.com/stories/online-archive/ grandfather-frost-more-than-just-santa-claus/ Toast, Sarah. “Christmas Traditions Around the World,” HowStuffWorks. http:// people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/holidays-christmas/christmastraditions-around-the-world-ga7.htm Towrie, Sigurd. “The Wild Hunt,” Orkneyjar. http://www.orkneyjar.com/tradition/hunt.htm Woodruff, Betsy. “Forget Santa. You Should Celebrate La Befana,” Slate. December 22, 2014: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/holidays/2014/12/celebrate_la_befana_at_christmas_the_holidays_need_a_wine_drinking_witch. html

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CHAPTER 25 PAUL CORUPE

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hey’ve been called everything from “Satan Claus” to the “AntiClaus,” but the truth behind the black-furred, devil-horned Krampus, who have recently emerged as the standard bearers for yuletide terror, is much more complex. The recent silver screen popularity of the Krampus may have breathed pop culture permanence into the winter holidays’ most infamous mythological menace, but it’s come at a cost, as modern depictions have largely stripped away the Alpine traditions and context that helped birth the creature. And yet this is really nothing new for the Krampus, who have been forced to forsake their true identities on more than one occasion to stay relevant for contemporary audiences.

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The Krampus are devilish yuletide creatures that first emerged in the 18th century as part of winter festivities in Austria, Bavaria, and parts of southern Germany. Popularized by illustrated depictions on 18th- and 19th-century postcards (known as “Krampuskarten”), the Krampus encourage good behaviour in children not by rewarding the good with Christmas treats, but by threatening the wicked with fates much more unpleasant than simply receiving a lump of coal. Just as the Krampus once surrendered their pagan roots to be assimilated into Alpine Christmas traditions, their subsequent arrival in North America has required a similar adjustment. The Krampus have now evolved into a single, larger-than-life personification of evil that stands in hostile opposition to Santa Claus’ kindness and generosity. This characterization

Left: Krampus (2015) soundtrack LP Cover. Art by Phantom City Creative, Inc. Courtesy Waxwork Records.

is best exemplified in the Krampus’ appearances in Christmas horror films like A Christmas Horror Story (2015) and Krampus (2015), depictions that perpetuate the idea of Krampus as an unrepentant, homicidal Scrooge. Drawing on other Christmas narratives, especially Santa slasher movies of the 1980s, the Krampus films allow audiences to indulge in holiday cheerlessness without directly challenging traditional understandings of Christmas. Though now established as a yuletide horror staple, the Krampus’ real origin has remained hazy due in part to the radical evolution of the character through the last few centuries, changes brought on by a mix of religious tradition, paganism and pragmatism. In the preface to his 2010 book of Krampuskarten, Krampus: The Devil of Christmas, Monte Beauchamp provides one of the earliest overviews for unfamiliar readers, focusing on the Krampus as punishers: “In European folklore, the Krampus is [St. Nicholas’] dark servant—a hairy horned beast whose pointed ears and long slithering tongue gave misbehavers the creeps. The Krampus terrorized the bad until they promised to be good. Some he spanked. Others he whipped. And some he shackled, stuffed into his large wooden basket, carted away and hurled into the flames of hell.”

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Above: Examples of Krampuskarten.

The Krampus fit into a vast cosmology of mythological Christmas figures from across Europe that includes everything from pious saints to mischievous gremlins. As Beauchamp notes, other countries play host to characters that fulfill much the same role as the Krampus, including the Netherlands’ Zwarte Piet, the Czech Republic’s Cert, and German companion Knecht Ruprecht, among others. Rather than representing an “evil reflection” of St. Nicholas, the Krampus and other unsavoury permutations were originally envisioned as unruly companions, brutes whose bestial instincts were tamed by St. Nicholas so that they might accompany him in his Christmas season duties.

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Even within the Alpine regions, the stories, legends and pictorial representations of the Krampus can vary greatly, in part because “Krampus” never originally referred to one beast in particular, but to a type of creature—more analogous to terms like “werewolf” or “vampire.” The pulpy illustrations that adorn the original Krampuskarten generally depict the Krampus as a synthesis of human and animal elements. They’re usually covered in black fur, but also sometimes with bare, devil-red flesh or even dressed in clothing ranging from Santa-like red coats to traditional Austrian winter outfits. One Krampus may sport long, swooping horns, while another has simple nubs. Some even have one human foot and one cloven hoof. These ostensibly cruel creatures are depicted as carrying a wide variety of implements and accessories, such as pitchforks, switches, chains or baskets slung across their backs, sometimes with misbehaving children already imprisoned inside.

Above: Example of Krampuskarten.

In his comprehensive book The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil, Al Ridenour traces the roots of Krampus-like creatures as far back as medieval Christmas plays, in which St. Nicholas was often given a devilish foil. He notes that, in the Alpine regions, a kind of “folk Catholicism mingled with an indigenous pagan folklore” and that the Krampus evolved in the late 18th century, “mostly organically,” out of a belief in evil mountain spirits known as “perchten.” Though the church generally worked to extinguish belief in such creatures, the Krampus survived and were instead absorbed into Christian winter traditions. Recast as the unruly wards of St. Nicholas, the Krampus became popularly associated with Christmas and, as Ridenour notes, were effectively domesticated and “brought under the control of ecclesiastic narrative and civil authority.” Ridenour notes that other swirling cultural influences, from pagan misinterpretations of St. Nicholas to advent carnival traditions and morality plays, eventually manifested as a “Krampus Run” (Krampuslauf), in which dedicated local troupes donned intricate animal-hide costumes and grotesque masks to parade through town (usually on December 5). Making their appearance at the end of fall, the Krampus and their folkloric peers also played an important role in encouraging children to complete their seasonal chores. Ridenour ties the Krampus’ postcard depictions as a kidnapper and switch-wielding brute to earlier traditions that also served to test and warn young boys and girls. Sometimes the role even fell to St. Nicholas, according to Ridenour, who notes that in the 17th century, a costumed local would sometimes playfully quiz children on their schoolwork. Around the same time, young girls behind on their domestic chores were told that they could expect a visit from Frau Perchta, a witchlike figure who, when displeased with a messy house, was believed to burn fingers or even slice open bellies and stuff them with garbage. (Sharing the Krampus’ roots in the perchten, Frau Perchta also survives in some form today as a kind of female Krampus equivalent).

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Above: 15th century illustration of Frau Perchta.

These kinds of disturbing threats against misbehaviour were further disseminated in children’s storybooks, like Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter (1845). This morbidly illustrated German tome, which was frequently given as a Christmas gift to young children, depicts unpleasant and sometimes violent fates for foolhardy youths who indulge in bad habits or poor hygiene. And yet, despite this implied violence and bloodshed, Ridenour highlights throughout his book a pantomime playfulness to the Krampus that hasn’t really translated outside of the Alpine region. While, as a rule, children are never hit by costumed Krampus performers even today, teenagers and parade spectators are sometimes lightly swatted with a switch, an act which he compares to mock violent traditions like “birthday spankings.” The Krampus troupes that take to the streets each December for Krampus runs really offer nothing more frightening than chaotic disruption, and some playacted ferocity.

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Top: Illustration from Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter (1845). Above: Contemporary Krampus run. Photo: © www.mariazellerland-blog.at.

If the vibrant Krampuslauf is akin to a North American Santa Claus parade, then the Krampus’ visits to homes of local children (the less common Hausbesuch) are the Alipne equivalent of sitting on a department store Santa’s knee. As explained by Ridenour, local Krampus troupes taking part in this tradition would roam from house to house (or by appointment) to visit families. St. Nicholas typically first enters a home and talks with the children, who sit with their kin on one side of a kitchen table. He appraises their behaviour (the details of which are procured beforehand from whispering relatives) and sometimes the children recite verses or answer schoolwork questions in exchange for small parcels of nuts and sweets. A Krampus usually hides outside and only makes his appearance near the conclusion of the visit, causing a great commotion by knocking over household objects and shaking the kitchen table in a show of force—a parting reminder of the importance of good behaviour for the new year. Ridenour notes that house visits have recently fallen out of favour, likely due to the modern popularity of the more tourist-friendly Krampuslauf. With the participation of contemporary “Krampus clubs,” these Krampuslauf have grown into festivals that resemble North American Christmas craft shows, with festive treats and goods for sale (although some regions are reportedly more protective over the Krampus as a local tradition, and shun interested tourists). The exact nature of the festivities varies by region, but can sometimes be playfully rowdy, occasionally getting out of hand thanks to the traditional incorporation of alcoholic beverages. On meeting in the streets, Ridenour notes that competing Krampus troupes sometimes get into shoving matches which each other—a codified ritual of horn-butting known as a “rempler”—but this is largely for the benefit of the spectators, and participants are usually careful not to hurt each other or damage their expensive costumes. Helping to cement Krampus’ 21st century popularity beyond the snowy Alpine mountains, Beauchamp’s 2004 book The Devil in Design was the first English-language collection of Krampuskarten, which featured more than 150 images of the Krampus along with a brief, one-page introduction to the mythological character. While a second volume, 2010’s Krampus: The Devil of Christmas, followed, Krampuskarten also gained additional exposure from collectors and historians, which ultimately led to the popular realization that some Alpine communities still held contemporary Krampus runs. Ridenour believes that, as a result of online photos of these runs, as well as lingering interest in Krampuskarten, the Krampus were “gleefully embraced as a sort of counter-cultural meme,” inspiring Krampus-themed events in North American cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto.

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That influence soon started to bleed into popular culture. Along with

novels (2012’s heavily illustrated Krampus the Yule Lord by Brom), children’s books (Dean Koontz’s 2004 novella Santa’s Twin and Kyle Michel Sullivan’s Goodnight Krampus (2016)) and comic books (Image’s fiveissue darkly satiric Krampus! (2013)), the Krampus’ likeness also graces action figures and plush toys, as well as holiday décor ranging from tree toppers and ornaments to stockings and knit sweaters. They have also popped up on television (including episodes of The Venture Bros., Supernatural, The League, ScoobyDoo! Mystery Incorporated and UK series Inside No. 9), and appear in independent short films like Krampus (2012), Night of the Krampus (2013) and A Visit From Krampus (2015). All of this cultural ephemera had an early hand in shaping how the Krampus legend has been transposed across the Atlantic. However, Michael Dougherty’s Hollywood studio-distributed 2015 feature Krampus has been the most influential work by again reshaping the Krampus’ story for a contemporary audience. In modern cinematic retellings, the Krampus are almost always positioned as singular figure rather than one of many, a reigning lord of antiChristmas sentiment best characterized as Santa’s evil counterpart rather than his wild but indentured companion. It’s Krampus, as well as other Christmas horror movies like A Christmas Horror Story (2015), Krampus: The Christmas Devil (2013) and Krampus: The Reckoning (2015) that, for better or worse, have shaped North American perceptions of the character. Filling in the gaps of the creature’s obscure origins with a mixture of familiar Christmas lore and common horror movie tropes, these cinematic reinterpretations have expanded popular perception of the punishment-dealing Christmas devil.

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The most significant influence on modern cinematic depictions of the Krampus is the Santa-starring Christmas slasher movie. As with the killer

Top: cover art for Gerald Brom’s 2012 book Krampus the Yule Lord. Above: Venture Bros.”A Very Venture Christmas” (2004).

Kris Kringles in Santa’s Slay (2005), Christmas Evil (1980), Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984), Sint (2010) and, most notably, Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), the North American Krampus primarily exist as counterpoints to Christmas cheer. In Silent Night, Deadly Night, for example, emotionally troubled orphan Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) snaps when he temporarily fills in for an absent toy store Santa, sending him on a deranged murder spree in which he disciplines “naughty” babysitters and sled-stealing teenage bullies. Similarly, in Santa’s Slay, it’s revealed that jolly old Saint Nick (Bill Goldberg) is really a spawn of Satan out for bloody revenge on townsfolk he was forced to be nice to as a divine punishment. Wearing dirty outfits and breaking into homes brandishing weapons instead of toys, these unsavoury Santas gleefully transgress feelings of goodwill and joy associated with the season. Despite their popularity, some protestors and parents took issue with the way films like Silent Night, Deadly Night and Sint subverted the popular holiday myth of Santa, a character most meaningful to children. This opposition is surely one reason that the Krampus have been quickly adopted by horror filmmakers liking to make a creepy Christmas classic, since it allows them to place the essential characteristics of the slasher Santa—disagreeable grinches more focused on violently punishing bad kids than rewarding good ones—into an existing preChristian character that already embodies a dark side of Christmas. In this way, these horror films, including Krampus, can express the same anti-Christmas sentiments as killer Santa movies, but without having to directly undermine popular Christmas iconography. No stranger to holiday horror, Dougherty previously tackled Halloween in his 2007 anthology Trick ‘r Treat (2007). For Krampus, his Christmasset follow-up, Dougherty resituates the mountain-dwelling devil in the American suburbs, creating an antagonist informed by the usual amalgam of inverted Santa tropes, cross-pollinated with movie clichés from different adaptations of A Christmas Carol, Gremlins (1984) and even The Polar Express (2004). In the film, young Max (Emjay Anthony) and his extended family are stranded in their suburban house without power during a harsh Christmas blizzard. The holidays already seem beyond saving when teenager Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) doesn’t return from a visit to her boyfriend’s house. Her father (Adam Scott) and uncle (David Koechner) go off searching for her, only to discover that nearby houses have been destroyed by some unknown animal or creature. When a Krampus finally makes his way to Max’s house, only his German grandmother seems to know what’s going on as his family is besieged by Krampus and his anarchic, Christmas-themed minions.

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On first appearance, Dougherty’s film seems to cast Krampus as a

Right: Poster for Michael Dougherty’s Krampus (2015).

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typical holiday slasher, eviscerating his way through a group of gathered victims. But, by the third act, it’s obvious that this Krampus hasn’t arrived to punish those that behave badly, he’s instead there to reinforce the importance of traditions and family at the holiday season. The Krampus is seemingly summoned when an embarrassed Max, teased by his cousins, rips up his letter to Santa in which he wishes for a return to a more meaningful holiday. Seeing Max has abandoned his belief in the magical aspects of the season, the Krampus forcibly rekindles his Christmas spirit by creating a nightmare Christmas Eve scenario where the young boy is subjected to visions of his family being murdered and thrown into the fires of Hell. But, like Scrooge or even George Bailey of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Max awakens on Christmas morning to find everything is back to normal; his family is alive and everything appears right in the world (while ambiguous, an epilogue that reveals that Max’s house sits in a snowglobe on the Krampus’ shelf seems only to suggest that he is watching and may return should Max slip up again). Though Christmas horror films often act as a receptacle for seasonal cynicism, Krampus surprisingly warns against indulging in such negativity. It’s an approach that places this characterization more in line with Dickens’ take on Christmas horror (one scene even has the characters watching the 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol on TV); rather than having sprits convince a miser to forsake his selfishness, the Krampus is there to ensure that Max remains a right jolly old elf—or else.

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Obviously, Krampus takes quite a few liberties with the established

Above: Michael Dougherty’s Krampus (2015).

Alpine mythology, including with the design of the creature. As opposed to the Krampus immortalized on postcards or that still run through the streets in small Austrian villages, this bestial hunchback is pitched as the more established evil Santa who arrives not to give gifts, but to take lives. Though his horns are still prominent and he’s covered in chains (a traditional element that here is reminiscent of Jacob Marley’s ghost from A Christmas Carol), he is otherwise clad in what amounts to a Santa disguise—a ragged, red and white suit and a mask from which hangs a dirty beard. Like his jollier counterpart, Krampus enters houses through the chimney, but ominously cracks the walls as he squeezes his way down the flue. Dougherty saves much of the film’s subversive holiday mayhem for less celebrated symbols, like killer gingerbread men and possessed toys who attack and kill the members of Max’s family.

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One bit of uncommon Alpine lore that the film does retain is the appearance of a Krampus bell, even if its meaning is again changed to fit with established holiday movie tradition. These huge, heavy bells are a prominent feature of Krampus runs, often worn by troupe members and identifiable by their ominous clanking noise. A miniature replica of this ancient-looking bell, giftwrapped and addressed to Max, mysteriously shows up under the tree on Christmas day, serving as a reminder of his recent transformative experience. It’s a scene that’s uncannily similar to the climax of The Polar Express, in which a boy unwraps Santa’s sleigh bell, a souvenir of his overnight trip to the North Pole that restores the recipient’s faith in the magic of Christmas.

Above: Michael Dougherty’s Krampus (2015).

Though less ambitious, the Canadian-made anthology A Christmas Horror Story (2015) also prominently features a Krampus who not only follows the evil Santa playbook, he stands as Santa’s literal arch-nemesis, a supervillain ready to do battle to the death. The film, co-directed by Grant Harvey, Brett Sullivan and Steve Hoban, weaves together a handful of holiday horror tales around a framing story featuring a cynical radio DJ (William Shatner) forced to work on Christmas. In one tale, clumsy youngster Duncan (Percy Hynes White) accidentally breaks a Krampus holiday ornament when visiting his elderly aunt. Following an unfortunate car accident, the family is then stalked through a snowy forest by the Krampus (Rob Archer), increasingly concerned that their own bad behaviour is attracting the creature. They take refuge in a nearby church to pray for forgiveness, but the Krampus hunts the family down and metes out a violent punishment. Though it doesn’t get into specifics, this ending serves to superficially connect the Krampus with pre-Christian traditions, as the sanctity of the church proves no obstacle to the Krampus’ wrath.

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A muscular creature with impressive horns, Krampus is most impressive in this film, not at all like the malformed Santa of Krampus or the CGI of the other low-budget DV features. And yet he’s also different from the traditional Krampus, with a chalky white body and wispy facial hair more reminiscent of mythological winter monsters such as the Wendigo or Yeti. While still focused on the idea of punishment, the Krampus of A Christmas Horror Story acts like a force of nature or a savage animal throughout the film, bringing the creature away from its mythological

Above: The Krampus as depicted in A Christmas Horror Story (2015).

roots and more into line with cryptozoogical curiosities like Bigfoot that have long fascinated North Americans as a kind of popular folklore. Rather than an acknowledged fantasy creature, this Krampus is presented as a possibly real creature, as yet undiscovered, whose existence only remains unproven. Later in the film, Krampus makes a brief appearance in an otherwise unrelated second tale about a zombie outbreak affecting the North Pole’s population of elves. As Santa (George Buza) massacres his way through his undead helpers, the hulking Krampus suddenly appears at the North Pole with a grappling hook and challenges him to a battle. “I knew it: Krampus—vile enemy of Christmas” proclaims the film’s battle-scarred St. Nick, “This ends tonight.” The Krampus here is not only a punisher, as depicted in the first story, but he’s also Santa’s (almost) equally powerful antithesis, a source of antiChristmas sentiment that can only be stopped when he’s conquered by a benevolent St. Nicholas. It’s a portrayal that again appears to reference Christmas movies past—in this segment, the Krampus seems drawn along the same lines as the mischievous demon Pitch in René Cardona’s 1959 kiddie matinee Santa Claus, a Satanic, horned nemesis whose tricks to stop Santa from his delivery duties are ultimately thwarted by Santa’s magic. As in Dougherty’s film, A Christmas Horror Story only briefly acknowledges the creatures’ pagan roots before it drastically resituates the Krampus legend, aligning it with North American reference points ranging from to cryptozoology to popular movie and comic book tropes.

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Above: Santa, battle-scarred from fighting the Krampus in A Christmas Horror Story (2015).

Along with bigger budgeted productions, there have also been several regionally made independent horror films to feature the Krampus. Produced two years before both Krampus and A Christmas Horror Story, writer/director Jason Hull’s Krampus: The Christmas Devil (2013) was re-released in 2015 to ride the tattered coattails of those more highprofile titles. This DIY Pennsylvania-shot DV film takes perhaps the fewest liberties with the character’s folklore roots, as a determined police detective (producer A.J. Leslie) investigates a rash of child kidnappings, all of which seem to lead back to hazy memories of escaping his own abduction as a youngster. He’s convinced that the perpetrator is a bestial creature who steals children and takes them into a nearby cave for some not-so-festive torture and murder. Laughed at by superiors, the confused cop comes to terms with his own childhood trauma, and enlists some SWAT team pals to comb the woods with machine guns to hunt the creature down. But Krampus has his sights on the detective’s own daughter, which comes to a head when the Christmas devil arrives at his homestead at the same time as a revenge-seeking ex-con (Bill Oberst Jr.). Starting with a scene of Krampus dragging a child in a burlap bag to the river to drown the boy as punishment for bad deeds, Hull seems to have largely based his Krampus on historical images popularized by Beauchamp, mixed with other horror movie menaces like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s (1974) Leatherface. Though largely kept in the shadows, the Krampus costume itself is somewhat faithful, if apparently fished out of a Halloween discount bin: a red Santa robe topped off with a bony skull mask that features large teeth and bright red horns. And while they are posited as brothers, the relationship between Santa and Krampus is also surprisingly similar to traditional Alpine representations—a brutish ally controlled by a benevolent master. Only this Santa, played by Paul Ferm, isn’t quite so innocent as he might seem. With a goatee and bad attitude, Krampus: The Christmas Devil’s Kris Kringle is more typical of the bad Santa slashers, even if he never dirties his hands. It’s Krampus who is there to mete out punishment to ill-behaved kids, but he only does so under his brother’s clear direction. And while these punishments are carried out primarily on children, this Krampus also chains up a topless woman in his cave for, it’s implied, his sexual satisfaction (something hinted at in Krampuskarten, which occasionally depicted the creature menacing a lady in her nightgown).

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Hull doesn’t stray far from this playbook for his 2016 sequel, Krampus: The Devil Returns, in which the caustic Christmas brothers return to the same town to tackle an increase in naughty behaviour. Aside from more shots of the disappointing Krampus mask, there’s not much deviation from the earlier characterizations, which still depicts the Krampus as a kidnapper

Right: Poster for Jason Hull’s 2013 Krampus: The Christmas Devil.

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and enforcer of Santa’s behaviour policy. However, this sequel tends to downplay its Krampus storyline to instead follow a gang of vengeful criminals, ultimately edging closer to a crime film than horror. Another Krampus horror film that plays out like a police procedural, Krampus: The Reckoning offers minor technical improvements over Hull’s films, even if its Krampus is interchangeable with almost any other slasher movie protagonist. For this effort, Arizona-based filmmaker Robert Conway casts Krampus as the murderous id of a troubled child, Zoe (Amelia Haberman), who emerges to burn to death those who cross the young girl, starting with her ungrateful foster parents. She’s helped by child psychologist Rachel (Monica Engesser), who’s also being wooed by Detective O’Connor (James Ray), a cop looking for the serial arsonist that’s leaving a trail of charred bodies around town. Only near the conclusion do they realize that Zoe, armed with a small Krampus doll, possesses mysterious powers. As with many contemporary regional horror films, Krampus: The Reckoning features a CGI monster who barely appears on screen but, when it does, it’s less than impressive; a muscular, gray-skinned demon with swept back horns (similar to the Krampus in A Christmas Horror Story), as well as a long slimy tongue. But all the evidence here points to an existing horror movie script that was later changed to incorporate a Krampus. Since this Krampus is presented not even as a Santa slasher, but a typical horror movie killer with his own revenge motive and method of killing, there’s very little connection to the holiday setting of the film. Rather than punishing children, this Krampus focuses on torching badly behaved adults—especially those who transgress moral boundaries, from Zoe’s drug addled, system abusing foster parents to a secret pedophile who works at a children’s hospital. Like Hull, Conway went back to the well for another try with Krampus Unleashed (2016), which ditches the CGI for practical effects. This one takes place during the holidays in snow-less Arizona, as some teens stumble on a rune-covered rock that has the power to summon the Krampus. As these things usually go, they accidentally awaken his

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Above: Poster for Jason Hull’s Krampus: The Reckoning (2015).

dormant spirit and Krampus ruthlessly slaughters anyone who gets in his way, including some hapless Bigfoot hunters. With the help of an older resident, they lure Krampus into an abandoned mineshaft to bury him alive. While the depiction of the creature is much more traditional than in Conway’s previous film, Krampus Unleashed again feels like a film where the addition of a Krampus was a last minute change to a script about another mythological creature—it often resembles a Bigfoot or animal attack film, even moreso than the first Krampus segment in A Christmas Horror Story. No matter if you’re bad or good, expect a visit from this Krampus who has a habit of materializing at awkward times, killing indiscriminately and without even a Santa counterpart to help keep him in check. While the depictions of the Krampus in these five films may vary, most recognize the importance of connecting the creature back to mythological roots, even if they aren’t particularly concerned about faithfully depicting them. In order to establish the Krampus’ connections to an older Christmas tradition now forgotten, the creature’s legend is usually recounted by elderly characters, often of implied German background. In A Christmas Horror Story (2015) it’s Aunt Etta (Corrine Conley) who warns of the Krampus threat, where the duty falls to grizzled ex-miner Coop (Kerry Keepers) in Krampus Unleashed. In Krampus, Max’s German grandmother Omi (Krista Stadler) explains that, “Saint Nicholas is not coming this year. Instead, a much darker, ancient spirit. His name is Krampus. He and his helpers did not come to give, but to take. He is the shadow of Saint Nicholas.” In another variation used to connect Krampus back to the idea of an ancient legend, Krampus: The Reckoning begins with a storybook readings to introduce the Krampus as a rival to Santa, and the characters later research the Krampus on a makeshift internet site populated with images from Beauchamp’s Krampuskarten books. These sources effectively replace and rewrite the established mythology that is often difficult to pare down to a line or two of expository dialogue.

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Just as the Santa Claus of modern folklore is shaped more by Clement Clarke Moore’s The Night Before Christmas and soft drink advertising than the St. Nicholas legend, the Krampus as presented in North American horror films function mostly as an personification of holiday humbugs. Largely stripped of their original folkloric intent, the Krampus have appeared on screen in a variety of distinct roles, from a guardian of Christmas spirit to Santa Claus’ evil twin and even a straightforward boogeyman, interchangeable with the masked monsters and killers of hundreds of American slasher films.

But maybe this forced evolution, unfaithful to the original legend as it may be, doesn’t matter. If the Krampus are to remain meaningful for an audience no longer frightened by mountain spirits or the perils of incomplete chores, they must represent new, modern winter anxieties. And, unlike their Santa slasher predecessors, the Krampus’ popular acceptance depends on tapping into these seasonal fears in a way that doesn’t directly upset existing Christmas lore. As the holiday season continues to get more complex and stressful—full of family pressures and expectations, credit card debt and even seasonal depression— perhaps these modern, pliable Krampus are more useful as a vehicle to exercise our weariness with Christmas’ overwrought pageantry, blind consumerism and demanding social expectations—or, at least, to help us establish a suitable ironic distance. Think of it as North America’s own take on the “rempler”—only instead of two costumed Krampus performers engaged in a shoving match, the Krampus films have become a contemporary ritual where audiences can push and prod at the holiday, testing for weak spots in that formidably cheerful façade. It’s little more than an exaggerated cultural pantomime, but an important one that brings nuance and balance to our understanding of the most wonderful time of the year.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y Basu, Tanya. “Who Is Krampus? Explaining the Horrific Christmas Devil.” National Geographic. December 19, 2013. Accessed May 20, 2017. http://news. nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131217-krampus-christmas-santadevil/. Beauchamp, Monte. The Devil in Design: the Krampus Postcards. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2005. Beauchamp, Monte. Krampus: the Devil of Christmas. San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2010. Brown, Phil, April Snellings, and Monica S. Kuebler. “Cruel Yule.” Rue Morgue, December 2015. Dow, James R. German Folklore: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Ferranti, Seth. “Krampus Is the Fucked-Up Santa America Deserves This Year.” Vice. December 14, 2016. Accessed May 20, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_ us/article/the-story-of-krampus-the-original-bad-santa-pulled-from-germanfolklore. Grimm, Jacob, and James Steven Stallybrass. Teutonic mythology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kavis, Deborah. “Krampus 101.” Rue Morgue, December 2016. Ridenour, Alan. The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2016. Taylor, Alan. “Krampus: Saint Nicholas’ Dark Companion.” The Atlantic. December 03, 2013. Accessed May 20, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/ photo/2013/12/krampus-saint-nicholas-dark-companion/100639/.

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“Grither” artwork by Trevor Henderson for a seasonal greeting card, 2017.

Please note that in the interest of comprehensiveness, we have included press notes for any Christmas horror films that we were not able to personally review in time for publication.

12 D E AD LY D AYS

Director: Joe Lynch, Joe Menendez, Eduardo Sanchez, Gregg Hale, John Hyams, Josh Miller | Writer: Chris Cullari, Jennifer Raite, Max Perry, Matthew Ryckman, Jackson Stewart, Patrick Casey, Josh Miller, Edward Voccola | USA | 2016 | Web Series A series of 12 Christmas shorts made exclusively for Youtube’s premium channel Youtube Red through a collaboration with Blumhouse Studios, 12 Deadly Days is a fun survey of holiday horror tropes that pairs up edgy indie horror directors with some familiar genre faces (such as Bill Moseley and Daniel Roebuck) and various internet personalities (Anna Akana, Burnie Burns, Brittany Furlan, Meghan Rienks and Alexis Zall) for an irreverent exploration of supernatural occurrences in the cursed town of Saturn, California as Christmas approaches. The series begins with A Christmas Carol riff “A Haunting at the End of the Street” in which the ghostbusting Cratchit brothers (J. Claude Deering and Jon Fletcher) are hired by a reclusive curmudgeon (Moseley) to exterminate some bothersome spirits (while most episodes operate as stand-alone stories, the Cratchit brothers return as a connecting thread through several of them) and continues with killer trees, haunted fruitcakes, homicidal carolers, an office party

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Above: Poster for the Youtube Red/Blumhouse anthology webseries 12 Deadly Days (2016).

that turns from corporate team-building exercise to deadly game of survival (complete with killer Nutcracker), and the haunted theatre at the root of the town’s spiritual plague. (Kier-La Janisse)

12-24

Director: Anthony Colliano | Writer: Anthony Colliano | USA | 2008 | Feature Low budget horror fave Tiffany Shepis stars in Pittsburgh-based actor/director Anthony Colliano’s debut feature. It’s Christmas Eve, and a group of disparate characters are heading home for the night when the dead begin to rise and seek human flesh. Who will survive the onslaught? (Press notes)

1 2 S L AY S O F C HR I STMAS

Director: Jason Figgis, Natalie Bailey-Trist, Kim Sonderholm, Sam Mason-Bell, Reyna Young, Jason Impey, Jonathan Patrick Hughes, Mike Connors, James Atkins, Joe Saulino, Dustin Ferguson, Kieran Johnston | Writer: Jason Figgis, Jonathan Patrick Hughes, Tony Newton, Kim Sonderholm | UK | 2016 | Feature A Christmas horror anthology. 12 indie horror directors bring you 12 tales of terror with a yuletide twist. (Press notes)

3 6 15 C OD E PÈ R E NO ËL

Director: René Manzor | Writer: René Manzor | France | 1989 | Feature Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: On Christmas Eve, a pre-teen boy is left at home by his parents and, when an unwanted visitor breaks in, the boy is forced to fend for himself using an elaborate series of booby traps built out of household items. But hold on—this time, the house is a cavernous mansion in the middle of the French countryside, the boy is responsible for a grandfather suffering from diabetic shock, and the home invader is not a bumbling comedy crook, but a psychopath dressed as Santa Claus who brutally murders the family dog. Released half a year before Home Alone (1990), 3615 Code: Père Noël starts as a broad, kid-friendly comedy with Terry Gilliam-ish visual ideas— including having the boy, Thomas (Alain Lalanne), control his booby trapped house from a wrist-mounted remote control in an impossibly giant room filled with toys. Things quickly take a nightmarish turn when a killer Santa drops down the chimney. The goofy Thomas sheds his annoying schtick, dresses up as Rambo, and discovers that murder may be the only way to survive the night. Director René Manzor ratchets up the suspense with a series of deftly handled set-pieces which include a surreal home-art gallery chase and a snowcapped rooftop showdown, all rendered beautifully in a colorful wide-angle style reminiscent of Italian horror auteur Michele Soavi. The over-the-top proceedings are also refreshingly grounded by the fearless lead performance of child actor Alain Lalanne, in his second film role, who begins the film as precocious brat and ends it as a shell-shocked survivor. 3615 Code: Père Noël isn’t about a clever kid pulling one over on a baddie, but Thomas’ brutal realization that the world will not bend to his will and that sometimes cleverness is not enough in the face of pure malice. Bonnie Tyler’s syrupy end credit power ballad “Merry Christmas” strikes a dissonant note when smashed up against the film’s unsettling final moments. For more on 3615 Code: Père Noël, see page 252. (Justin Decloux)

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A CAD AV E R C HR I STMAS

Director: Joe Zerull | Writer: Daniel Rairdin-Hale, Hanlon Smith-Dorsey, Joe Zerull | 2011 | Feature A nostalgic tribute to the Christmas horror subgenre (complete with faux film grain and scratches), A Cadaver Christmas has an undeniable energy that transcends its low budget. A bartender (Ben Hopkins) and a lonely drunk (Hanlon Smith-Dorsey) are sitting out Christmas Eve festivities with a sad drink over the “Hippopota-Christmas Special” (an animated special presumably created especially for this film) when a blood-soaked janitor (Daniel RairdinHale) bursts in looking for the washroom. He saddles up to the bar for a seasonal beverage and his story unfolds: he’s just escaped a swarm of walking, flesheating cadavers (not zombies, cadavers, he’ll have you know!) at the local college. Soon the janitor, the barteder, the drunk, a disgraced cop (Yosh Hayashi) and his perverted perp (Andrew Harvey) find themselves in the Science building of the campus warding off not only a zombie (erm, cadaver) invasion spawned by a grieving doctor’s experiments in reanimation, but some frustrating institutional bureaucracy instgated by campus security guard (Jessica Denney). The film is supremely silly, and its basic premise is nothing new, but the comic rapport between the performers makes it stand out. A zom-com with some decent gore and a lot of heart. (Kier-La Janisse)

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A C AR OL FO R ANO THER C HR I STMAS

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz | Writer: Rod Serling | USA | 1964 | Made-ForTV Film This dystopian reimagining of A Christmas Carol follows hard-hearted conservative Daniel Grudge (Sterling Hayden), who argues about isolationism with his liberal nephew Fred (Ben Gazzara) on Christmas Eve. Both men grieve for Grudge’s son (and Fred’s cousin) Marley, a soldier who was killed several Christmases ago, but this shared loss is not enough to soften the older man’s position. Grudge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past in the form of a World War I soldier (Steve Lawrence) who reminds Grudge of his own military visit to the rubble of Hiroshima after World War II. The Ghost of Christmas Present (Pat Hingle) shows up at the head of an overstuffed banquet table to show Grudge

Above: Joe Zerull’s A Cadaver Christmas (2011).

the millions of “barbed wire nomads” suffering from a lack of shelter and food. Finally, a hooded and robed Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Robert Shaw) reveals a future devastated by nuclear war and guided by the proclamations of The Imperial Me (Peter Sellers), a fanatic who encourages survivors to only look out for themselves. In the end, Grudge admits he was wrong, apologizes to Fred, and shares a Christmas meal with his African-American servants. This ABC production aired in 1964 as part of a series of films in support of the United Nations. Underwritten by The Xerox Corporation, it reportedly cost $4 million, which allowed the network to air the film without commercial interruptions. While both the acting and writing are outstanding, the film often feels weighted down by its own heavy-handed politics. However, the sentiments promoting the universal importance of communication and tolerance still feel relevant. For more on A Christmas Carol, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A CH RI S TMAS C AR O L

Director: J. Searle Dawley, Ashley Miller, John H. Collins| Writer: Unknown | USA | 1910| Short

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One of two versions of Scrooge’s tale released in 1910 (the other coming from Italy), this film is also based on J.C. Buckstone’s play. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A CH RI S TMAS C AR O L

Director: Edwin L. Marin| Writer: Hugo Butler | UK | 1938| Feature Reginald Owen stars in the first feature-length adaptation of Dickens’ Carol for a major studio, in this case MGM. This Joseph L. Mankiewicz production co-stars Gene Lockhart as Bob Cratchit. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

Above: Peter Sellers in A Carol for Another Chrismas (1964).

A CH RI S TM AS C AR O L

Director: Richard Williams| Writer: Charles Dickens | UK | 1971| TV Special Although produced in UK, this animated short was made for ABC and premiered on December 21, 1971. The film features the voice talents of Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge and Sir Michael Redgrave as the narrator. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A C HR I STMAS CAROL

Director: Clive Donner| Writer: Roger O. Hirson| USA | 1984 | TV Film This adaptation of A Christmas Carol features the grim opening scene of Marley’s funeral, one which reflects Dickens’ original prose. George C. Scott provides one of the more convincing transformations in a film that evokes many elements of horror cinema. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A C HR I STMAS CAROL

Director: David Jones| Writer: Peter Barnes| USA | 1999 | TV Film This cinematic version of Patrick Stewart’s popular one-man stage performance as Scrooge is quite faithful to Dickens’ original text. Richard E. Grant co-stars as Bob Cratchit, while Joel Grey portrays the Ghost of Christmas Past. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A CH RI S TM AS C AR O L

Director: Robert Zemeckis| Writer: Zemeckis| USA | 2009 | Feature

Robert

Writer/director Robert Zemeckis used 3D animated motion-capture technology to bring his adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas classic to life. Jim Carrey not only provides the voice of Scrooge, but also the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

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A CH RI S TM AS C AR O L

Director: Jason Figgis| Writer: Jason Figgis| Ireland | 2012 | Feature Billed as “the darkest, most ghostly version of this story ever made,” this 2012 adaptation of A Christmas Carol is introduced by the character of Charles Dickens, who sets the stage for the events to follow. The low-budget movie was

Top: George C. Scott in Clive Donner’s 1984 A Christmas Carol. Bottom: Poster for Jason Figgis’ 2012 A Christmas Carol.

filmed in and around Dublin over the course of two years. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A CH RI S TMAS C AR O L: THE MU SI C AL

Director: Arthur Allan Seidelman| Writer: Mike Ockrent, Lynn Ahrens| United States | 2004 | Telefilm One of the more star-studded versions of A Christmas Carol, this musical stars Kelsey Grammer as Scrooge and Jason Alexander as Marley’s Ghost, and features Jesse L. Martin, Jane Krakowski, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Geraldine Chaplin and more. The TV movie is based on a 1994 Broadway musical. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A CH RI S TMAS G I F T

Director: Maximilian Weiland | Writer: Andy Steinhauer | USA | 2013 | Short While many Christmas horror films focus on the more supernatural terror associated with the holiday season, Max Weiland’s A Christmas Gift touches on real life trauma, albeit with a sardonic edge. During a Christmas gift exchange (a disappointing haul of socks and a mug), friends Tom and Mike spot a wrapped present under the tree that evokes harrowing memories. Nestled innocently under the tree, the red-striped package reminds Mike of a drunk driving accident he was involved in, and Tom of a murder he committed, and the pair worry that the contents of the gift will reveal their dark secrets to their unsuspecting pal. This mutual worry builds until the friends to attack each other, leaving the mysterious package still unwrapped. Narrated in rhyming couplets with only features a few lines of dialogue—like “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” as retold by Edgar Allan Poe—this sharply scripted four-minute film is surprisingly festive, with a comic edge that helps the film from coming off too dire. But really, A Christmas Gift is about how past behaviour can come back to bite you at the holiday season, where ending up on the naughty list can result in worse fate than just residual guilt or a chunk of coal. (Paul Corupe)

A CH RI S TMAS HO R R O R STO R Y

Director: Grant Harvey, Steve Hoban, Brett Sullivan | Writer: James Kee, Sarah Larsen, Doug Taylor, Pascal Trottier, Jason Filiatrault | Country | 2015 | Feature

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From the Canadian company behind the Ginger Snaps werewolf franchise, A Christmas Horror Story is a holiday horror anthology that hits the right targets with more than a few gore-soaked snowballs. In the first of the film’s four interwoven stories, a trio of ghost hunters investigate a series of murders that occurred in their school basement, while the second film has a young child (Orion John) acting strangely when his parents brings home a Christmas tree they’ve illegally cut down. Krampus (Rob Archer, underneath some heavy prosthetics) terrorizes a misbehaving family who take sanctuary in a church in the third story, which sets the scene for the Christmas demon’s battle with Santa in the conclusion, after having already battled a zombie outbreak that has claimed St. Nick’s elven helpers. All four tales are strung together by William Shatner, who plays a drunken radio DJ. From the opening model work to the monster effects and general production design, A Christmas Horror Story strives to stay creepy. While

it creates the sort of carnage and frights we’ve come to expect from yuletide terror, it’s safe to say you’ve never seen victims of an axe attack by a guy in Santa costume quite like this. (Michael Helms)

A CH RI S TM AS TR EAT

Director: Tim Sullivan | Writer: Tim Sullivan | USA | 1985 | Short Twenty years before writer, director, actor and producer Tim Sullivan took the directorial reigns on 2001 Maniacs (2005)—a remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis” cult splatter classic Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)—the then twenty-one year old fledgling filmmaker wrote and directed the four minute short A Christmas Treat. The one-time Icons of Fright staff writer’s yuletide themed effort is a simple tale with an amusing and shocking twist (depending on your sensibilities) that won Sullivan the Fangoria Short Film Search Award. Shot in 1984 while Sullivan was studying at NYU and released on Christmas Day 1985, A Christmas Treat plays out like the allAmerican dream of the perfect family Christmas before literally and metaphorically dealing that image a fatal blow. To the jaunty strains of “The Christmas Song,” young Jason (Jason Gulisano) can’t resist sneaking downstairs after being tucked up in bed by his parents to peak at Santa Claus as he delivers presents to the family home. Jason’s ill-fated decision to make his presence known, by tugging at Santa’s sleeve, marks the point at which A Christmas Treat becomes anything but for the young boy, as Jason is bloodily slain by “Santa Claws” (as the character is credited) and stuffed into a sack with the corpses of other naughty boys. Made for $10,000, A Christmas Treat perfectly captures the sort of soft focus, cozy look and mood seen in TV ads at Christmas, which makes its crushing of the fantasy all the more successful. (Neil Mitchell)

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Top: William Shatner in A Christmas Horror Story (2015). Bottom: Tim Sullivan and friend behind the scenes of his 1985 short A Christmas Treat.

A GH OS T STO R Y FO R C HR I STMAS: “ T H E S TAL LS O F B AR C HE STE R ”

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark | Writer: Lawrence Gordon Clark | UK | 1971 | TV Special The first of Lawrence Gordon Clark’s beloved and oft-revisited series of BBC Christmas specials, “The Stalls of Barchester” was broadcast on Christmas Eve 1971 and is based on M.R. James 1911 short story “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” about an archivist (Clive Swift) who comes upon an old diary detailing the events leading up to the mysterious death of the Cathedral’s former Archdeacon, Dr. Haynes (Robert Hardy). Haynes had orchestrated the early death of his predecessor in order to usurp him, but found himself cursed by the spirits in the Archdeacon’s choir stall, which had been carved in the 17th century from wood taken from a tree known locally as The Hanging Oak. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

A GH OS T STO R Y FO R C HR I STMAS: “A WARN IN G T O T H E CURIOUS”

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark | Writer: Lawrence Gordon Clark | UK | 1972 | TV Special After the success of the first installment of A Ghost Story for Christmas, Lawrence Gordon Clark returned with an updated imagining of M.R. James’ “A Warning to the Curious,” which first appeared in a 1925 short story collection of the same name. Structurally modified from the original source text, the television adaptation stars character actor Peter Vaughn (Straw Dogs, Symptoms) as an amateur archeologist who makes a trip to the Suffolk seaside to look for the mythical three lost crowns of Anglia, which are rumoured to ward off invaders. But when he locates one of the crowns and removes it from its resting place, its spectral guardian begins to terrorize him. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

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A GH OS T STO R Y FO R C HR I STMAS: “L OST H E ARTS ”

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark |Writer: Robin Chapman | UK | 1973 | TV Special Based on an M.R. James story to feature in his 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, “Lost Hearts” had been adapted for the small Top: A Ghost Story for Christmas: “The Stalls of Barchester” (1971). Photo: Andrew Tweedie. Bottom: A Ghost Story for Christmas: “Lost Hearts” (1972). Photo: Lawrence Gordon Clark.

screen once before—as an episode of ITV’s Mystery and Imagination series in 1966—before becoming the fan favourite of Lawrence Gordon Clark’s seminal holiday series. It is also the first of the Ghost Story for Christmas installments to actually feature the series title in the credits. Simon Gipps-Kent plays a young orphan named Stephen who is whisked away to the sprawling country estate of a supposed distant relative, Mr. Abney (Joseph O’Conor), an eccentric old doctor who is revealed to be an alchemist looking for the key to immortality by experimenting on young children. The ghosts of Stephen’s two predecessors attempt to warn him, their presence signaled by the haunting hurdy-gurdy music the episode is now famous for. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

A GH OS T S TORY FO R C HR I STMAS: “ THE TREASURE OF ABBOT T HOMAS”

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark | Writer: John Bowen | UK | 1974 | TV Special The Ghost Story for Christmas installment most overtly structured like a traditional mystery, “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” combines the excitement of amateur sleuthing with the kind of visceral horror that would later come to be associated with H.P. Lovecraft. Pragmatic medieval scholar Reverend Somerton (British horror regular Michael Bryant) and his young protégé Lord Peter Dattering—who does not appear in the source text—try to uncover a treasure allegedly hidden on the Abbey grounds that is somehow connected to a disgraced former Abbot. The adaptation moves the action from Germany to Somerset’s Wells Cathedral where it incorporates the famous 14th century stained glass “Jesse Window” as part of the mystery. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

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A GH OS T S TORY FO R C HR I STMAS: “ THE AS H T REE”

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark | David Rudkin | UK | 1975 | TV Special The final installment of the original Ghost Story for Christmas series to be based on a story by M.R. James, “The Ash Tree” was adapted by celebrated playwright David Rudkin (who had scripted Alan Clarke’s “Penda’s Fen” the previous year) and stars Edward Petherbridge (later to show up in Gordon Clark’s own version of James’ “Casting the Runes” for ITV Playhouse in 1979) as an aristocrat who is plagued by his ancestor’s execution of a local witch decades earlier. The ash tree of the title is the locus of a particularly gruesome secret that materializes in the form of spindly creatures that invade the artistocrat’s bedroom at night. An essential offering of folk-horror that would make a great double bill with Walter

Above: A Ghost Story for Christmas: “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1974). Photo: © BBC.

Grauman’s US TV movie Crowhaven Farm (1970). For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

A GH OS T STO R Y FO R C HR I STMAS: “ THE SIGN AL MAN ”

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark |Writer: Andrew Davies | UK | 1976 | TV Special A Ghost Story for Christmas creator Lawrence Gordon Clark departed for the first time from the work of M.R. James in favor earlier writings by A Christmas Carol scribe Charles Dickens, whose short story “The Signal-Man” first appeared in the 1866 Christmas edition of his journal All The Year Round. Inspired by his own near-death in a railway crash the year prior, Dickens wrote this spooky tale about a railway signalman (a sweaty, nervous Denholm Elliott) who works at a lonely outpost beside a long, dark tunnel, where he is occasionally visited by a horrifying spectre whose presents warns of an accident about to happen. “The Signalman” is the most critically successful instalment of the Ghost Story for Christmas series, using foreshadowing and precise, echoing sound design to amplify the isolation of the protagonist. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

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A GH OS T STO R Y FO R C HR I STMAS: “ ST IGMA”

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark | Writer: Clive Exton | UK | 1977 | TV Special The first of the Ghost Story for Christmas series to be based on original source material in a contemporary setting, “Stigma” was unfairly panned at the time of its release because of its departure from period. But there is another kind of period in “Stigma”—namely the menstrual connotations of its female protagonist hemorrhaging to death from an invisible wound after some landscapers move

Above: A Ghost Story for Christmas: “TThe Signalman” (1976). Photo © BBC.

a standing stone in her yard and unleash a curse. Set in Avebury—home to one of the most important neolithic henge monuments in Britain and the location for iconic children’s show Children of the Stones which was broadcast earlier that year—it is the only female-centric story in the entire Ghost Story for Christmas series and a beautifully measured script by Clive Exton, who had written the acclaimed serial killer drama 10 Rillington Place in 1971. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

A GH OS T S TORY FO R C HR I STMAS: “ THE I CE H OUSE”

Director: Derek Lister | Writer: John Bowen | UK | 1978 | TV Special The last entry in the original 1970s incarnation of A Ghost Story for Christmas, “The Ice House” was a fraught production, most notably due to the series founder Lawrence Gordon Clark having left the show, leaving directing duties to Derek Lister. John Bowen, who had penned “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” returns to scriptwriting duties here, and the setup—a recently divorced city dweller goes to recuperate in the country only to be confronted by sinister rural folk—is somewhat similar to his earlier script for the 1970 Play for Today “Robin Redbreast” (covered elsewhere in this book), which was also broadcast as part of Christmas programming. While the secret to the titular ice house is supernatural in nature, the film was criticized by audiences at the time for straying further from the series’ central preoccupation, which is the ghost story, and the episode marked the end of its original run. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

A GH OS T S TORY FO R C HR I STMAS: “A VI E W F ROM A H IL L”

Director: Luke Watson | Writer: Peter Harness | UK | 2005 | TV Special When the BBC decided to revive the Ghost Story for Christmas series nearly 30 years after its original run (the installments from 2005, 2006, 2010 and 2013 are collectively considered the “second series”), they returned to the English ghost story writer whose work had inspired the series in the first place, M.R. James. As with many James stories, our guide into the tale is an archivist, who has come to a remote place to catalogue a collection of antique items. Mark Letheren (The Bill) stars as the archivist Dr. Fanshawe, who realizes that a pair of antique binoculars he has borrowed from the collection allow him to see an old Abbey on the Gallow’s Hill is not visible otherwise, and he soon finds himself dogged by the spirits of people hanged there. Director Luke Watson’s sole genre credit at that point was a series of 15-minute interstitials called The Fear, in which famous actors—Ray Winstone, Sadie Frost, Jason Flemyng—read scary stories to the camera, while writer Peter Harness was on his first TV job. Needless to say, despite the excitement circling the return of the series, the results are a very safe, underwhelming James adaptation. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

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A GH OS T S TORY FO R C HR I STMAS: “ NUMB ER 13”

Director: Pier Wilkie | Writer: Justin Hopper | UK | 2006 | TV Special This second installment of the mid-oughties revival of A Ghost Story for Christmas sees Greg Wise playing the typical Jamesian arrogant academic, who stays at an inn while documenting the history of a nearby Cathedral. He is assigned

Room 12, and notices there is no Room 13—but assumes this is due to rural superstition. At night, he is awoken by noises coming from the room next door, and discovers that there is indeed a hidden Room 13, a gateway to a secret past involving a reformation-era witchcraft scandal. The film’s use of shadows and disembodied voices recalls the restraint of the earlier series, but as with the 2005 entry “A View From a Hill” there is just not enough of a sense of dread to compete with the oozing atmosphere of the original 1970s films. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

A GH OS T STO R Y FO R C HR I STMAS: “ W H IST L E AN D I’L L COME T O YOU” Director: Andy de Emmony | Writer: Neil Cross | UK | 2010 | TV Special

Jonathan Miller’s celebrated 1968 adaptation of M.R. James’ “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” may have inspired the Ghost Story for Christmas series, but it was never part of it, despite often being spoken of in the same breath. The BBC cemented that association with this 2010 reboot starring John Hurt, which was broadcast on Christmas Eve and is considered part of the official canon. While the original tale focused on a socially oblivious academic (Michael Hordern) who finds himself haunted after discovering an ancient whistle buried in a Templar cemetery on the East Anglian coast, the 2010 version’s protagonist (Hurt) is a retired astronomer who has gone to the coast after depositing his wife (Gemma Jones) in a care home. The introduction of a wife—or any female character at all— is a significant departure from the source material. The fact that she is in the early stages of senile dementia, and that the protagonist finds a wedding ring on the beach rather than a whistle, emphasizes the tale’s already palpable sense of melancholy. Back at his hotel he finds the ring is inscribed with the Latin words for “Who is this, who is coming?” which he reads aloud, thereby prompting the haunting that will follow him through the end of the film. Though a very different story to the one it re-envisions, it is an excellent stand-alone film and a classy addition to the Ghost Story for Christmas roster. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

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A GH OS T STO R Y FO R C HR I STMAS: “ THE T RACTAT E MIDDOT H”

Director: Mark Gatiss | Writer: Mark Gatiss | UK | 2013 | TV Special Mark Gatiss to the rescue! A longtime champion of those beautifully musty 1970s British tele-terrors, The League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss has made a name for himself as the most reliable rebooter in the business, not only through his work on Doctor Who and Sherlock but his own 2008 Christmas mini-series, Crooked House. Here he makes his directorial debut with the most recent (to

Above: A Ghost Story for Christmas: “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” (2010). Photo © BBC.

date) official entry in the Ghost Story for Christmas series, an undeniably eerie adaptation of M.R. James’ “The Tractate Middoth,” which first appeared in the 1911 collection More Ghost Stories. Sacha Dhawan (who played filmmaker Waris Hussein in Gatiss’ Doctor Who biopic An Adventure in Space and Time the same year) plays a young librarian charged with finding a rare book that will leave him forever shattered. Gatiss’ classy creepfest is a welcome addition to the canon, outshining the middling 2005/2006 installments with its saturated hues, solid character casting (including British TV regulars John Castle and Roy Barraclough as well as Eleanor Bron of Beatles film fame) and a horrific cobwebby ghost that would be right at home in the original series. For more on A Ghost Story for Christmas, see page 136. (Kier-La Janisse)

A L I T TL E GAME

Director: Paul Wendkos | Writer: Carol Sobieski | USA | 1971 | TV Film Home from military school for the holiday break, a young boy (Mark Gruner from Jaws 2) soon finds himself tangling with his new stepfather Paul (Ed Nelson), who has begun to suspect the teenager of killing a classmate. This telefilm, adapted by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Carol Sobieski (Fried Green Tomatoes) from Fielden Farrington’s 1968 novel of the same name, is one of the more underrated Evil Kid films. It’s clearly riffing on The Bad Seed (1956), but remains fresh thanks to the fine performances from the small but talented cast. Robert’s transformation from snot-nosed brat to murdering sociopath, and his intellectual standoff with his stepfather, is suspenseful and smart. While it’s a mere quibble, Diane Baker as Robert’s mother fares less well because the story plays too heavily on the trope that a mother can only view her child in a certain light. But, aside from the interesting family dynamics, the curious relationship and power play between Robert and his “best friend” (i.e., lackey) Stu (Christopher Shea) steals the film. Stu is easy to love, and helps anchor the film’s cynicism with a sweet dose of organic innocence. Directed by stalwart telefilm director Paul Wendkos (he also directed the small screen Bad Seed remake in 1985), A Little Game originally aired on October 30, 1971, as a Movie of the Weekend (a spinoff of the popular Movie of the Week series). This TV movie was met with mostly positive reviews, but left some a little uncomfortable. LA Times film critic Jerry Beigel stated, “The subject matter may be offensive to some. In an age when the alienation of youth is so famous, it may be unpleasant to see so vivid a reminder, and in a boy only 13 years old.” (Amanda Reyes)

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Above: A Little Game (1971).

A M U P P E T C HR I STMAS C AR O L

Director: Brian Henson| Writer: Jerry Juhl| USA | 1992 | Feature After the 1951 Alistair Sim-starring film, this musical adaptation of Dickens’ classic is among the most widely popular film versions of A Christmas Carol. Gonzo acts as the narrator, while Michael Caine stars as Ebenezer Scrooge. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

A VERY ZOMBIE HOLIDAY

Director: Sean Becker | Writer: Zeb Wells | USA | 2010 | Short Aping the familiar style of 1950s instructional films, prolific TV director Sean Becker’s fun threeminute short provides some essential advice for what to do when the undead try to ruin your Christmas celebration. Featuring several different cheerful female narrators, A Very Zombie Holiday guides viewers through four useful tips that families can use to ensure that their suburban holiday soirees are safe from zombie attacks. Need to board up your house? Get it done before finishing the holiday baking, and don’t forget to include high-calibre shotguns and ammunition as Christmas morning gifts to take out any infected grandmothers. In addition to cautioning single girls that a trip under the mistletoe could put her in danger with someone more interested in her brains, the film also notes that the threat of an undead uprising is the perfect cover for taking out a pack door-to-door carolers. Inspired by George A. Romero as much as Kris Kringle, this clever short film contrasts the idyllic 1950s holiday season—complete with sweater-clad, pipe-smoking dads and apron-clad party hostesses—with the unending terror of the zombie apocalypse, with some fun make-up effects and a campy approach that makes it unique among other modern horror shorts. (Paul Corupe)

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A V I S I T F R O M K R AMPU S

Director: Lisa Jay | Writer: Lisa Jay | USA | 2015 | Short Supposedly “based on the true origins of Christmas,” A Visit from Krampus is one of a handful of shorts released since 2010 featuring the mythological Alpine Christmas monster. In the film, a teen girl explains the story of Krampus to her cousin—noting that the legendary creature is a reborn Earth spirit who represents the “dark half” and “evil twin” of Santa. Skeptical of Krampus’ existence, but still hoping to appease him in case he is on the way, the girls nevertheless decide to leave him a shot of Jagermeister instead of the traditional milk and cookies. Of course, when he does show up on Christmas Eve, the Krampus downs the liquor and then heads upstairs to the bedrooms, packing an axe instead of a sack of toys. As opposed to other Krampus shorts released around this time, Lisa Jay’s seven-minute film is a pastiche of sorts, weaving in footage of other Above: A Very Zombie Holiday (2010).

Christmas films (including Rene Cardona’s Santa Claus), scenes that appear to be a recreation of a pagan rite, and experimental optical effects, in an effort to illustrate Krampus’ dark origins. Though it diverges from the real tale of Krampus and is light on narrative, the film is interesting for its attempts to represent the Krampus’ story visually. For more on the Krampus, see page 306. (Paul Corupe)

AL F RE D H I T C HC O C K PR E SENTS: “ B AC K FOR CHRIST MAS”

Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Writer: Francis M. Cockrell, John Collier | USA |1956 | TV Episode While not set at Christmas time, the seasonal holiday looms large in this tale of cold-blooded murder and unexpected karma from the first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Adapted by Francis M. Cockrell from John Collier’s 1939 short story of the same name, “Back for Christmas” uses the holiday season as a calendric death knell at the narrative’s conclusion for the smug perpetrator of an apparently perfect murder. The twofold horror in “Back for Christmas,” in which henpecked husband Herbert (John Williams) murders his domineering wife Hermione (Isobel Elsom), is primarily felt by the viewer watching the callous act of murder that is the catalyst for the story, and is subsequently experienced by Herbert as his pre-meditated plan to escape justice and start a new life abroad unravels. Having dug a pit in the basement of their home— under the pretence of turning the space into a wine cellar—Herbert coldly bludgeons Hermione to death, buries her corpse in the pit and leaves for America on what the married couple’s friends think is an extended family holiday. Hermione’s insistence that both she and Herbert would be “back for Christmas” comes true for her unremorseful husband with Herbert’s discovery that Hermione’s pre-paid Christmas present to him is a professionally installed wine cellar, which involves excavating the basement-cum-burial ground. Recalling both the real life case of wife murderer Dr. Crippen and Edgar Allen Poe’s macabre, fictional 1843 short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Back for Christmas” is a simple tale told with great economy by the Master of Suspense. (Neil Mitchell)

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AL I E N R AI D E R S

Director: Ben Rock I Writer: Julia Fair, David Simkins I USA I 2008 I Feature It’s closing time at Hastings Market a few days before Christmas. A van load of

Above: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: “Back for Christmas” (1956).

masked, heavily armed marauders storm in and take everyone in the store hostage. It’s apparent this isn’t a robbery, but an organized siege performed with militarylike precision. The sixperson group, led by the fastidious Ritter (Carlos Bernard), uses a “spotter” to inspect each of the captives in search of a rogue alien parasite that arrived on Earth via meteorite. Ritter’s team has tracked the lone male “king,” a grotesque creature that’s impregnated a cluster of females, capable of controlling their host vessels in a violent rage. Ritter believes one or more of the employees and shoppers are infected, and plans to test them individually. Complicating their mission is negotiations with skeptical Chicago policeman Seth Steadman (Mathew St. Patrick) whose stepdaughter Whitney (Samantha Streets), a cashier at the store, is among the hostages inside. No one knows who to trust, and carnage ensues. Alien Raiders was conceived as part of Daniel Myrick’s “Raw Feed” imprint, a series of low budget directto-video releases under the Warner Home Video umbrella. Director Ben Rock is a jack-of-all-trades who worked closely with Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, creating the iconic stick man figure as production designer on The Blair Witch Project (1999). Rock subsequently directed television specials associated with the Blair Witch, and is an accomplished makeup artist, theater director, and magazine editor. His design team decks out Hastings Market with holiday decor before all hell breaks loose. Though Alien Raiders suffers in spots from jarring editing techniques and occasional dimly lit effects shots, Rock demonstrates a keen aptness for tightly constructed action set pieces. The film shares DNA with paranoia-driven sci-fi horror like John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), but is most closely akin to Jack Sholder’s raucous alien action vehicle The Hidden (1987). The framework is familiar, but a capable cast and unrelenting action makes this gruesome invasion a gift that keeps giving. (Chris Hallock)

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AL L TH E C R EATUR ES W E R E STI R R I NG

Director: Rebekah McKendry, David Ian McKendry | Writer: Rebekah McKendry, David Ian McKendry | USA | 2017 | Feature Husband-and-wife team Rebekah and Dave McKendry put their experience as longtime genre journalists to work with their own take on the Christmas horror anthology film. Indie darling Graham Skipper (Almost Human (2014), Sequence Break (2017)) serves as our guide in the framing story: a man with no plans for Christmas Eve accompanies his co-worker to a mysterious play, an almost teutonically minimalist production that sets the stage for five tales of holiday terror. An awkward Secret Santa game-turned-bloodbath; a last-

Above: Ben Rock on the set of Alien Raiders (2008).

minute shopper stuck in a parking lot purgatory; a Christmas Carol riff (in which a narcissistic curmudgeon—Jonathan Kite in the film’s star turn—suffers hellish admonitions; an accident on a dark country road; an intergalactic quest for the true meaning of Christmas. The directors gleefully trot out and skewer a host of Christmas horror tropes. There are a slew of familiar faces here—including Chase Williamson (John Dies at the End (2012)), Amanda Fuller (Red, White & Blue (2010)), Jocelin Donahue (The House of the Devil (2009)), Matt Mercer (Contracted (2013)), Maria Olsen (Starry Eyes (2014)), Jesse Merlin (Beyond the Gates (2015)) and vets like Archie Hahn of Phantom of the Paradise (1973) and Larry Zerner (a strong candidate for most-hated Friday the 13th character, Shelly from Part III (1982)). Fellow indie directors Axelle Carolyn and Mike Mendez have uncredited cameos. (Kier-La Janisse)

AL L T H ROU G H THE HO U SE

Director: Todd Nunes | Writer: Todd Nunes | USA | 2015 | Feature A gross and graphically violent precredit sequence, in which two characters (one played by Scream Queen Jessica Cameron) meet their demises at the hands of a killer dressed as Santa, sets the inyour-face tone for Todd Nunes’ feature length debut, All Through the House. A stalk ’n’ slash Christmas-set horror film, Nunes’ self-penned tale contains several narrative and visual nods to classic slashers such as Halloween (1978) and The Burning (1981) while twisting the image of Santa Claus into that of a deranged murderer. Unfolding over one evening, Nunes’ familiar tale sees the inhabitants of a suburban neighbourhood terrorized and decimated by the aforementioned “Santa,” whose identity, when revealed, eventually ties into the mysterious disappearance of one of the residents’ offspring many years before. The director’s sister, Ashley Mary Nunes, heads the cast as Rachel Kimmel and Melynda Kiring turns in an amusing performance as Kimmel’s odd neighbour Mrs. Garrett, around whom the main and subplot points converge. An assortment of young, scantily clad supporting characters are introduced and dispatched as the Santa killer heads towards Mrs. Garrett’s house for the film’s revelatory climax. A popular entry into the horror film festival circuit—picking up numerous audience awards along the way—All Through the House doesn’t contain any narratively symbolic reasoning for its yuletide setting other than to offer up an apposite visual image of Santa. The mask worn by the killer is a grotesque, gargoylesque rendering of Santa, totally at odds with that of the ruddy-cheeked facial features the viewer would generally expect to see. (Neil Mitchell)

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AM E RI C AN H OR R O R STO R Y: “ UNHO LY NI G H T ”

Director: Michael Lehmann | Writer: James Wong | USA| 2012 | TV Episode

The second season of anthology horror series American Horror Story takes place at an insane asylum in 1964, where an investigative journalist (Sarah Paulson) is victimized by a former Nazi doctor (James Cromwell). Compounding this storyline are elements of the supernatural, the occult, and an uncertain sense

Above: All Through the House (2015).

of reality. In the holiday-themed episode “Unholy Night,” A possessed nun (Lily Rabe) hosts a festive Christmas party in the common room for the patients. A serial killer (Ian McShane), locked away in solitary confinement since last year, is set loose to play Santa Claus at the party and unleashes deadly violence on the asylum’s staff—all according to the nun’s plan. Drawing from 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night and its use of a Santa Claus disguise to spread deadly justice (as well as the cruel repressiveness of nuns), the frank depiction of a twisted, murderous St. Nick is nonetheless new for television. The episode references other Christmas narratives too—a scene in which the killer Santa specially selects a curve-handled cane to exact his revenge on a hospital staff member is a perverted reference to the endearing cane in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), inspiring no one to believe in the miracles of the season. (Joanna Wilson)

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AN AM E RI C AN C HR I STMAS C AR O L

Director: Eric Till| Writer: Jerome Coopersmith| USA | 1979| TV Film Transposing the London of the 19th century to the Great Depression in 20th century America adds a poignant touch to this made-for-TV adaptation of Dickens’ novella. Henry Winkler stars as Benedict Slade, a Scrooge stand-in. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

AN AU S TR ALI AN C HR I STMAS B LO O D Y MIRACL E

Director: Unknown | Writer: Unknown | Australia | 2015| Short Bewdy, Bottler, Bonza, Boomer Cobber! Unlike any cinematic Bush Christmas you’ve ever seen, the animated short An Australian Christmas Bloody Miracle has become an online phenomenon, with more than 6 million views on Above: Lily Rabe in American Horror Story: “Unholy Night” (2012).

YouTube. A mating of the menacing outback bar scene in Wolf Creek (2005) with a fighting video game, this short has two characters stroll into the tiny, dusty town of Wolobongdong (“Home of the Cannibal Death Snake”), and end up in a bar brawl when their delicate palates force them to spit out their stubbies of ‘Roo Brew, seriously offending the hard drinking locals. Taken to the King of Australia to be sentenced for perceived crimes, they escape in a Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)-type chase sequence. Besides red clothing (common for outback Australians) the film barely mentions Christmas until the final moments where they introduce bottles of Scrumpy, a type of cider popular during the holidays. It’s the only truly authentic Australian aspect of An Australian Christmas Bloody Miracle. The film was made with Source Film Maker, a software application that creates films with pre-existing animated characters. (Michael Helms)

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AN N A AN D THE APO C ALYPSE

Director: John McPhail | Writer: Alan McDonald, Ryan McHenry | Scotland | 2017 | Feature Based on Ryan McHenry’s BAFTA-winning 2010 short film Zombie Musical, a zombie apocalypse threatens the sleepy town of Little Haven at Christmas, forcing Anna (Ella Hunt) and her high school friends to fight, sing and slash their way to survival with a fast-spreading undead horde in relentless pursuit. Teaming up with her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming), Anna and her crew fight their way through zombified snowmen, a ravenous bachelor party and high school hormones to try and save family and faculty alike. But they soon discover that no one is safe in this new world, and the only people they can truly rely on are each other. (Press notes) Above: TV Guide ad for An American Chrismas Carol (1979).

AN OTH E R W O LFC O P

Director: Lowell Dean | Writer: Lowell Dean | Canada | 2016 | Feature Lycanthropic lawman Lou Garou (Leo Fafard) is back in this Canadian splatter comedy that returns to the small town of Woodhaven as it readies for the Christmas holiday with an overload of hockey, beer and unapologetic lowbrow humour. Taking advantage of the Woodhaven populace’s struggling economy and propensity for indiscriminately chugging cheap beer, self-made tycoon Sidney Swallows (Yannick Bisson) buys up the local defunct brewery (with the help of the opportunistic town mayor, played by filmmaker and admitted Canuck-o-phile Kevin Smith) to revive it as a combination brewery/arena where the townspeople can indulge in their two favourite pastimes and escape the plague of unemployment. Little do they know the new “chicken milk” beer they’re being sold by the score isn’t your typical joy juice—instead it’s a means of impregnating humans with a legion of embryonic shapeshifters. Featuring

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Top: Ella Hunt in Anna and the Apocalypse (2017). Bottom: Another Wolfcop (2016). Photo: © Wolfcop 2 Productions.

wolf sex, hairy prosthetic penis (some things you can’t unsee) and cameos by Winnipeg’s celebrated Astron-6 filmmaking collective as a gang of armed robbers mangled and multilated by the furry town hero, this follow up to the 2014 Cinecoup-funded Canuxploitation neo-classic is a fun romp fueled by blood and Christmas carols—not to mention the sweet pipes of the strange animal himself, ‘80s rocker Gowan. (Kier-La Janisse)

ARC H I E ’ S W E I R D MYSTER I E S: “ THE C HR I S T MAS PH AN T OM”

Director: Unknown | Writer: Phil Harnage | USA | 1999 | TV Episode This children’s animated series, which uses the characters first popularized in Archie Comics in 1942, offers a horrifying twist on the teen hijinks and comedy of their previous incarnations, as the Riverdale gang are pitted against monsters and frightening creatures. In this episode, Archie gets a job as a last-minute replacement as a department store Santa Claus, after the last Santa suddenly quit, scared off by a “Christmas Phantom.” After hours, Archie is accidentally locked inside the store and finds that the rumours are true: he meets a redhooded figure with magical powers to bring inanimate objects to life— including a menacing Christmas tree. Archie not only gets what he wanted for Christmas—a new story for his “Weird Mysteries” newspaper column—but when his friends eventually find him, they happily explain how they’ve missed him, and have changed their attitudes about the season Archie has always loved. (Joanna Wilson)

ATM

Director: David Brooks | Writer: Chris Sparling, Ron Tippe | USA/Canada | 2012 | Feature In this Canadian-shot slasher, a stop at a banking machine turns deadly. Leaving their office Christmas party, David (Brian Geraghty), the co-worker he has a crush on (Alice Eve) and his friend (Josh Peck)—an inconvenient third wheel who interrupts their plans at every turn—are trapped in an ATM kiosk by an unidentifiable hooded figure in a parka who kills anyone who comes near him. We don’t know who he is or what his motivation may be. But it’s clear that, this Christmas, he’s out for blood. Evoking a sense of isolation and claustrophobia (this was writer Chris Sparling’s follow-up to Buried (2010), in which Ryan Reynolds finds himself buried alive), ATM’s imagery also draws nostalgic comparisons to earlier slashers like I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). However, the film’s thin plot and characters simply don’t come to life and the final outcome poses more questions than it answers. (Ariel Fisher)

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T H E AVE N GE RS: “ TO O MANY C HR I STMAS T REES”

Director: Roy Ward Baker | Writer: Tony Williamson | UK | 1965 | TV Episode Prior to his stint directing for Hammer and Amicus studios, genre fave Roy Ward Baker was paired with prolific writer of television espionage Tony Williamson for this nightmarish Christmas episode of classic British spy-fi series The Avengers in the fourth season (a season also notable for the introduction of Dianna Rigg’s iconic character Emma Peel). This sinister seasonal episode opens in British intelligence officer John Steed’s (Patrick Macnee) dream: he finds himself in a cardboard forest, walking towards a big stack of gifts, one bearing his name.

When he opens it he finds a framed photo of hiimself, and then stumbles upon the corpse of an agent he worked on top secret assignments with before being terrorized by a maniacally laughing and somewhat deformed Santa. Upon waking he

remarks to Mrs. Peel that his friend was “dead as a doornail”—this reference to A Christmas Carol just the first hint at the episode’s Dickensian obsessions. He finds that his dream was premonitory; his former colleague has just died in real life. Peel aims to settle his mind with a holiday weekend at the remote castle of a wealthy publisher where they find themselves at a Dickens-themed costume party that is a cover for a telepathic conspiracy of which Steed is the target. Director Roy Ward Baker’s knack for horror comes through, and subverted Christmas imagery abounds in this surreal and unsettling episode. (Kier-La Janisse)

B AB E S I N TO YL AND

Director: Gus Meins and Charles Rogers | Writer: Frank Butler, Nick Grinde | USA | 1934 | Feature Set in the magical world of Toyland where fairy tales and nursery rhymes live and breathe, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s Babes in Toyland is a lovely children’s film full of life and laughter that occasionally veers into frightening territory. Based on the popular operetta by Victor Herbert and starring the well-known comedians as Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee, the film follows the not-so-dynamic duo as they try to save Widow Peep (Florence Roberts) from eviction and protect Bo-Peep (Charlotte Henry) from forced marriage. The villain is the odious Barnaby (Henry Brandon), the village lender and debt collector who is infatuated with the much younger Bo-Peep. Amidst Laurel and Hardy’s shtick and giggles, the film dabbles in psychedelic, sometimes nightmarish images of cats with fiddles and taunting mice, and later ventures deep into Bogeyland, a hellish, subterranean world where guilty men are sent to pay for their sins—a realm that bears striking resemblance to some of cinema’s most significant silent films, namely Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

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Babes in Toyland is a Christmas movie that, once upon a time, would have been ideal for little kids. Now, it’s more nightmare fodder than anything else. It’s a

Above: The Avengers: “Too Many Christmas Trees” (1965).

strangely perverse film with its borderline pedophilic forced marriage between Bo-Peep and Silas Barnaby, a character based on the Crooked Man from the Mother Goose rhymes, and its bleak inferno below Toyland. Despite Laurel and Hardy’s best efforts, the sum of Toyland’s parts is more terrifying than charming, with some slapstick thrown in for good measure. (Ariel Fisher)

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B E Y ON D TO MO R R O W

Director: A. Edward Sutherland | Writer: Adele Comandini, Mildred Cram | USA | 1940 | Feature

A little-known dramatic fantasy that puts a novel twist on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Beyond Tomorrow (later re-released under the title Beyond Christmas) is about the ghosts of three industrialists (played by veteran actors Harry Carey, C. Aubrey Smith, and Charles Winninger) back from beyond the grave after dying in a tragic plane crash. Their spirits return to reunite a couple (Richard Carlson and Jean Parker) they had brought together the Christmas prior, who have since been torn apart by adultery and grief over losing the friends who set them up, while simultaneously coping

Top: Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland (1934). Bottom: Beyond Tomorrow (1940).

with all-consuming fame and a sizable inheritance. The film struggles with trying to do too many things all at once; romance, drama, ghost stories, tales of sin and redemption, morality and corruption pepper the film. It takes place predominantly during Christmas, using the holiday season to ground its story in a kind of “Golden Era Hollywood” setting, but without the major studio resources. To work within their limited budget, the filmmakers bolstered their cast with noted character actors Carey, Smith, Winninger and Maria Ouspenskaya (perhaps best known to genre fans as the Gypsy fortuneteller in Universal’s 1940s Wolf Man films). While highly moralistic, Beyond Tomorrow avoids righteous piety, bringing moving performances to the foreground to showcase more relatable, human elements. In emphasizing Christmas as a time for love and family, for forgiveness and generosity of spirit, Beyond Tomorrow is able to balance the bleak subject matter and dabble in darker territory. (Ariel Fisher)

B I G W OL F O N C AMPUS: “ANTI -C L AUS IS COMIN G T O T OWN ”

Director: Erik Canuel I Writer: Barry Julien, Rick Nyhlon I 2001 I Canada I TV Episode Tommy Dawkins (Brandon Quinn), a high school jock who was bitten by a werewolf, transforms into a teen lycanthrope at the most inopportune moments. He’s now the reluctant protector of Pleasantville, a small town frequently besieged by supernatural foes. He’s joined by his pal Merton J. Dingle (Danny Smith), resident goth and expert in the paranormal, and Tommy’s girlfriend Lori (Aimée Castle), who excels in fisticuffs. Tommy finds great joy in the Christmas season, but must confront an imposter “Anti-Claus” who’s crash landed in Pleasantville and looking to raise some holiday hell. The real Santa stops by to lend a hand, but Dawkins must unleash the beast within to save Christmas from the evil Claus. “Anti-Claus is Coming to Town” is a holiday episode from the third season of Big Wolf on Campus (1999-2002), Canada’s answer to Teen Wolf (1985), which starred Michael J. Fox as the titular beast. It was an earlier entry in the ranks of serialized scholastic monster programs emerging on the heels of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). In fact, it arrived a full decade before MTV’s own Teen Wolf series, which ran from 2011-2017. This episode was co-written by Barry Julien whose future credits include massively popular political satires The Daily Show (1996-), The Colbert Report (2005-2012), and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015-). The series creator Peter Knight’s penchant for idiosyncratic humor would blossom with future hit series BoJack Horseman (2014-)

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Big Wolf on Campus thrives in an atmosphere of 1990s pop sensibility, characterized by electronic music, sarcasm and self-deprecating silliness. Knight and his staff even cultivate a mythology around Dawkins and the monstrous denizens of Pleasantville. Whereas Tony Rivers (Michael Landon) perished tragically in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Tommy, hip to the curse, eventually embraces his werewolf alter-ego, persevering amid the confusing awkwardness of high school. By the episode’s end, Tommy, Merton and Lori are rewarded on Christmas morning with their dream gifts once order has been restored to the holiday. (Chris Hallock)

B I N G E & P U RG E

Director: Brian Clement | Writer: Brian Clement | Canada | 2002 | Feature Christmas, the near future: terrorist attacks have turned North America into a police state. Strange murders have begun to plague the capital city. The police chief assigns two officers to look into the disappearance of a young fashion model and the officers themselves promptly disappear. Fearing for the reputation of his department, and hoping that two of his problems take care of each other, the chief enlists the aid of a trio of private detectives he deems expendable. The group’s investigation leads them to an evasive fashion designer and his circle of enigmatic models. What they uncover is not just a simple murder, but a complex web of corruption, mass killing, deceit... and cannibalism. (Press notes)

B L ACK C H RI S TMAS

Director: Bob Clark | Writer: Roy Moore | Canada | 1974 | Feature Bob Clark’s Black Christmas has proven itself not to be just a major influence on yuletide terror but slasher films in general. The film begins as several girls are left in their sorority house as Christmas approaches. Unbeknownst to them, a serial killer has set up shop in their attic where he starts making strange and offensive phone calls (voiced in part by director Bob Clark himself). Filmed in Toronto by Clark, who later directed Canadian tax shelter staple Porky’s (1981) as well as holiday classic A Christmas Story (1983), Black Christmas was supposedly the template that John Carpenter used in his genre-defining masterpiece Halloween (1978). The film also features a notable cast, including Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)), John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)), Art Hindle (The Brood (1979), Andrea Martin (Cannibal Girls (1973)) and Olivia Hussey (Turkey Shoot (1982)). Most memorable is a feisty Margot Kidder (Sisters (1973)), who firmly establishes her thespian ability by delivering a speech that revolves around the mating capabilities of turtles. Black Christmas was apparently Elvis Presley’s favourite horror film and he dutifully watched it every Christmas until his death in 1977. Allegedly, that Presley family continues this tradition to this day. For more on Black Christmas, see page 6. (Michael Helms)

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B L ACK C H RI S TMAS

Director: Glen Morgan | Writer: Glen Morgan, Roy Moore | USA/Canada | 2006 | Feature Leaning heavily on the original script but basing its villain on “Co-Ed Killer” Edmund Kemper III, this remake of Bob Clark’s 1974 film was directed by Glen Above: Margot Kidder in a lobby card for Black Christmas (1974).

Morgan, a writer for TV’s The X-Files (1993) and the film Final Destination (2000). As with the original, the film follows a group of female college students gathered in their sorority house on Christmas Eve, all deeply involved in preparations for the big day. Meanwhile, a mysterious killer has begun to demonstrate a murder method that invariably involves a plastic bag and multiple stab wounds to the head. In addition to improved make-up effects over the original film, the Black Christmas remake also more thoroughly maps out the history of the killer, including a sexual act that refers directly to Kemper. Other mayhem in the film includes death by icicle and rolling pin as well as much eyeball mutilation. The only original cast member returning for this Black Christmas is SCTV staple Andrea Martin, who takes over the role as the sorority housemother, Ms. Mac. A bit of trivia: the surnames of the sorority sisters are taken from singers who put out popular Christmas songs. (Michael Helms)

B L ACK M IR R O R : “ W HI TE C HR I STMAS”

Director: Carl Tibbetts I Writer: Charlie Brooker I UK I 2014 I TV Episode

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Two men inhabit a remote cabin in the middle of a desolate snowy terrain. They’ve barely spoken in the five years stationed together. Matt Trent (Jon Hamm) is preparing a Christmas meal to share with his combative cabin mate Potter (Rafe Spall), hoping some holiday cheer will help bridge the social divide. They each share the stories of how they arrived here in isolation: Matt reveals that a horrible crime was committed under his watch as a celebrity pick-upartist-turned-confidence-coach who specializes in helping lonely men seduce vulnerable “outsider” women; Potter, who Matt has pegged as a “good man who’s done bad things” has been ostracized from his family for drunken, callous behavior toward his pregnant wife Beth (Janet Montgomery). As they share details, we learn that their lives are intertwined in complicated ways beyond sharing a roof in these wretched conditions. A special holiday episode from the second season of Britain’s hit speculative techno-horror series Black Mirror, “White Christmas” was penned by Charlie Brooker, the show’s creator, and directed by Carl Tibbetts, both of whom have molded offbeat sci-fi and drama Above: Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas (1974).

concepts into successful television careers. Black Mirror is a technophobe’s worst nightmare, narrative warnings of technological abuse in the hands of narcissists, opportunists, and sociopaths who plague the installments. “White Christmas” embodies the most chilling qualities of this distressingly provocative series with three interconnected segments of Christmas woe. No amount of kitschy decor or comforting holiday tunes makes the episode go down easy. Its deceptively simple opening expands into a territory where toxic machismo, manipulation, and selfishness lead to technological exile, slithering its way to a devastating conclusion. Anyone prone to the holiday blues may want to steer clear, for “White Christmas” will surely ruin the strongest egg nog buzz. (Chris Hallock)

B L ACK R AI N B OW

Director: Mike Hodges | Writer: Mike Hodges | UK | 1989 | Feature Best known for his 1970s vehicles Get Carter (1971), Pulp (1972) and The Terminal Man (1974), filmmakerfor-hire Mike Hodges was so frustrated with the offers of lacklustre 1980s projects that he wrote a screenplay on spec and got it produced as Black Rainbow. In this fascinating and intriguing film, a travelling medium predicts the murder of a factory worker about to blow the whistle on his corrupt bosses. When the Nostradamus-like prophecy gains some momentum in the press, a hitman goes after the seer. While Christmas may seem initially incidental, with meagre festive decorations and holiday pop tunes on background radios, the cold, oppressive winter landscape permeates the proceedings. And oppressive is the key word—Hodges is the king of the draconian frame. Like the streets of New Castle in his grim gangster opus Get Carter, Hodges brings the same sense of grit to the paved roads of Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Black Rainbow was lensed. From the tight and snappy screenplay to the acting, the entire production is a gem. Star Jason Robards is at his best, but Rosanna Arquette is the showstopper. Black Rainbow’s clairvoyant scenes are creepily effective, but the supernatural angle is subdued in favor of the very human threat of the Chicago shooter. It isn’t until the film’s final moments that the spookiness really comes into play. For this reason, Black Rainbow probably flies under most fright fan’s radars, which is a shame; this little crime thriller has enough chills to quantify a horror label. (Eric Zaldivar)

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Above: Rosanna Arquette in Black Rainbow (1989).

B L ACK S ANTA’S R EVENG E

Director: David F. Walker | Writer: David F. Walker | USA | 2007 | Short After a spate of robberies in which donated Christmas presents destined for deprived children are stolen, a downtrodden African-American community centre Santa Claus takes it upon himself to dish out some street justice to right a callous wrong. More blaxploitation action piece than creepy yuletide tale, Black Santa’s Revenge nevertheless features some bloody gore and FX work. Written and directed by BadAzz Mofo creator David F. Walker, and based on one of his own short comic books, Black Santa’s Revenge stars Ken Foree as the titular central character whose anger and sense of injustice at the robberies spills over into brutal, revenge-fuelled violence. Down on his luck—like his fellow community members in general—Foree’s Santa is driven by a traditional moral code and strong community spirit that spurs him on to save Christmas for the local kids. With little help coming from the police, Santa jumps at his chance to tackle the gang of thieves when he spots one of them while drowning his sorrows in a strip club. With pump-action shotgun in hand, this bad-ass Santa surprises the criminals at their hideout and, with a “ho, ho, ho,” proceeds to graphically blow them away Death Wish-style and recover the toys earmarked for the community’s younger members. Stylishly shot, with flashbacks, flash-forwards and split-screen imagery, Black Santa’s Revenge delivers a seasonal happy ending made possible by the preceding, thrash-metal accompanied, ultra-violent shootout. (Neil Mitchell)

B L ACK X X X-MAS

Director: Pieter Van Hees | Writer: Pieter Van Hees | Belgium | 1999 | Short Disorientation seems to be the name of the game in Belgian director Pieter Van Hees” oddball short Black XXX-mas. Van Hees loosely updates the story of Little Red Riding Hood into an urban crime drama set at Christmas in which an African Caribbean Santa sports a broad Jamaican accent and makes a living by committing house burglaries. Frenetic, gory and possessed of a jet-black comedic streak, Black XXX-mas is also a riotously bizarre melange of sex, drugs and drum and bass music. A night on the town for Little Red (Rochelle Gadd) goes dangerously awry as the spliff-smoking teenager is stopped, frisked and sexually harassed by Officer Wolfy (Manou Kersting). During the stop-and-search, Officer Wolfy guns down several tourists for no apparent reason before turning his murderous attentions back to the girl. While this is playing out, Little Red’s father, Black Santa (Don Warrington), is drawn into an impromptu sexual liaison while relieving an upmarket house of its contents. Both strands of this leftfield narrative come together in a manner that adds buckets of splatter to both the reworked fairy-tale and the Santa Claus mythology. The film’s absurdist narrative is compounded by two brief sequences that bookend the story in which God views and manipulates the action through the screen of a Gameboy. The winner of a Pixie Award in 2001, Black XXX-mas may only last for 11 minutes but it packs a lot of genre-bending blood letting, social commentary and religious satire into its relatively brief running time. (Neil Mitchell)

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Above: Ken Foree in Black Santa’s Revenge (2007).

B L AS T OF S I L ENC E

Director: Allen Baron | Writer: Waldo Salt, Allen Baron | USA | 1961 | Feature A delightfully unconventional film set during the Christmas season, Blast of Silence is the story of a lonely hitman alone during the holidays trying to make a buck. Written, directed, and starring Allen Baron, this low budget crime film has a pulpy, Raymond Chandler-esque quality that leans heavily on its film noir roots. Frankie Bono (Baron), a hitman from Cleveland, is sent to New York City during Christmas week on a job. He contracts a special gun from his grotesque arms dealer in the city, and runs into some old friends along the way. Namely, a dame he knew growing up in an orphanage. His cage is rattled, and his concentration blocked. His lack of focus could cost him his life.

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A genuine passion project, the film was made for a meager $20,000 in Manhattan. Though Baron took the writing credit out of necessity, it was written by then-blacklisted writer Waldo Salt (who later wrote Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Serpico (1973)), whose down-and-dirty script is full of slang and cigarette smoke. The second person narration (by Lionel Stander, who was also blacklisted at the time) lends a stylized quality to the film, and the performances are a highlight, including vile arms dealer Big Ralph (Larry Tucker), and even nonactor Baron. A 2008 Criterion DVD release helped raise the film’s profile, but it really should be a macabre Christmas classic. (Ariel Fisher)

Above: Lobby card for Blast of Silence (1961). Right: Supernatural Samurai in Blood Beat (1983).

B L OOD B EAT

Director: Fabrice A. Zaphiratos | Writer: Fabrice A. Zaphiratos | USA | 1983 | Feature In this regional 1980s slasher production, the spirit of an evil Samurai warrior terrorizes a family of psychics over the Christmas holidays. The demon is summoned via an orgasm provided by a visiting girlfriend. Shot in rural Wisconsin, Blood Beat may be bonkers but it’s far from entertaining. This programmer has trouble getting going, with its armored Samurai ghost staying off screen until long past the halfway point. The filmmakers clearly feared their main cast of four wasn’t enough to satisfy the bloodlust of the ravenous horror audience so, once the killings do commence, the body count is padded by introducing extraneous characters, including stranded motorists and campers. The mayhem displayed in the movie’s trailer makes this clunker look like an Evil Dead-type offering but, in reality, all the good stuff makes up about five minutes worth of screen time in the actual feature. The Christmas content is also lacking—there is a paganist tree but, otherwise, the holiday is not mentioned. (Eric Zaldivar)

B L OOD RED C HR I STMAS

Director: Veronica J. Valentini | Writer: Veronic J. Valentini | USA | 2014 | Feature Having witnessed the slaughter of her family ten years before, a mentally disturbed young woman begins to question her own mind when the killer comes back to haunt her. (Press notes)

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B L OOD Y CH RI STMAS

Director: Michel Leray | Writer: Michel Leray, David Neiss, Boris Pezzali | France | 2002 | Short In this French short film that prefigures Canuxploitation classic Treevenge (2008)—and apparently one of two shorts director Michel Leray made using the same title and same synopsis (but different cast)—a man (Kad Merad) steals a Christmas tree from outside a country residence and takes it home to decorate. We see these events largely through the tree’s perspective, and when its attention focuses on a photo of a forested mountain range, we sense its longing to return home. This longing becomes bloody determination as the tree suddenly springs to life and terrorizes the man, chasing him through the house and utilizing the various decorations as weapons. Despite the title it’s not especially bloody, relying instead on inventive camerawork to convey the tree’s relentless attack. (Kier-La Janisse)

B L OOD Y CH RI STMAS

Director: Michael Shershenovich | Writer: Michael Shershenovich | USA | 2012 | Feature In a small town, police are searching for a child murderer. Meanwhile Rich Tague, a has-been ‘80s action movie star, is attempting to figure out the meaning of Christmas as he plays Santa on a public access TV show. He fantasizes about murdering the people who do him wrong. Will he have the strength to not be on his own naughty list? (Press notes)

B L OOD Y M E RR Y C HR I STMAS

Director: Michael Felanis, Yorgos Kastellis | Writer: Yorgos Kastellis | Greece | 2012 | Short The deep-seated resentents of a group of women having a high school reuinion over Christmas come to the fore when a killer appears to be picking them off one by one. Taking a page from the Black Christmas phonebook— two of the characters are even named Jessy and Billie—they are being threatened by an obscene caller who may or may ot be in the house, leaving George Michael lyrics scrawled on the bathroom mirror in blood (or rather, ketchup). An overlit, overlong, low-budget slasher containing some pretty horrendous characterizations of women, Bloody Merry Christmas is a bit too concerned with its clever barrage of pop culture references and not concerned enough with creating real drama or atmosphere. (Kier-La Janisse)

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T H E B RAI N

Director: Edward Hunt | Writer: Barry Pearson | Canada | 1988 | Feature In the nutty but charming horror outing The Brain, a giant alien brain feeds on the thought waves of audiences who tune into “Independent Thinking,” a TV show hosted by Dr. Blakely (cult favorite David Gale of Re-Animator fame). When teens Jim (Tom Bresnahan) and his girlfriend Janet (Cynthia Preston) break into the TV station at Christmastime to discover why the show is causing viewers to hallucinate, they discover that the brain has developed monstrous

characteristics including a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. Released in November of 1988, Christmas serves exclusively as the setting for the film, an arbitrary placement in time with no larger context or meaning. Directed by Bloody Birthday (1981) helmer Ed Hunt, and filmed in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, The Brain is a Christmas-set Canadian cult classic, with campy performances and dialogue that laughs along with its audience. (Ariel Fisher)

T HE BREN T WOOD ST RAN GLER

Director: John Fitzpatrick | Writer: John Fitzpatrick | USA | 2015 | Short It’s the Christmas season in Los Angeles; a lonely woman (Jordan Ladd) goes on a blind date unbeknownst to her that her date (Adam J. Yeend) is an active and notorious serial killer, The Brentwood Strangler. Is love in the air? Or is she in for the worst (and last) date of her life? (Press notes)

B U F F Y T H E VAMPI R E SL AYE R : “AME NDS”

Director: Joss Whedon | Writer: Joss Whedon | USA | 1998 | TV Episode

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In Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s season three episode “Amends,” Buffy’s (Sarah Michelle Gellar) vampire ex-lover Angel (David Boreanaz) is plagued by a series of apparitions that force him to confront his past transgressions. The source of the haunting is one of the series’ biggest “big bads,” called The First—a ubiquitous evil force that long predates humanity, and can take on the appearance of any dead person. Here, the spectres come in the form of Angel’s past victims, prodding him through guilt and regret to destroy the slayer, and himself. One of the series’ most moving episodes, “Amends” finds a despairing Angel asking about his worth—about whether his existence has been anything but a torment for others, and whether he should end his immortal life at sunrise on a hot, Sunnydale Christmas Eve. “Am I a righteous man?” he asks Buffy, waiting for the dawn to turn him to dust. “Am I worth saving?” “Amends” encourages comparisons to Frank Capra’s perennial Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), with its suicidal protagonist George Bailey visited by a guardian angel who shows him what the world would have been without him. Yet the episode falls even more squarely in the tradition of the Christmas

Above: VHS cover art for The Brain (1988).

ghost story, particularly Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). The episode was advertised as a Christmas “event,” with the tagline, “He’s a vampire who has killed for 200 years. This Christmas Eve, his victims confront him.” To put it irreverently, this is the episode where Angel gets “Scrooged.” Writer-director Joss Whedon even elides the series’ typical atheism with a Christmas miracle: a shroud of snow covers Sunnydale, blocking out the killing sun. Despite the deus ex machina ending, it is the episode’s weighty existential themes that endure, characteristic of a series that avoids easy answers to the questions it raises about past trauma, future purpose, and present atonement. (Kristopher Woofter)

CAE S AR AN D OTTO ’S D EAD LY XMAS

Director: Dave Campfield | Writer: Dave Campfield | USA | 2012 | Feature Caesar (writer/director Dave Campfield) and Otto (Paul Chomicki) are like a modern version of the Three Stooges—all rolled into two—and together they’ve appeared in a series of on-screen adventures. Despite a cheapjack approach to filmmaking and constant self-references, the duo’s yuletide horror ode Caesar and Otto’s Deadly Xmas is a sometimes absurdist comedy that delivers honest laughs. In the film, Caesar and his half-brother/roommate Otto sign up with Xmas Enterprises to make some extra cash. Meanwhile, guests that failed to appear at Caesar’s Thanksgiving party turn up dead, and the police are busy dealing with the sudden disappearances of various Christmas merchants. It all ends badly on the Dr. Pheel McGrabb TV show. Caesar And Otto’s Deadly Xmas features cameos from low-budget luminaries Brinke Stevens, Linnea Quigley, Debbie Rochon, Joe Estevez, Lloyd Kaufman and Robert Z’Dar. Watch it in a double after Silent Night, Deadly Night 2. (Michael Helms)

CALV AI R E

Director: Fabrice Du Welz | Writer: Fabrice Du Welz, Romain Protat | Belgium | 2004 | Feature Marc (Laurent Lucas), a low-rent entertainer for retirement communities, is en route to a “Christmas gala” when his van breaks down in the middle of the Belgian backwoods. Stumbling upon a village devoid of women, Marc soon finds himself the object of infatuation. He is eventually taken in by an elderly innkeeper (Jackie Berroyer), who believes Marc is his returned wife. Soon, the singer finds himself in bondage and unable to escape the inn. Things turn fairly bloody after that. Calvaire is a slow burn affair about obsession and the great lengths one will go to obtain one’s desires. This theme is established early on when a geriatric admirer, braving through embarrassment, makes awkward sexual advances toward Marc, claiming he was gawking at her during a set. This setup makes for a very sad, human scene that is engaging in ways the genre is rarely allowed to be. Calvaire, and films like it, seemed to have laid the foundation for the so-called “torture porn” subgenre that would

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Above: Laurent Lucas in Fabrice Du Welz’ Calvaire (2004). Photo: Luca Etter.

reach the mainstream with Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). While Calvaire doesn’t beat its audience to death with yuletide imagery, it does qualify as a holiday horror film in surprisingly subtle mannerisms. For instance, Mark’s magnetic influence on the other characters can be attributed to the season; during which lonesome people are at their loneliest and bare an insatiable lust for companionship. For more on Calvaire, see Chapter 19. (Eric Zaldivar)

CAM P F I RE TALE S

Director: William Cooke, Paul Talbot | Writer: William Cooke, Paul Talbot | USA | 1991 | Feature Campfire Tales is an ultra-cheap portmanteau film in which a drunken hobo (played by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Gunnar Hansen), weaves four tales of terror for a captive audience of three youths, one of which is titled “The Fright before Christmas.” Steve (Paul Kaufmann), a failed businessman, kills his mother on Christmas Eve and then terrorizes his niece and nephew with stories of Santa’s evil counterpart, Satan Claus, who visits children when they’re naughty. Ironically, Steve’s own creation comes to call that evening to deliver a well-deserved comeuppance that’s a little nastier than just stuffing a lump of coal in his stocking. Though a low-budget affair with poor performances and some amateurish direction, the stories themselves are mostly unique and highly enjoyable, with the Satan Claus segment being the most accomplished. While mortal killers in Santa Claus regalia are a dime a dozen in the cinematic landscape, the axe-wielding Satan Claus echoes the mythical companions of St. Nicholas, such as Krampus and Black Peter, and appears modelled on the United Kingdom’s Father Christmas—a tall and lanky figure whose outfit recalls a Victorian Kris Kringle and whose face is wisely kept in shadow throughout most of the film. The less-than-jovial nocturnal intruder’s gnarly looking reindeer also make a memorable appearance, in what was among the first horror films to make use of the folkloric roots of Santa. See page 78 for more info. (Eric Zaldivar)

CAS H ON D EMAND

Director: Quentin Lawrence | Writer: David T. Chantler, Lewis Greifer | UK | 1961 | Feature

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The UK’s revered Hammer Studios reimagined the works of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Gaston Leroux, but left Charles Dickens to David Lean and the BBC—except for the company’s single stab at a Christmas movie, Quentin Lawrence’s Cash on Demand. Here, we get a Hammer take on A Christmas Carol, with Peter Cushing giving one of his best screen performances as a contemporary Scrooge who learns his lesson not through ghostly visitation, but during a suspenseful robbery. For more on this film, see page 170. (Kim Newman)

CAS P E R’ S FI R ST C HR I STMAS

Director: Carl Urbano, Chris Cuddington| Writer: Bob Ogle | USA | 1970 | TV Special After taking a wrong turn on their way to a snowy mountain lodge for Christmas, an all-star animated cast of Yogi Bear, Boo Boo, Quick Draw McGraw, Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy seek

shelter in a condemned house haunted by Casper the Friendly Ghost and his friend Hairy Scary. In an attempt to make the most of it, the crew band together and generate some holiday cheer. Hairy Scary was introduced to audiences earlier in 1979 when he appeared alongside everyone’s favorite child ghost in the Saturday morning cartoon Casper and the Angels (presumably riffing on Charlie’s Angels). He made his prime time debut in this special, which ran on December 18, 1979, just three days after the last episode of Angels aired. Here, he meets several beloved Hanna-Barbera characters as they spruce up the house, cheerfully expecting Santa Claus to find them wherever they are. A minor entry in the world of cartoon specials, Casper’s First Christmas is of note because of its character crossover, and because veteran voice actor Daws Butler voiced a majority of the characters. The special aired on a night of holiday treats for NBC, which also included A Family Circus Christmas, and a small screen musical titled Skinflint: A Country Christmas Carol, which featured Hoyt Axton, Mel Tillis and Barbara Mandrell. (Amanda Reyes)

THE CHILDREN

Director: Tom Shankland | Writer: Tom Shankland, Paul Andrew Williams | UK | 2008 | Feature Suffice to say, the kids in Tom Shankland’s The Children have earned their spots on Santa’s naughty list. Set over the Christmas holidays at a sprawling country estate, the 2008 film sees sisters Elaine (Eva Birthistle) and Chloe (Rachel Shelley) unite their fractured families to enjoy some festive cheer while their young children toboggan and play with their holiday spoils. One by one, the kids start falling ill with initial symptoms of nausea and vomiting giving way to violence and homicide. The children stalk their prey from the woods nearby as their beleaguered folks fight for survival, all the while blaming one another for their situation. Elaine’s teenage daughter Casey (Hannah Tointon) seems immune to the disease (as well as the adult paranoia), so it’s up to her to ensure this hellish holiday gathering isn’t her family’s last. The Children is an oddball yuletide election that presents a fairly conventional horror setup with a mixture of home invasion and killer-kid tropes. A story that would play out as ludicrous in less capable hands is treated with the right balance of playfulness and gravitas by Shankland, with graphic and gratuitous bouts of violence providing catharsis between scenes of festering familial grievances (to which many a modern family can relate). The cause of the children’s illness remains mysterious to the end, which polarizes viewers into those who can roll with sudden, unexplained juvenile familicide and those who can’t. But, more importantly, the tightly-wound tensions that lie beneath the plot’s surface threaten to snap when the unthinkable becomes truly perilous, adding a layer of depth to an otherwise gimmicky concept. For more on The Children see page 240. (Andrea Subissati)

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CH RI S TM AS A PPAR I TI O N

Director: Colleen Griffen | Writer: Colleen Griffen, Katie O. Jones | USA | 2013 | Feature Also known as The Cold and the Quiet, Colleen Griffen’s debut feature as director is a bit of a family affair, involving two of her children and a niece as the film’s central cast, and husband Joe Chapelle (co-producer, CSI: Miami,

The Wire) as exec producer. A quiet, anxietyridden university student named Emma (Katie O. Jones) is dismayed when her plans to hide out over the holidays in the vacant dorms are thwarted by renovations that require her to find somewhere else to stay—and it appears that staying with family is not an option. Though left potently ambiguous, the indication is that her family is afraid—either for her or of her—and it is likely related to the undisclosed medication we see her taking. She is saved from homelessness at the last minute when a frantic bourgeois woman—a complete stranger—offers her the chance to babysit her dog and teenage children for a few days while she escapes for some “me time.” Bitchy 17-year-old Chrissy (Maura Chapelle) doesn’t appreciate having a babysitter barely older and far less assertive than she is, and her adolescent brother (Matthew Chapelle) never speaks and rarely looks up from his drawing pad—on which he obsessively draws Christmas trees. Seeing the drawings as a hint that the kid is desperate for some of the trappings of an old-fashioned Christmas, Emma takes them to pick out a tree and lugs the decorations up from the basement. But she doesn’t stop to wonder why a family with so much Christmas gear has it stored away only days before the holiday, not to mention the mother’s hurried and conspicuous absence during this most family-oriented season. There’s a reason there are no Christmas decorations up in this house and it has nothing to do with non-observance. One of the most striking things about Christmas Apparition is the fluidity of the familial roles; relationships are deliberately undefined and anxiety seems contagious and self-fulfilling. While there isn’t nearly enough of the “Christmas apparition” promised by the title (and what there is doesn’t have the punch the film seems to be building to), the strangeness of the situation is brought to life through a trio of believable performances, making this indie wonder worth adding to your Christmas viewing list. (Kier-La Janisse)

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CH RI S TM A S AT D R AC U L A’S

Director: Simon Mckeon | Writer: Simon Mckeon | Ireland | 2016 | Feature Told through the eyes of the Invisible Man, Count Dracula has hit rock bottom, so with the help of his noble companion Igor, he decides to throw the greatest Christmas party of all time. But when two killers arrive at the door, things slowly begin to spiral out of control. And Dracula’s faith lies in the hands of one creature... death himself! (Press notes)

Above: Promotional art detail for Christmas Apparition (2013).

T H E C H RI S TM A S C AR O L

Director: Arthur Pierson | Writer: Arthur Pierson | USA | 1949 | TV Special Horror icon Vincent Price narrates this half-hour mid-century television adaptation of the Carol, an otherwise unremarkable low budget production save for an early appearance by future Bond girl Jill St. John as one of the Cratchit daughters. For more on A Christmas Carol, see page 114. (Kier-La Janisse)

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C H RI S TMAS C R UELTY!

Director: Per-Ingvar Tomren, Magne Steinsvoll | Writer: Elaine Aasheim, Janne Iren Holseter, Anita Nyhagen, Magne Steinsvoll, Per-Ingvar Tomren | Norway | 2013 | Feature Before flashing to its retro title sequence (outfitted with the familiar font from Tootsie Rolls and Garfield comics), Christmas Cruelty! lets you know exactly what you’re in for: the first image is a blood-spattered wall with a baby crying in the background, a soft ballad playing as the camera pans across the scene of a violent home invasion. A middle-aged man sodomizes a woman as her bound-and-gagged family looks on in anguish. When he finishes, he gathers up his tools: “Might as well do the smallest one first,” he says, as he takes a power saw to the baby. This is one of two such brutal scenes that bookend a film that is otherwise surprisingly poignant. After its horrific opening we follow a trio of young friends as they prepare for the holidays: patient den mother Eline (Eline Aasheim, who also co-wrote), grouchy metalhead Magne (co-director

Above: Holiday nastiness in Christmas Cruelty! (2013).

Magne Steinsvoll) and the wheelchair-bound Per-Ingvar (co-director Per-Ingvar Tomren) who is alleged to have suffered head trauma in an accident and is routinely teased about it by Magne. But the bond between these three friends is apparent, despite their differences and constant bickering, and over the course of the film we come to care about them. Which makes it all the worse when the serial killer decides that this group of friends are his next targets. Per-Ingvar Tomren, who is also in a wheelchair in real life, wore many hats on the production, from editing and art design to the FX, which are nauseatingly vicious, and I don’t say that lightly. And though Chrismas Cruelty! seems to borrow from the image bank of earlier precedents like Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and Silent Night (2012), this isn’t just a slasher film set at Christmas; it is deeply entrenched in the narrative, with several monologues relating to the pagan roots of the holiday, and a jarring commentary on the superficial warmth and safety of the season. (Kier-La Janisse)

CH RI S TM A S EVI L

Director: Lewis Jackson | Writer: Lewis Jackson | USA | 1980 | Feature Originally intended as a serious social critique on the commercialization of Christmas, writer/director Lewis Jackson developed Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out) over a long period while working in the bowels of the adult film industry. The story begins one Christmas Eve, when a very young Christmas-loving Harry Stadling (Brandon Maggart, who also appeared in Brian DePalma’s Dressed To Kill the same year) accidentally witnesses his mother (Ellen McElduff) having it off with his Santa-suit clad father (Brian Hartigan) beneath the family Christmas tree. As a disillusioned adult, he finally sees red, and so takes off from his toy factory job to don a self-manufactured Santa suit and right wrongs and reward those on his Christmas list. Naturally, a bloody Christmas massacre ensues. Using New York locations, this $750,000 feature came about from a meticulous plan that included complete storyboarding, the use of an actual toy production plant (care of toy mogul/film producer Ed Pressman), and precision casting. Unfortunately, despite being a finely honed film with nuanced and engaging performances and more subtext than an underground train network during peak hour, Christmas Evil became the victim of commercial indifference as Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) was better positioned to reap box office dollars. Even the endorsement of John Waters, and recent home video re-releases have not led Jackson to make another film. See page 44 for more info. (Michael Helms)

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CH RI S TM A S MO R NI NG

Director: Ben Rock I Writer: Bob DeRosa I USA I 2015 I Short Christmas is about giving, but sometimes it’s about secrets. In Christmas Morning, a short from Alien Raiders helmer Ben Rock, a family celebrates a modest Christmas in their sparsely decorated home. Under the tree lies a few

Above: Christmas Evil (1980). Photo: courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome.

paltry gifts—a baseball bat for Peter, (Chase Magum) and a baby doll for Annie (Sasha May). Mom and Dad (Katie F. Ward and Chris McKenna) debate over whether to share the truth about Christmas with Annie, or let her be a kid for just a little longer. A sound from the chimney interrupts the moment with promise of Santa. Instead, a vicious zombie attack follows, ruining the holiday cheer. Seems a zombie invasion has put a damper on Christmas this year, and this family of survivors is fed up. Rock offered up this short burst of holiday fear for the first season of 20 Seconds to Live, a comedic horror webseries designed “for people who hate happy endings.” The series boasts fun guest stars like Tom Holland, Graham Skipper, and Adam Green. In this installment, The Blair Witch Project (1999) co-director Daniel Myrick makes an appearance as one of the uninvited undead. Rock has a blast playing with familiar zombie tropes, shattering childhood fantasies in the process. (Chris Hallock)

CH RI S TM AS N I G HTMAR E

Director: Vince Di Meglio | Writer: Vince Di Meglio, Tim Rasmussen | USA | 2001 | Feature After members of a right-wing militia group assassinate a presidential hopeful, an FBI agent (Hugo Armstrong) takes two campaign managers (Tiffany Baker and Charlie Finelli) to a secluded home in the woods to protect them. Unfortunately, not only is the house haunted by the spirit of an axe murderer, who wastes no time in possessing the G-Man, but the militia members are already lurking about the property. Oh, and it’s Christmas time! It’s commendable that the filmmakers tried their best with an original setup, but injecting atypical trimmings into an otherwise run-of-the-mill spook house thriller only accentuates the clichés of the genre. The events are set during Christmas time but, aside from some scattered ornaments and a festive tree, there is little to recommend this as a yuletide terror entry. Also, the film’s showy use of computer-generated effects, most notably when an animated swirling vortex of flame is superimposed over a backwoods lake, is less than convincing. (Eric Zaldivar)

C H RI S TMAS PR E SENC E

Director: Henrique Couto | Writer: Henrique Couto I USA I 2015 I Short

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Substituting for her sick friend Stephanie, kindhearted Mary babysits for the Walkers, a family that celebrates Christmas to an immense degree. Mary is enamored by the opulent display of Christmas cheer throughout their upper class suburban neighborhood, large homes totally decked out in blinking lights. The Walker’s home is the brightest on the block, magnificently adorned inside and out. Mary embraces the magic of the season, so it’s not a bad way to spend Christmas Eve completely immersed in yuletide spirit. When she discovers a creepy Santa Claus mannequin in one of the upstairs rooms, paranoia sets in and the night takes an ominous turn. Christmas Presence is a comedic horror short that begins on a lighthearted note, but transforms into a tense little nailbiter. It was written and directed by Henrique Couto, a prolific creator of low budget tongue-in-cheek cult videos with lurid titles like HeadCheese (2003) and Babysitter Massacre (2013). The film is nicely photographed and tightly edited by a team that’s clearly honouring Santa stalk-and-slashers of yore like Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), as well as John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (1978).

In the horror genre, the babysitter catches all the flack, and Mary’s ordeal works especially well here because the environment is so cheery. The life-sized Santa statue also carries frightening heft because it’s so out of place among the sparkly trees and fancy gift-wrapping. These components successfully merge the humor with the horror, making Christmas Presence a fun stocking stuffer that crams a ton of atmospheric thrill into a pint-sized package. (Chris Hallock)

T H E C H RI STMAS SEASO N MASSAC R E

Director: Jeremy Wallace | Writer: Jeremy Wallace, Eric Stanze | USA | 2001 | Feature Tommy “Oneshoe” McGroo (Michael Hill) was relentlessly bullied throughout high school, and has been vengefully killing off his former classmates ever since. After two couples are slain at Christmastime, the last survivors get together at a camp in the woods where Tommy is said to hang out, to put a stop to him once and for all. Unfortunately for this group, their survival skills are distinctly limited, and Tommy is armed with a chainsaw, a shotgun, and assorted other weapons… After The Christmas Season Massacre ends at the 58-minute mark, followed by credits and about eight minutes of outtakes, we’re informed it was “Shot on location in Christmastown, California—not Missouri… during an unusually warm December—not June.” That’s a cheeky way of acknowledging the complete lack of yuletide atmosphere as the bulk of this horror/comedy’s action takes place amidst green forests and fields. The holiday is part of Tommy’s backstory, and sleigh bells play on the soundtrack when he’s around, but that’s about it. This shot-on-video, non-sequitur takeoff on Friday the 13th (1980) and similar slashers could really have been set at any time. It features a bare minimum of plot and characterization, and a sufficient amount of sloppy gore and gratuitous nudity to please schlock fans—though oddly, no clothes come off when “strip Trivial Pursuit” is played. The cast frequently appear to be making it up as they go, and the humor ranges from generic (once again, the protagonists are named after horror directors) to funny peculiar (a sex scene in which the guy wears a giant watermelon-slice replica on his head), while rarely making it to funny ha-ha. (Michael Gingold)

CH RI S TM A S SL AY

Director: Steve Davis | Writer: Steve Davis | UK | 2015 | Feature

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In a prologue that makes use of the irony that kids expect an intruder in the house on Christmas Eve, a nihilistic killer in a Santa suit (Frank Jakeman) sneaks into a country home and proceeds to murder its inhabitants, unaware that he’s tripped the silent alarm and the police are on their way. After a strangely unconfrontational showdown with the cops (everyone seems remarkably lackadaisical considering a massacre has just taken place) the killer—revealed to be a serial holiday offender whose been wanted for some time— is locked up in a mental hospital. The narrative skips ahead by a year to join a trio of young women (Lydia Kay, Jessica Ann Bonner and Dani Thompson) en route to a Christmas holiday getaway at a country resort. They miss the radio alert that several inmates have escaped from a nearby asylum and embark on their weekend of card games, weed smoking and hot-tub sex when an intense,

Above: Frank Jakeman in Christmas Slay (2015).

hulking man in a Santa suit shows up to spoil the party. There are some massive logistical holes in this film, but the lead villain really goes for it in his silently raging performance, and someone does get stabbed in the head with a crayon. (KierLa Janisse)

CH RI S TM AS S PI R I TS

Director: June Wyndham-Davies I Writer: Willis Hall I 1981 I UK I TV Film On Christmas Eve, Hollywood location scout Julia Myerson (Elaine Stritch) arrives a remote and rundown English manor reputedly haunted by a trio of ghosts in the wake of a horrific family murder. Julia is in search of the perfect site for a horror production, and the property certainly possesses the requisite creepy vibe. Left alone at night while the current tenants (Ben Aris and Norma West) are stranded elsewhere, Julia is besieged by things that go bump in the night. The house’s caretaker Mrs. Purvis (Stephanie Cole) also lurks about and may not operate under the best intentions toward their American guest. A grippingly suspenseful but low-key haunted house mystery that values performance over shocks, Christmas Spirits is a collaboration between Welsh director June Wyndham-Davies, a fixture in British television, and Willis Hall, a prolific writer recognized for terrific films Billy Liar (1963) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961), among others. Though a little-seen entry in the pantheon of British supernatural thrillers, Christmas Spirits brims with spooky ambiance—from the house’s stunning stained glass windows and grand staircase to a trio of creepy life-sized wax dolls that commemorate the manor’s tragic past. The second part of the film is especially effective, as Julia is locked up alone in the main house, frantically wandering around as she uncovers its dark history in search of a way out. Gravelly-voiced Elaine Stritch, the larger-than-life star of stage and screen, commands every inch of the TV tube and the disembodied voice of her thoughts narrate the frightening encounter, providing an added layer of tension as the story approaches a downbeat conclusion. A ghostly gift in the vein of The Legend of Hell House (1973), Burnt Offerings (1976), and The Woman in Black (1989), Christmas Spirits deserves inclusion as a spine-tingling holiday staple. (Chris Hallock)

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CH RI S TMAS W I TH THE D E AD

Director: Terrill Lee Lankford I Writer: Joe R. Lansdale, Keith Lansdale I USA I 2012 I Feature

Calvin promises his wife Ella the best Christmas ever in Christmas with the Dead, an adaptation of prolific author Joe R. Lansdale’s short story. Unfortunately, a catastrophic electrical storm strikes while he naps, turning everyone in town— including Ella and their daughter Tina—into shambling, flesh-starved zombies. Flash forward a few years, and Calvin’s (Damian Maffei) life as a wasteland survivor living with his undead wife chained up in the house, dispatching the walking dead who used to be his neighbors. It’s a dismal way to spend his days. In an effort to restore normalcy, Calvin resolves to honour his past commitment. He breaks out the tinsel and blinking lights to deck the halls—undead “snappers” and sweltering Texas summer heat be damned! Lansdale’s short story was adapted for the screen by his son Keith, and directed by indie stalwart T.L. Lankford who spent considerable time in the trenches as a producer, writer, and actor on notable cult titles like Scalps (1983), Armed Response (1986)

and Bulletproof (1988). The production was a community effort, with many of Lansdale’s family and neighbors contributing despite treacherous weather conditions. Lankford’s vision is ambitious in scope, and by squeezing every ounce out of a severely limited budget, delivers apocalyptic chills on an impressive scale. Christmas with the Dead is a surprisingly heart-warming, holiday-themed zombie film. Calvin doesn’t relish killing zombies, nor does he bask in having the world all to himself. He mostly just misses his family. His steadfast commitment to honouring his wife’s wish is both admirable and sorrowful. The film plays as an extended holiday greeting card by way of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, a festive rendition that playfully subverts post-apocalyptic zombie archetypes. In the end, we find holiday cheer used as a means of uniting a community of the living and the undead. (Chris Hallock)

COM I N G TO TO W N

Director: Carles Torrens I Writer: Carles Torrens I Spain I 2006 I Short Spanish director Carles Torrens (Apartment 143) takes a playfully brutish approach in tackling school bullying in Coming to Town, a raucous short that gleefully subverts our notions of holiday cheer. In the film, Father Christmas is depicted in two forms: one is the jolly old Saint Nick who wishes to bring joy to children; the other is Klaus, a shotgun-toting agent of vengeance sent to dispatch mean-spirited transgressors on Christmas Eve. JoBeth (Delaney Manning) is the target of bully Allister (Daeg Faerch) and his cronies who defile her lunch and dunk her head in a toilet. Her dickish school principal Benson (Gary Rolin) is usless, suggesting she deal with it or change schools. Jobeth writes to Klaus (Howard Ferguson-Woitzman), and with the help of his foul-mouthed elves Baldfred (Mark Parr) and Alpinolo (Mikey Post), becomes her instrument of revenge. They ensure that the assholes in JoBeth’s life receive a holiday comeuppance, courtesy of these sadistic North Pole ruffians. Coming to Town is all sorts of inappropriate. It’s a rude and rowdy, and sure to please fans of caustic exploitation, especially those with a fondness for malicious portrayals of Kris Kringle. Torrens has no designs on profound social commentary, but his film may have some naughty playground tormentors thinking twice about getting on Santa’s bad side. It’s the Christmas spirit delivered at the end of a gun barrel. (Chris Hallock)

CR OOK E D HO USE

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Director: Damon Thomas | Writer: Mark Gatiss | UK | 2008 | TV Special In this three-part miniseries concieved by The League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss for the BBC’s 2008 Christmas season, Gatiss himself stars as a museum curator who inherits a mysterious antique doorknocker, causing him to research the infamous, since-demolished Tudor mansion it came from. This leads to three period terror tales inspired by the writing of M.R. James and the Amicus portmanteau films of the 1960s and ‘70s. (Kier-La Janisse)

CU RS E OF THE C AT PE O PLE

Director: Gunther von Fritsch, Robert Wise | Writer: DeWitt Bodeen | USA | 1944 | Feature The sequel to 1942’s classic Val Lewton-produced shocker Cat People (1942),

Curse of the Cat People drifts drastically from its origins. Following the death of his wife Irena (Simone Simon), Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) is now married to his former assistant Alice (Jane Randolph). Their daughter Amy (Ann Carter) is an imaginative child who lives in a fantasy; without friends of her own, she spends her days with imaginary playmates, including one who turns out to be Irena’s ghost. While she finds solace and companionship in Irena’s company, Amy also visits a kind, senile old lady up the road (Julia Dean), whose daughter (Elizabeth Russell) is none too fond of the little girl. While Curse of the Cat People begins in the summer months, Christmas soon comes around, with the cold of winter mirroring Amy’s isolation. What should be a joyous time for family and togetherness is instead a painful process by which Amy tries to better understand herself, and her newfound companion. A moody film with noir elements and dynamic lighting, Curse of the Cat People maintains a surreal, ghostly atmosphere in Irena’s presence, eschewing the more overt sensuality of its predecessor. More than anything, Curse is a story about a child’s imagination, and her propensity to dream, and it boasts a haunting quality that blends seamlessly with the Christmas season. (Ariel Fisher)

T H E C U RS E OF THE W E R EW O LF

Director: Terence Fisher | Writer: Anthony Hinds | UK | 1961 | Feature After successful runs at Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy films, Hammer Film Productions set their sights on the werewolf at the start of the 1960s, producing just one installment about the iconic monster. Born on Christmas day—a deadly omen in rural Spanish communities— orphan Leon (Oliver Reed) is plagued by nightmares, while strange acts of violence continually occur around him. Once old enough to leave home to find work, Leon is torn between his violent acts of rage and the forbidden love with the daughter (Catherine Feller) of a wealthy nobleman. Loosely adapted from Guy Endore’s novel The Werewolf of Paris, Hammer’s Spain-set The Curse of the Werewolf is one of the studio’s more romantic and least violent horror films. Instead of focusing on the titular werewolf, who doesn’t even appear until the film’s final scene, director Terence Fischer successfully trades consistent scares for emotion and mood, highlighting the terror of the unseen against a wonderful Gothic atmosphere. Despite cuts to the British release resulting from battles with the ratings board, the film remains terse and beautiful, especially once the film is set into motion for the final act. Though not usually considered yuletide horror, The Curse of the Werewolf reimagines the werewolf as Christmas evil. The son of an imprisoned beggar who rapes a mute woman, Leon’s conception should be seen as mock-Nativity; a “miracle” that leads to childbirth on Christmas. Only

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Above: A baby is born on Christmas Day in Curse of the Werewolf (1961).

Leon is not born of God, but is the result of evil, and thus will grow not into a saviour, but a havoc-wreaking monster. (Joe Yanick)

D AR K E S T NI G HT

Director: Noel Tan I Writer: Russ Williams I Philippines I 2012 I Feature Filipino television journalist Danny Valencia (Jonas Gruet) hopes that a recently discovered video tape will explain the recent disappearance of a family. Before we witness the assembled footage of that fateful night, as captured by one of the family members, the film cuts to a re-enactment of a 1989 tragedy involving a trio of young girls who lost their parents in a similar fashion. The survivors, sisters Susan (Anne Gauthier), Chelsea (Jill Palencia) and Michelle (Issa Litton), assemble for their annual Christmas visit. Susan (Anna Gauthier) arrives from Manila to the remote and mountainous region of Luzon to introduce her American fiancé Ken (DJ Perry) to her extended family over a traditional holiday meal. During dinner, a tremor knocks out the power, plunging the celebration into darkness that soon reaches hellish depths as they confront an invasive demonic presence. A found-footage film from the Philippines, Darkest Night was written and produced by American transplant Russ Willams who uses the vérité aesthetic to convey ae nightmarish quality. While effectively tense, the film is not without the usual shortcomings inherent in the format; some of the performances feel too rehearsed, missing the naturalistic ad lib approach integral to selling it as “reality.” Even so, Darkest Night conveys the sense of urgency one hopes to receive from this style of film, and the makers build upon their foundation with mounting grim terror. Although Christmas holds a huge cultural significance in the Philippines, the producers are more interested in cultivating a paranormal/occult atmosphere than decking the halls with holiday decor. Their main motivation is invoking the deity Baphomet, presented here as a demonic entity relative to Satanic interpretations rather than its pagan counterpart. Satanism factors heavily into the proceedings, and we witness potent imagery of ritualistic human sacrifice, suicide and castration performed by the cast at the behest of this evil presence trapping them in a purgatorial realm. If you think your awkward family gatherings are bad, it’s nothing compared to hosting a visitor straight from Hell. (Chris Hallock)

T H E D AY OF THE B E AST

Director: Álex de la Iglesia | Writer: Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría | Spain | 1998 | Feature

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Álex de la Iglesia’s second feature The Day of the Beast (El día de la bestia, 1995), tells the story of Father Ángel, a Jesuit theologian who believes that Satan will rise on December 25th to plunge the world into hell. Father Ángel travels to Madrid in order to commit sin, thereby getting Satan’s attention and destroy him. He enlists the help of a metalhead and a TV exorcist, and together their make their comic attempt to save humanity. While De la Iglesia rejected the dominant cinema of Spain at this time, The Day of the Beast explores many of the same themes: the decay of the urban centre, the collapse of the influence of the Catholic Church, the dominance of trash television, and the rise of crime. His was the underground culture of heavy metal music and comics books that were the outlet of the outsider. The difference lies in the film’s combination of horror and black comedy. The Day of the Beast plays with the image of the

Catholic priest; not the tormented one of The Exorcist (1973)or the ominous one of The Omen (1976), but instead an ironic hero. He is hapless at blending into new urban life, and comic in his attempts to save a world whose signs and methods he does not understand. In its bombastic yet clever story, The Day of the Beast skewers Spanish cinema, politics, and culture, and was at the forefront of the Spanish Fantastic New Wave. (Shelagh Rowan-Legg)

D E AD E N D

Director: Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Fabrice Canepa | Writer: Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Fabrice Canepa | France | 2003 | Feature Vacation destinations in horror movies always wind up bad for the cast, but the journeys themselves are often fraught with perils as well. Such is the case with Dead End, in which things get spooky after the patriarch of a family (Ray Wise) decides to take the scenic route when transporting his loved ones to a faraway relative’s house on Christmas Eve. Devoid of any of the usual symbols of Christmas horror—no killer Santas or demented snowmen—Dead End’s main menace is instead steeped in the supposed real-world phenomena of the white lady; a pale female apparition whose appearance signals an unfaithful husband or, sometimes, death. Despite suffering from characters acting illogically (a horror staple we can do without, frankly) and a telegraphed ending, Dead End is a generally unnerving chiller. The film’s endless, oppressive road looks like it’s shot in the eastern United States, but was actually shot on a short stretch of pavement near Hollywood Boulevard. For more on Dead End, see chapter 19. (Eric Zaldivar)

D E AD OF N I GHT

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti | Writer: John Baines, Angus MacPhail | UK | 1945 | Feature Best known for their early droll comedies, UK production company Ealing Studios also served up a portmanteau horror picture now considered the “granddaddy” of horror anthologies, solidifying many of the conventions that audiences take for granted today. Released in 1945, Dead of Night compiles five spooky stories strung together by a wraparound segment (an innovation at the time). While perhaps best known for an infamous segment involving a ventriloquist dummy, the film’s yuletide terror segment is almost as good; director Alberto Cavalcanti helmed both stories, leaving the other tales to be manned by others. At a Christmas party, during a spooky variation of “hide and seek”, the spectre of a little boy is mistaken for a participant by the unaware youth of the household. One living member of the group inadvertently calms the restless spirit, allowing it to find peace. While chilling, like all good ghost stories there is also a touch of sentiment. Screenwriter Angus MacPhail’s work strongly resembles early 20th century writer A.M. Burrage’s story “Smee,” only less muted and more melodramatic. Decades later, Dead of Night would inspire a similar run of horror anthologies from UK filmmakers at Amicus, stretching from Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) to From Beyond The Grave (1974). Dead of Night, if not only the first fully developed anthology horror movie, is the first to feature a yuletide terror entry among its episodes. This tradition would continue with Amicus studios’ Tales From The Crypt (1972) and the more recent Night Terrors (2014). (Eric Zaldivar)

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D E AD OF N I G HT: “ THE E XO R C I SM”

Director: Don Taylor | Writer: Don Taylor | UK | 1972 | TV episode One of three surviving episodes of the single-season British supernatural anthology show Dead of Night—of which Christmas classic The Stone Tape (1972) was intended as the final episode before being broadcast as a standalone teleplay—“The Exorcism” stars familiar Christmas horror faces Anna Cropper (Play for Today: “Robin Redbreast” (1970)), Clive Swift (A Ghost Story for Christmas: “The Stalls of Barchester” (1971)) and Edward Petherbridge (A Ghost Story for Christmas: “The Ash Tree” (1975)) along with TV regular and then-Mrs. Ted Kotcheff Sylvia Kay (Wake in Fright) as four middleclass friends who go to a renovated farmhouse for Christmas holidays only to find the place haunted by the ghost of a family that starved to death there. An absolutely terrifying and essential Christmas horror gem. (Kier-La Janisse)

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Top: Dead of Night (1945). Photo: from the collection of Movie Ink (movie-ink. com). Bottom: Anna Cropper in Dead of Night: “The Exorcism” (1972).

D E AD LY L I TTL E C HR I STMAS

Director: Novin Shakiba | Writer: Novin Shakiba, Jeremiah Campbell | USA | 2009 | Feature One Christmas a little boy loses it, and kills his father and the family’s housekeeper. He is put away, and all is well until the 15th anniversary of the brutal murders (When he escapes from the sanitarium that has locked him away for so long). Now, the only thing he wants is another Christmas massacre. (Press notes)

D E ATH LY P RE S ENTS

Director: Ben Franklin, Anthony Melton | Writer: Ben Franklin, Anthony Melton | UK | 2015 | Short Strange sounds up on the rooftop are usually cause for children’s excitement, but not in Deathly Presents, an entry in UK horror anthology web series “Bloody Cuts,” from filmmakers Ben Franklin and Anthony Melton. This five-minute short features a grab bag of horror ideas and techniques, ranging from jump scares and cryptic notes to elaborate monster effects and mysterious packages (in this case, wrapped up under the tree). A suburban family scene on Christmas Eve goes awry when a series of odd noises leads to the discovery of a box covered in burlap mixed in with their other Christmas gifts. Opening it up has dire consequences, as the confused husband and wife discover the source of the earlier rooftop commotion has shown up for more than a cup of Christmas cheer. While in many ways a typical horror movie subversion of the Santa story, with a grotesque monster swapped in for Old Saint Nick, Deathly Presents nevertheless features some exceptional FX work and production detail—the wrapped-up box is an ornately carved wooden chest that spits our flies and dirt before revealing a tarnished metal hand holding a note. It really does feel like an ancient, otherworldly object that connects the killer Santa myth back to its creepier pagan origins. (Paul Corupe)

D E X TE R: “ TR UTH B E TO LD ”

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Director: Keith Gordon | Writer: Drew Z. Greenberg, Tim Schlattmann | USA | 2006 | TV Episode

In this suspense-filled first-season episode of the long–running cable TV crime drama Dexter, a serial killer employed as a forensic technician, Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), continues his investigation of the Ice Truck Killer (Christian Camargo ), the season’s major villain. As it’s the holidays, the Killer has left the body parts of his latest victim gift-wrapped under a Christmas tree where children visit with Santa Claus. Meanwhile Dexter’s memories of his own mother’s murder nudge him into requesting the original police file. Although not as bloody and violent as other episodes, the intensity is heightened when the Ice Truck Killer gets dangerously close to Dexter’s sister (Jennifer Carpenter), who is excited when her boyfriend proposes marriage. The irony of the romance of a holiday engagement, the elves that discover the “gifts” under the tree, and Dexter’s obsessive reflections on a tragic family history are all components that make this Christmas episode feel especially dark and disturbing. (Joanna Wilson)

D E X TE R: “ D O YO U SE E W HAT I SEE? ”

Director: John Dahl | Writers: Manny Coto and Wendy West | USA | 2012 | TV Episode After a holiday episode in the show’s first season (see Dexter: “Truth Be Told”), serial killer/forensic technician Dexter (Michael C. Hall) returned for another Christmas episode six years later. Dexter learns that his supervisors at the Miami homicide department suspect that he’s the Bay Harbor Butcher, so he plants evidence to link someone else to those crimes. Wanting to give himself a Christmas present, Dexter lures the last of the men responsible for his mother’s murder to a waiting trailer for execution— only to learn that his victim’s parole was arranged as a trap to catch Dexter in the act. Meanwhile, Dexter’s sister is in a car accident on Christmas Eve when she loses consciousness while driving. The suspicious circumstances lead the two to believe she was poisoned by Dexter’s girlfriend, who has murdered in the past. Heart-felt moments include seeing Dexter enjoying a pleasant Christmas Eve dinner with his son and girlfriend, and a happy gift exchange. But the most festive holiday moment is when Dexter and his girlfriend share a kiss under the mistletoe as the police arrive to arrest the poisoner for her crimes. The emotional highs (Dexter’s warm fantasies of a future spent with a loving family) and lows (his betrayal by his girlfriend and his boss) in this episode stand in stark contrast to viewers’ expectations of a jolly holiday season. (Joanna Wilson)

D O Y OU S EE W HAT I SEE?

Director: Serena Whitney, Justin McConnell | Writer: Serena Whitney, Justin McConnell | Canada | 2016 | Short Toronto filmmakers Serena Whitney and Justin McConnell team up for this witty contribution to the Christmas horror subgenre. Sloan (Caleigh Le Grand) goes to her uptight sister Jessica’s (Jorja Cadence) “ugly Christmas sweater” party, which she has been dreading; her sister is a little intense (she has literally gift-wrapped the entire house). Just as Sloan starts to enjoy herself, she realizes the guy she’s been talking to all night has been put up to it by the meddling Jessica. But as the party rages on and the two sisters have it out in the midst of the festivities, a balaclava-clad intruder is slashing his way through the party guests. With great comic timing and a believable trio of main characters— the cynical sister, the ballbreaker and the

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Above: Caleigh Le Grand (and other members of the Toronto horror community) in Do You See What I See? (2016).

hapless boyfriend/man-servant (Adam Buller)—Do You See What I See? also has an unexpected twist that distinguishes it from your typical holiday slasher. (Kier-La Janisse)

D OCTOR W H O: “ THE UNQ UI E T D EAD ”

Director: Euros Lyn | Writer: Mark Gatiss | UK | 2005 | TV Episode Even though long-running BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who is about a time-traveling alien, that doesn’t mean he’s above celebrating a little holiday cheer. This time out, the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston, the ninth Doctor) and his companion Rose (Billie Piper) travel to a Cardiff theatre on Christmas Eve, 1869, where Charles Dickens (Simon Callow) is performing a reading of A Christmas Carol. Suddenly, ethereal spirits swirl around Dickens as he shares his Christmas ghost story, causing a panic. The Doctor recognizes the ghost-like creatures as gaseous alien life forms who exist in the building’s natural gas pipes and have reanimated corpses at a nearby undertaker’s shop. There, the undertaker’s assistant (Eve Myles, who also plays the main character Gwen on Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood) psychically communicates with the beings, referring to them as “angels.” The story cleverly combines Dickens’ Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future with contemporary sci-fi as the Doctor organizes a séance, revealing the aliens’ plan to migrate to Earth through the bodies of the dead. (Joanna Wilson)

D ON ’ T OP E N ‘ TI LL C HR I STMAS

Director: Edmund Purdom | Writer: Alan Birkinshaw, Derek Ford | UK | 1984 | Feature A grotty police procedural headed by director/star Edmund Purdom, Don’t Open ‘Till Christmas quickly gets down to what real Christmas horror movies are all about—killing Santas— with a scene of a knife applied to the back of Santa’s head intercut with recurring shots of the revolving New Scotland Yard sign. This cheap and cheerful British sleazefest features Caroline Munro writhing, nude modeling, rip-off music from The Warriors (1979), and of course, numerous Santa deaths. The dazzling array of participants belie a fortuitous time when the British sexploitation industry slipped from its profitable heights in the ‘70s and everyone began to shift into the newly popular slasher films. Notable names in front of the camera include sexploitation regulars Alan Lake (Diana Dors’ ex) and Pat Astley (of Let’s Get Laid and The Playbirds (both 1978), in addition to production staff such as writer Alan Birkinshaw (under the pseudonym Al McGoohan), editor Ray Selfe (3D supervisor on The Four Dimensions of Greta (1972) and noted American trash film producer/actor Dick Randall (The French Sex Murders (1972), Pieces (1983)). Purdom rescued the project by taking over when writer/director Derek Ford (The Wife Swappers (1970)) quit. (Michael Helms)

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Above: Don’t Open Til Christmas (1984).

D R AG N E T: “ .22 R I FLE FO R C HR I STMAS ”

Director: Jack Webb | Writer: James E. Moser, Jack Webb | USA | 1952 | TV Episode The original police procedural, Dragnet aired a popular, yet tragic Christmas story in 1952, originally written for the show’s earlier radio incarnation in 1949. It’s sometimes difficult to watch, especially due to the familiar words that start each Dragnet episode: “Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true.” In the days before Christmas, homicide detectives Sgt. Friday (Jack Webb) and Officer Smith (Ben Alexander) are called in to investigate a case of two missing boys. When one of the boys returns home, he confesses that he accidentally shot his friend after finding a Winchester rifle in a closet—it was wrapped up and intended as his Christmas present. The nine year-old dragged his friend’s body into the trees behind his house and prayed for hours that his friend would come back to life. While this episode is not usually considered a horror story, it’s traumatic enough to qualify, and the Christmas setting—the most emotional time of the year—makes the tragedy more deeply felt. If the episode’s message is not already clear, Sgt. Friday warns viewers “You don’t give a kid a rifle for Christmas.” One has to wonder about the frightening story in the context of the popularity of A Christmas Story (1983), about one boy’s obsession with getting a BB gun for Christmas. (Joanna Wilson)

E LV E S

Director: Jeffrey Mandel | Writer: Jeffrey Mandel, Mike Griffin, Bruce Taylor | USA | 1989 | Feature The success of the Christmas-set Gremlins spawned other several tiny terror features of the 1980s, including Ghoulies (1985), Critters (1986), Munchies (1987) and Hobgoblins (1988), but only the less-than-stellar Elves shares its holiday flavor. In the film, Nazi thugs want to further the master race by inseminating a troubled young lady with the seed of a genetically engineered “elf” (not one of folklore but a genetically engineered monster created by German scientists, this movie is not set in a world where Santa, or his helpers, exist). Enter an ex-detective moonlighting as a department store Santa Claus (Dan Haggerty of Grizzly Addams (1974) fame) and you have yourself the 1989 cheapie Elves; the Christmas movie where the focus is on the nativity of a Germanic savior rather than a Jewish one. The film’s pluralistic title is false, as there’s only one inarticulate elf, one that is not convincing as a harbinger of the master race. Possibly the only film that features a mall Santa being brutally stabbed in the groin multiple times. For more on Elves see page 64. (Eric Zaldivar)

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T H E E V I L TO U C H: “ HAPPY NEW YEAR , AUN T CARRIE”

Director: Eric Fullilove | Writer: Michael Fisher | Australia | 1972 | TV Episode “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie,” an episode of the Australian television anthology horror series The Evil Touch (1972-1973), is an unnerving and frightening depiction of the tail end of the festive season as a brutal struggle for survival. Set in the summer—the season in which the Christmas holidays fall in Australia— there is no snow, no mistletoe hanging from the doorframes and no close-knit, merry family festivity to ring in the new year. Instead, a somewhat desiccated

family unit, comprised of a middle-aged wheelchair bound woman (Julie Harris) and two young frightened children (Rory and Regina Tacchi), are left to fend for themselves against a homicidal gangster (Kevin Miles). Australia’s drinking culture, which goes into overdrive around Christmas and New Year’s, and the effect this can have, is central to the story of a time of celebration turning into something much darker. For more on The Evil Touch and “Happy New Year, Aunt Carrie,” see page 274. (Andrew Nette)

FAT H E R C H RI STMAS

Director: Kial Natale | Writer: Dave McDonald, Graham Talbot, Nelson Talbot | Canada | 2011| Short Made for the now-defunct Bloodshots 48 Hour Horror Filmmaking Challenge in Vancouver Canada, this tense holiday chamber piece is set around the Christmas tree, after three siblings (Connor Gomez, Jonathan Moxness and Krista Magnusson) discover an old audio cassette packed away in the closet. Thinking it must be a remnant of their childhood attempts to catch Santa on tape, they decide to listen to it for old times’ sake, only to realize they had recorded something much more sinister... (Kier-La Janisse)

F E E D E RS 2 : S L AY B ELLS

Director: John Polonia, Mark Polonia | Writer: Mark Polona (as Storm Anderson) | USA | 1998 | Feature Aliens invade Earth over the Christmas holidays, and it’s up to Santa Claus and his elves to save the world. (Press notes)

F I L M S TO K E EP YO U AW AK E : “ THE C HR I STMAS TAL E”

Director: Paco Plaza | Writer: Luiso Berdejo | Spain | 2005 | TV FIlm This limited oughties reboot of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s influential Spanish horror anthology series Historias para no dormir (Stories to Keep You Awake (1966-1982)) brought feature-length films by many of the top directors of the New Spanish Fantastic—Matel Gil, Paco Plaza, Alex de la Iglesia, Jaume Balaguero and Enrique Urbizu, along with Serrador himself—to the small screen in Spain and to home video internationally as 6 Films to Keep You Awake. The series’ Christmas episode by Paco Plaza (later to co-direct [REC] (2007) with Jaume Balaguero) is set in 1985, and focused on a group of BMXing pre-teens who are prepping for the Christmas holiday when they discover an unconscious woman in a Santa suit lying at the bottom of a hole in the woods. In the process of rescuing her they discover she’s a wanted criminal with a load of stolen cash hidden somewhere, and collectively decide to hold out on helping her unless she tells them where the money is. This already dark story of childhood moral failure gets even darker as the woman is depersonalized and slowly begins to starve to death. The kids, inspired by their favourite film Zombie Invasion, conduct a voodoo ritual around her with deadly results. Featuring a fantastic cast of saucy children headed up by Ivana Baquero—who a year later would appear in her breakout role as the lead in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)—as the conscience of the group, The Christmas Tale defies the theme of many Christmas films in its insistence that childhood was never a time of innocence in the first place. (Kier-La Janisse)

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F OL L OW

Director: Owen Egerton | Writer: Owen Egerton | USA | 2015 | Feature Quinn Woodhouse (Noah Segan) longs for something more. He and Thana, his beautiful girlfriend, rent a house from a kindly old man who lives next door. Quinn is a typical starving artist, working in a bar to make ends meet. Just before Christmas, he goes to work like any other night. But when he comes home, Thana has an enigmatic early Christmas present for him. Her behavior is strange and unsettling, but before Quinn can figure out what’s going on, he blacks out. When he wakes up the next morning, he finds his entire world crashing down. Once things take their turn, Follow embarks on a tense spiral into the darkest recesses of paranoia and the most inhuman corners of human nature. Owen Egerton is an accomplished novelist, screenwriter and stage performer. He bursts onto the indie filmmaking scene with his feature directorial debut, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Noah Segan gives a gut-wrenching performance as the increasingly crazed Quinn, a man walking his sanity’s breaking point. Filled with tension and mystery and punctuated with the incongruously happy notes of Christmas music, Follow is a bold, brash and bloody series of increasingly bad decisions. (Luke Mullen)

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F ROM S U N SHI NE TO HELL

Director: Neil Foley, Grant Hardie | Writer: Neil Foley, Grant Hardie | Australia | 1992 | Short A gritty, almost documentary-like short drama from Australia, From Sunshine to Hell culminates in a welter of explosive violence. Things kick off with a TV news story tells us there’s a serial killer on the loose, with 15 bodies have been uncovered in shallow graves, all wrapped in plastic. But who cares? It’s Christmas! Ditch work, grab a slab, fire up the bong, shoot some H and let’s party! At least that’s the attitude of lecherous, loud-mouthed, substanceabusing Dean (Neil Foley) as he picks up his boyfriend Wayne and friend Tim from work and says goodbye to their pre-occupied boss Mr. Cummins (John

Above: Noah Segan in Owen Egerton’s Follow (2015).

Laurie). Dean and Wayne’s party hovel, in the decaying Melbourne suburb of Sunshine where old world industry meets old world suburbia, becomes the site where everything goes to hell. Co-written and co-directed by Neil Foley and Grant Hardie, the creators of Australian distribution company Monster Pictures, From Sunshine to Hell cleverly contrasts the bright sell of Christmas with the dark and dank world that its characters inhabit. With a nod to seminal Australian film Pure Shit (1975), From Sunshine to Hell also includes the graphic intravenous ingestion of opiates. Phillip Samartzis provides the noisy industrial soundtrack. (Michael Helms)

GH OS T W H I S P E R ER : “ HO LI D AY SPI R I T ”

Director: Steve Robman | Writer: Jeannine Renshaw | USA | 2007 | TV Episode The ghosts of Christmas return in Ghost Whisperer, a network supernatural drama series in which a woman named Melinda Gordon (Jennifer Love Hewitt) can see and communicate with the dead. At the holiday season, Melinda connects with a confused ghost who thinks he’s Santa (Gordon Clapp) out to punish an emotionally unavailable father. Melinda’s investigation into the myth of Santa Claus leads her to the failed father’s past and a custody battle with his ex-wife (Melinda Page Hamilton) that she believes a reunion will fix. Like much of the series, this episode focuses on a gentler ghost narrative with an emotional hook, but what is surprising is that the Santa Claus here is angry and looking to harm someone, much like the judgmental Santa Claus in Christmas Evil (1980) or even Krampus. The unique story incorporates both of the dominant secular images of Christmas, combining Santa Claus (as described in the poem by Clement C. Moore) with a holiday ghost (made popular by Dickens). But much like A Christmas Carol, this ghostly story is more about a character readjusting his values than terrorizing the viewers. (Joanna Wilson)

GOOD T I D I N GS

Director: Stuarrt W. Bedford | Writer: Stuart W. Bedford, Stu Jopia, Giovanni Gentile | UK | 2016 | Feature Stuart W. Bedford’s debut feature is a sadistic siege saga sprung from the imagination of co-writer/co-producer/co-star Stu Jopia and brought to life in saturated grindhouse hues. Three masked psychopaths in Santa suits invade an abandoned courthouse that’s been repurposed as a sprawling squat for a close-knit group of homeless folks who are trying to make the best of the holidays. After locking the squatters in the building, the Santas (Liam W. Ashcroft, Giovanni Gentile and Stu Jopia)—credited in the cast as Larry, Curly and Moe with defining characteristics clearly ripped from the Rob Zombie playbook—subject them to a cruel game of cat-and-mouse, stalking them through the halls and leaving a burgeoning bodycount (though the worst of the violence happens offscreen). The building is large enough to allow for moments of respite and bonding between the victims, whose circumstances were already so dire it compounds the violence being enacted on them. The film also takes time to emphasize the analogous relationship between the preservation instincts needed to live on the streets and to literally fight for one’s life. While it could have used a trim to sustain tension, Good Tidings is at times genuinely frightening and, like all good Christmas horror, takes a cynical view of the season associated with compassion and goodwill. (Kier-La Janisse)

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GOOD W I L L TO MEN

Director: William Hanna, Joseph Barbera | Writer: Unknown | USA | 1955 | Short A remake of Hugh Harman’s 1939 anti-war classic Peace on Earth, the MGM animated short Good Will to Men was, like its inspiration, nominated for an Academy Award. Made not long before directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera started their own famous animation studio, the short contains scary imagery intended to frighten viewers into making moral considerations. A group of mice in the ruins of a church sing “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” and discuss how humans became extinct due their unquenchable thirst for violence. An old owl finds a discarded Bible with the oft-ignored rules “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself,” which inspires the animals to live peacefully. The most significant change from the 1939 version is to update to the humans’ means of warfare since World War II, meant to disturb viewers during the Cold War era. The most frightening images include sprawling military cemeteries that extend to the horizon, an escalation in modern warfare that can set whole cities on fire, and nuclear explosions causing mushroom clouds to wrap around the Earth. (Joanna Wilson)

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GR E M L I N S

Director: Joe Dante | Writer: Chris Columbus | USA | 1984 | Feature Joe Dante’s gift to yuletide terror, Gremlins is a multi-layered achievement and possibly one of the most inventively murderous PG-rated films of all time. Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) makes a last-minute purchase on Christmas Eve from a mysterious shop owner (Keye Luke) who provides explicit instructions about what not to do. He gives the gift—a furry and apparently loveable pet Mogwai named Gizmo—to his son Billy (Zach Galligan), who soon discovers that, due to complete human ignorance, Gizmo spawns a seemingly never-ending troop of creatures as the carnage of cuteness begins. Thanks to the exceptional design

Above: One of three murderous Santas in Stuart W. Bedford’s Good Tidings (2016).

and special effects work of Chris Walas and a vast team, the gremlins come to life and death in a multitude of jaw dropping ways. The kill list could’ve been drawn up by gore godfather H.G Lewis, but Gremlins plays like a fuel-injected Bugs Bunny cartoon on speed. Death by domestic food preparation equipment is prominent and star Phoebe Cates even gets flashed by a sleazoid gremlin. Typically for Dante, it all ends in chaos in a cinema, and cameos abound— including animation legend Chuck Jones, Roger Corman regular Dick Miller and executive producer Steven Spielberg. For more on Gremlins, see chapter 19. (Michael Helms)

T H E G R I M ADVENTU R ES O F B I LLY & MAN DY: “BIL LY AN D MAN DY SAVE CH RI S TM AS ”

Director: Juli Hashiguchi, Shaun Cashman, Sue Perrotto, Robert Hughes, Russell Calabrese | Writer: Nina Bargiel, Jeremy Bargiel | USA | 2005 | TV Episode Also known as The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy Christmas Special, this holiday-themed episode of animated children’s show The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is longer than a typical entry in the series, in which a pair of children have befriended the sickle-carrying Grim Reaper. In the story, Grim escorts the youngsters to the North Pole, only to discover that Santa has been bitten by a vampire. To stop him before he makes his annual journey around the world delivering toys—and spreading vampirism—Grim and the kids must track down and stake the head vampire to break the spell, using stakes carved from Santa’s Christmas tree. This clever and irreverent cartoon is filled with pop culture references, including a twisted version of Clement C. Moore’s “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”, nods to the 1964 animated TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and a tribute to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Even a video message made by Santa is intended to resemble Princess Leia’s plea for help in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). Another highlight is the outstanding guest cast—Baron Von Ghoulish is voiced by Malcolm McDowell, who also stars as the cynical sheriff in holiday horror film Silent Night (2012), while Mrs. Claus is performed by Carol Kane, who appears as the Ghost of Christmas Present in Scrooged (1988). (Joanna Wilson)

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TH E G U MB Y SHO W: “ SANTA-W I TC H”

Director: Art Clokey | Writer: Unknown | United States | 1963| TV Episode

This Christmas episode of the classic 1960s stop-motion animated series created by animator Art Clokey (Davey & Goliath) features a holiday adventure for Pokey, Gumby’s bendable orange pony. Entering an “Unusual Stories” storybook, Pokey finds himself at the North Pole, where Santa Claus is too sick to deliver toys. But when Pokey invites his friend Witch (a character first seen in the 1962 episode “The Witty Witch”) to deliver the toys as a replacement, trouble ensues. Though friendly, Witch’s oversized nose and scraggily white hair inadvertently Above: The Gumby Show: “Santa-Witch” (1963).

frightens people, prompting Pokey to give her a plastic Santa mask. A scene in which Witch frightens children while delivering gifts is reminiscent of a similar scene in another stop-motion holiday film, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). (Joanna Wilson)

T H E H ARVEST

Director: Jorge Jaramillo | Writer: Luis Fernando Mora | Colombia | 2013 | Short Forget about traditional Christmas monsters in this atmospheric CGI animated short film from visual FX artist Jorge Jaramillo, which introduces a new kind of holiday horror menace. Like many other holiday-themed horror shorts, The Harvest begins with a child waking on Christmas Eve night, and exploring the area around the darkened Christmas tree with a flashlight, where she spots eerie, blood-covered dolls crawling amongst the gifts. Shocked, she takes flight down the hall to her parents’ bedroom—chased by the screaming, diminutive creatures—only to discover true horror: a strange, winged beast attacking her mother with tendrils. Featuring an attractive, quasi-handmade aesthetic, The Harvest is a film that builds slowly over its three-minute runtime, starting with a quiet, snow-laden house that soon gives way to flashing lights and deafening soundtrack roars. Though the film’s surface connections to Christmas doesn’t really extend much beyond its setting, it nevertheless plays on fears about our families at perhaps the one time of the year that we depend on them the most, a sentiment made clear as the creature takes flight into the night carrying a limp body, invading houses to steal loved ones rather than leave gifts. (Paul Corupe)

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H E RE COMES SANTA

Director: Chris Thomas | Writer: Richard Standen | USA | 2011 | Short Kids who want to catch Christmas’ elusive man of the hour have it easier than ever—thanks to modern technology, curious boys and girls are no longer forced to even peek around banisters and corners in their efforts to catch Santa filling their stockings. Take for example this short, in which a kid (Oscar Malcom) decides to set up a webcam to try and catch Santa (Tom Stanley) in the act. After some agonizing waiting and a camera glitch that needs fixing, he hears

Above: The Harvest (2013).

the telltale thumps on the roof. A first he’s thrilled to finally catch a glimpse of Old Saint Nick, but is soon horrified when he discovers that Santa is in fact a decayed, pet-eating creature. Seeing his image on the monitor in his room, the boy knocks over a toy, attracting the Santa ghoul’s attention, giving him only seconds to dive under the covers and pretend to be asleep—seemingly the only way to save himself. Santa’s look—something like a hissing, zombified Grinch in the traditional Santa garb—is perhaps the most notable aspect of this five-minute effort, which also features a brief after-credits sequence of the kid being dragged away in a bag in what appears to be a nod to the Krampus legend. (Paul Corupe)

HIDE & SEEK

Director: Shawn Arranha | Writer: Apporva Lakhia, Suresh Nair | India | 2010 | Feature After cutting his teeth as a second unit or assistant director for the best part of a decade in the early 2000s, Indian filmmaker Shawn Arranha took full control of a feature film for the first time in 2010 on Hide & Seek. Despite being shot and set in his home country, Arranha’s Christmas-themed directorial debut is clearly influenced far more by Hollywood than Bollywood in terms of its narrative structure, genre traits and character types. A fast-paced drama thriller-cumstalk ‘n’ slash horror, Hide & Seek takes place largely within the confines of a locked shopping mall festooned with seasonal decorations and features a central villain dressed in a Santa Claus outfit. Confined within the mall are five former friends reunited against their will by the aforementioned “Santa” for the first time in 12 years. Forced into a deadly version of the titular children’s game, the friends” inter-personal grievances, dysfunctional relationships and dark secrets resurface as per “Santa’s” malicious plan. Employing numerous flashback and montage sequences, Arranha’s twisty tale of broken dreams and revenge pays homage to a number of contemporary American horror genre movies such as The Initiation (1984), Chopping Mall (1986) and Saw (2004). As gradually revealed in flashbacks, the seasonal setting and Santa Claus outfit are central to the narrative, as a botched exchange of presents 12 years previously becomes the catalyst for a series of violent incidents that has eventually led to a bloody, vengeful day of reckoning. (Neil Mitchell)

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H OL I D AY S

Director: Anthony Scott Burns, Kevin Kolsch, Nicholas McCarthy, Adam Egypt Mortimer, Ellen Reid, Gary Shore, Kevin Smith, Sarah Adina Smith, Scott Stewart, Dennis Widmeyer | Writer: Anthony Scott Burns, Kevin Kolsch, Nicholas McCarthy, Gary Shore, Kevin Smith, Sarah Adina Smith, Scott Stewart, Dennis Widmeyer | USA | 2016 | Feature A thematic anthology film featuring novel approaches to the mythology of eight major holidays, bringing together indie talents from Starry Eyes (2014), The Pact (2012), House of the Devil (2009), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), The Midnight Swim (2014), Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2014), Red State (2011) and more. Two of these holidays—Christmas and New Year’s Eve—come under our purview here. Scott Stewart, a writer and executive producer on the Syfy series

Dominion (2014-2015) brings us the Christmas segment, in which Seth Green plays hapless father Pete Gunderson, who seems doomed to let his family down for yet another holiday. He arrives at a shop on Christmas Eve too late to snatch up their last UVU headset—a new form of customized virtual reality touting the tagline “UVU shows you you!”—which is the gift his young son desperately wants. But he gets a second chance when the customer who beat him to it suddenly drops in the parking lot of a heart attack. Prompted by an angry text from his wife (Clare Gant), nice guy Gunderson goes against character and makes off with the headset, crushing the fallen victim’s heart pills as an added insult. Christmas morning his kid is happy, his wife is aroused by his newfound assertiveness, but Gunderson is plagued by guilt, which is compounded by the act that the UVU headset appears to have a record of the event from the POV of the victim. As a tie-in to the film’s Christmas segment, an extended version of the virtual reality sequence was made and disseminated as an installation. But the holidays don’t end there—the film’s co-producer Adam Egypt Mortimer (Some Kind of Hate (2015)) closes out the film with New Year’s Eve, in which a lonely serial killer (Andrew Bowen) who blames his bad luck on the inefficacy of dating sites meets his match in a young woman (Eli Roth’s wife and star of his films The Green inferno (2013) and Knock Knock (2015)) who is desperate to not ring in another New Year all alone. Desperate enough to risk the warning signs this guy is emitting in spades.

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How each film relates to the holidays in question is in the pressure to fulfil certain obligations established by holiday convention. With Christmas, it’s the irony of a holiday that prizes its commitment to empathy, charity and goodwill bringing out the most inhumane behavior. In New Year’s Eve, the pressure is to be doing something epic as the clock strikes, to have that meaningful midnight kiss, or to be at the center of the biggest party of your life. You can sense that the placement of this New Year’s segment dictates that it too must be the biggest party of them all, the punchline to the whole film, and that comes with pressures of its own—which, like most New Year’s celebrations, never quite live up to one’s expectations. (Kier-La Janisse)

Above: Seth Green in the Christmas segment of Holidays (2016).

H OM E F OR THE HO LI D AYS

Director: John Llewellyn Moxey | Writer: Joseph Stefano | USA | 1972 | TV Film Originally airing as an ABC Movie of the Week on November 28, 1972, Home for the Holidays revolves around the reunion of a dysfunctional family. Four sisters return home to visit their ailing father who has accused his second wife of slowly poisoning him. Isolated by a wild thunderstorm, the sisters attempt to work through their various issues with dear ol’ dad and each other, but it appears they are not alone, as someone has started killing off the family members one by one. Written by Joseph Stefano (who adapted Psycho (1960) for Alfred Hitchcock) produced by Aaron Spelling, and directed by steadfast journeyman John Llewellyn Moxey, this telefilm has just as much talent in front of the camera as it does behind it. A young Sally Field capably heads an otherwise seasoned cast, including Walter Brennan, Julie Harris, Eleanor Parker, Jill Haworth and Jessica Walter. TV movies revelled in and sometimes relied too heavily on their star power, but Home for the Holidays is more than a gothic proto-slasher attempting to cash in on its actors and then-unusual setting. The family dysfunction runs deeply in this gene pool, and each daughter is given enough of an onscreen presence to convey the idea that there can be just as much horror in family gatherings as there is in murder. Kim Novak was originally offered the part of Alex (played by Eleanor Parker), but turned it down to take care of her mother who had suffered a stroke (Novak’s first TV movie would be Third Girl from the Left which aired in 1973). The film was mostly well received, with noted LA Times TV columnist Kevin Thomas stating, “We’re right back in ‘The Old Dark House,’ but it’s a very sophisticated, amusing trip.” Shot in Calabasas, California, there was no way to give the film any real snowbound effects, so the powers that be elected to set the tale in the middle of a rainstorm instead. TV movie fans may recognize the house from an earlier small screen cult classic, Crowhaven Farm (1970). (Amanda Reyes)

T H E H OR R OR SEASO NS

Director: Shawn Buffington | Writer: Shawn Buffington, Gregory Milne, William Pattison, Greg Russell Tiderington | Canada | 2005 | Feature In this horror anthology with four tales set in different seasons, the winter story leading up to Christmas depicts a sleepy town haunted by a demon named “Satan Claws.” The townspeople think he’s a myth, but a preacher named Reverend Burbank (Andrew Mondia) tries to convince them he’s real. When people who commit bad deeds start getting slaughtered one by one they have to question whether Satan Claws is really just a myth after all. (Press notes)

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I ’ M D RE AM I N G O F A W HI TE D O O MSD AY

Director: Mike Lombardo | Writer: Mike Lombardo | USA | 2017 | Feature A sense of doom and the oppressiveness of the holidays creep in from all sides as a mother (Hope Bikle) and her young son (Reeve Blazi) find themselves alone in a basement shelter after an unnamed apocalypse. With her husband (Damien Maffei) long-gone for supplies as Christmas Eve approaches, the mother struggles to fight off her own suicidal tendencies and preserve her child’s sense of wonder and excitement about the holiday, even though the Right: Part of an ad kit for TV movie Home for the Holidays (1972).

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world has crumbled around them. Writer/director Mike Lombardo has said that, inspired by his own mother’s long-term hospitalization, he wanted to make a film about the drive to maintain certain illusions in a hopeless situation. With its Christmas setting, this modest independent feature exec-produced by awardwinning horror novelist Brian Keene is a slow-paced but devastating film that subverts the optimism of the classic Nativity story. (Kier-La Janisse)

INSIDE

Director: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury | Writer: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury | France | 2007 | Feature French horror film À l’intérieur, retitled Inside for English-speaking markets, opens outside at the scene of a fatal car accident that leaves the pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) without a partner. Four months later, with Christmas in full effect, Sarah is preparing to go to hospital for the birth of her first child when a mysterious and dangerously obsessed woman (Beatrice Dalle) turns up on her doorstep. A violent and bloody confrontation eventually occurs in and around Sarah’s bathroom, where much of Inside takes place. Of all the yuletide terror films mentioned in this book, Inside is one of the bloodiest and most gore-splattered, but it’s also one of the smartest. Set in a world where essential services and humanity in general are not paying attention to anything but Christmas, Inside captures the insanity generated by the season and uses it to ratchet up intensity as it gradually isolates Sarah in her suburban house with a woman who appears more interested in meeting the unborn baby than even its own mother does. Entirely downbeat and horrific, Inside is the first feature of the writing and directorial team of Alexandre Bustillo (a former writer for French horror mag Mad Movies) and cinematographer Julien Maury, who have since seriously kicked on to produce Amongst the Living (2014), Livid (2011) and contributed the “X Is For Xylophone” segment to The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). A remake of Inside premiered at the Sitges Film Festival in 2016. For more on Inside, see chapter 19. (Michael Helms)

I N S I D E NUMB E R 9 : “ THE D E VI L O F CH RIST MAS”

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Director: Graeme Harper | Writer: Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton | UK | 2016 | TV Episode

Since the British comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen went into a semipermanent hiatus in 2005, two of its founding members— Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton—have continued the League’s penchant for grotesquery, dark comedy and outright horror with the mystery/thriller series Psychoville and the crossgenre anthology series Inside Number 9. The latter project’s Christmas special, which aired Above: Reece Shearsmith in Inside Number 9: “The Devil of Christmas” (2016).

in December 2016, is an exquisite slice of retro-horror-cum-black comedy that showcases Shearsmith and Pemberton’s gift for narrative construction, expert knowledge of pop culture and subversive sense of humour. Set entirely within the confines of one location—as all the series’ individual episodes are—“The Devil of Christmas” unfolds inside an alpine chalet in Austria on Krampusnacht, 1977. The chalet’s British holidaymaking occupants are Julian Devonshire (Steve Pemberton), his mother Celia (Rula Lenska), pregnant second wife Kathy (Jessica Raine) and Devonshire’s son Toby (George Bedford). After the resort’s manager Klaus (Reece Shearsmith) regales the guests with the story of the Devil of Christmas—in which the terrifying figure of Krampus punishes naughty children—the family’s stay takes a rapidly sinister turn for the worse. Paying homage to “70s anthology horror films and shows such as the BBC’s unsettling anthology series Dead of Night (1972) “The Devil of Christmas” takes on a very post-modern, self-reflexive quality by the addition of what appears to be a DVD commentary track (voiced by Derek Jacobi) by the episode’s fictional director. It is the elevation of this creepy Christmas tale into a meta-narrative that leads to its shocking conclusion, one steeped in the very un-festive mythology surrounding snuff movies. (Neil Mitchell)

JAC K F R OS T

Director: Ub Iwerks | Writer: Unknown| USA | 1934 | Short This Christmas staple, produced by Ub Iwerks Studios as part of their ComiColor Cartoon series of 25 animated shorts from 1933-1936, is an eight-minute joy of eyepopping colour and inventive imagery. As Jack Frost prepares the forest for winter, a little bear cub too curious to hibernate sneaks out to experience the snowfall firsthand and comes face to face with the fearsome Old Man Winter. While meant as a jaunty short for kids, it is full of nightmarish imagery as the young bear finds himself in an alien landscape and a literal prisoner to the cold. (Kier-La Janisse)

JAC K F R OS T

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Director: Michael Cooney | Writer: Jeremy Paige, Michael Cooney | USA | 1997 | Feature Though the baffling success of Leprechaun (1993) led a handful of filmmakers to attempt to turn other mischievous fairy tale creations into horror icons, the title villain of Jack Frost has about as much to do with its folkloric origins as Chinese take-out has to do with actual Chinese cuisine. Not to be confused with the family-friendly film of the same name starring Michael Keaton, Cooney’s seasonal horror film begins when a van taking convicted serial killer Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) to the electric chair collides with a vehicle containing experimental genetic chemicals, transforming the doomed man into an animate killer snowman with a taste for blood and puns. Now endowed with snow powers, Frost resumes his killing spree, targeting the hometown of the sheriff that put him behind bars. It’s easy to laugh at this lunacy, but Jack Frost

Above: A bear cub is terrorized by Old Man Winter in Ub Iwerks’ Jack Frost (1934).

is in on the joke. The film is littered with sight gags alongside genuine tension and, infamously, an audacious scene in which Frost rapes a young Shannon Elizabeth in the tub by hiding himself as her bath water. The film’s foamy snowman monster isn’t as impressive as the skeletal snowman with sharp icicle teeth featured on the memorable lenticular cover art that graced the shelves of virtually every Blockbuster video store. (Eric Zaldivar)

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JACK F R O ST 2: R EVENG E O F THE MU TAN T KIL LER SN OWMAN

Director: Michael Cooney | Writer: Michael Cooney | USA | 2000 | Feature

A year after the events of the first Jack Frost movie, Sheriff Sam (Christopher Allport) is still shell-shocked from his battle with a killer snowman, so he heads off to an island resort for the holidays with his wife Anne (Eileen Seeley). Only Jack (Scott MacDonald) is revived just in time, and follows the couple to seek revenge. Essentially more of the same, only a little worse, Jack Frost 2 joins the slippery ranks of slasher sequels that go tropical (see Piranha 2: The Spawning (1981) and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)… or rather, don’t). Shot digitally instead of on celluloid like the first film, Jack’s appearance has also gone downhill with a cheaper-looking suit and the addition of fanged icicle teeth (apparently to match the first film’s misleading VHS artwork). Rather than push the envelope or take the franchise into new territory, director Michael Cooney never outdoes his original, despite a memorable set piece in which Jack freezes

Above: The non-family friendly version of Jack Frost (1997). Photos: courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome.

the surface of a pool to trap a nubile skinny dipper and Jack’s gimmicky new ability to replicate himself as tiny lethal snowballs that spew baby talk. The plot briefly works when Sheriff Sam is reduced to an ineffectual, mumbling man-child by post-traumatic stress, forcing his wife to step up to the plate and take charge of busting Jack’s snowballs. The filmmakers have threatened a third outing that was subsequently abandoned after Allport (Sheriff Sam) died tragically (and perhaps ironically) in an avalanche. (Eric Zaldivar)

T H E JU N K Y ’S C HR I STMAS

Director: Nick Donkin, Melodie McDaniel| Writer: William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz | USA | 1993 | Short Originally published as “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him” in William S. Burroughs’ 1973 short story collection Exterminator!, The Junky’s Christmas—an updated version of the original tale—was turned into an arresting claymation short film by then first-time directors Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel in 1993. By turns grim, wryly amusing, sordid and unexpectedly touching, The Junky’s Christmas appeared in the same year that Burroughs collaborated with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain on a guitar-backed, spoken word version of “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him.” Like the Cobain piece, Donkin and McDaniel’s work also featured the famed Beat Generation author, here seen in live action wraparound sequences reading from Interzone, the 1989 short story collection in which “The Junky’s Christmas” first appeared under that title. Recounting the less-than-festive tale of Danny the Carwiper’s strung-out journey around the cold, wintry streets of New York as the heroin addict desperately tries to score smack on Christmas Day, The Junky’s Christmas is a hellish yuletide themed anti-adventure. Danny encounters dismembered feet, an alcoholic doctor and uncaring passers by during his broke, withdrawal-fuelled mission to sink back into the embrace of junkinduced oblivion. Having secured a quarter of a pill from the aforementioned medical practitioner, Danny altruistically gives it up to a stranger suffering in agony from a kidney complaint before miraculously receiving an “immaculate fix” for his good deed in an uplifting flight-of-fancy finale. Scored with traditional festive songs and beats provided by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, A Junky’s Christmas is a unique and fittingly off-beat animated film that starkly shows the banal horrors of addiction before injecting some much needed Christmas spirit into its hitherto squalidly downbeat narrative. (Neil Mitchell)

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K AZ U O U MEZI ’S HO R R O R THE ATR E : “ TH E PRESEN T ”

Director: Yudai Yamaguchi | Writer: Tamio Hayashi | Japan | 2005 | TV episode Manga author Kazuo Umezu brought a very twisted version of Santa to television for Kazuo Umezu’s Horror Theater. This series, which ran in 2005, was in some ways like the USA’s Masters of Horror (2005-2007) in that it was a limited series (six episodes in all), done by different directors. Adapted for the small screen by Tamio Hayashi, “The Present” is a simple story about a group of young adults who use the Christmas holiday as an excuse to party at a mysterious hotel. Unfortunately, Santa Claus has a different idea in mind. For more on Kazuo Umezi’s Horror Theatre, see chapter 8. (Amanda Reyes)

K N I F E P OI N T

Director: Jed Strahm | Writer: Jed Strahm | USA | 2011 | Feature Abbie (Katherine Randolph) and her wheelchair-bound sister Michelle (Krista Braun), who secretly resents her more independently mobile counterpart, are alone in their condo on Christmas Eve when a drooling thug breaks in and begins sexually assaulting Michele. With the assailant quickly dispatched via a blow to the head, the girls soon realize that the rapist was only the sentinel for a gang descending upon their home as part of a large-scale robbery targeting the entire complex. The home invasion film speaks to the transferring of a threat from the public space to the private space—the latter giving the false impression of being ‘safe,” especially in the context of Christmas—and how we adjust to that threat. Knifepoint explicitly addresses a woman’s right to inviolable space, and its female relationships are especially interesting in this light. Psychotic female assailant Lorraine (Kym Jackson) doesn’t seem that much different from Michele; both are in primary relationships that place them in a position of dependence and weakness, and frustration gets acted out in unhealthy ways, usually against the other female characters. When Abbie and Michele— ostensibly the two victims—show any sign of agency or independence, Lorraine becomes especially retributive: she takes it not only as a physical threat but a threat to her integrity, as it calls into question her own inability to stand up for herself in pivotal situations. The only feature by frequent production accountant Jed Strahm, Knifepoint is an insightful addition to the Christmas horror canon, if you can stomach its brutality. (Kier-La Janisse)

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K RAM P U S

Director: George Dalphin | Writer: George Dalphin | USA | 2012 | Short

Above: Katherine Randolph in Jed Strahm’s Knifepoint (2011).

Among the earliest American horror shorts to feature the Krampus, this eightminute dark comedic effort from director George Dalphin was initially made for a 48-hour filmmaking challenge. In this take on the classic character, the Krampus (Justin Roig) is a “cranky old fellow” who kidnaps naughty children so he can feast on them for Christmas dinner. But that was 100 years ago—since then, he’s hit rock bottom, living with his obnoxious girlfriend and surrounded by empty beer cans, the Krampus decides he needs to get “back in the Christmas game” and so calls up his old co-worker Santa (Dan Greenleaf). At a dinner party with their significant others, Santa fends off the Krampus’ questions about “how naughty and delicious are the children of this century?” and instead fills him in on the way Christmas works now—with coal having officially replaced child-eating. Reinvigorated by a new sense of purpose, the Krampus makes up for lost time by kidnapping adults for childhood infractions that he missed out on. Featuring more humour than horror—the Krampus costume is a minimal, goat-like mask—Krampus is interesting in the way it suggests that the Alpine-born mythological monster’s sudden re-emergence into pop culture is because he suddenly felt driven to reclaim his place beside Santa. With funny performances across the board and a decidedly wry take on the character and his relationship with St. Nicholas, it’s a notable addition to the Krampus cinematic canon. (Paul Corupe)

K RAM P U S

Director: Michael Dougherty | Writer: Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields | USA | 2015 | Feature Dysfunctional in-laws converge for a family Christmas in idyllic suburbia. The youngest member of the clan (Emjay Anthony), loudly protesting his kinfolk’s awful behavior, accidentally awakens Christmas demon Krampus. There is a great deal of build-up before Krampus arrives, with some of the creepier imagery provided by the demonic creature’s lackeys, such as a freaky Jack-in-the-box. When the titular villain does finally show, he’s hidden behind a red coat and an antiquarian Santa mask that reveals just enough of the beastly features behind it. This design helps distinguish this cinematic Krampus from the hordes of other Christmas horror protagonists that have preceded it without betraying its folkloric roots (it’s still a horned, goat-like demon). Despite fan concerns over its PG-13 rating, this lavish Hollywood production proves one does not need excessive violence or depictions of gore to make a fine horror picture. Krampus is more satisfying than Dougherty’s previous holiday offering, the Halloween portmanteau Trick ‘r Treat (2007). (Eric Zaldivar)

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K RAM P U S : THE C HR I STMAS D EVI L

Director: Jason Hull | Writer: Jason Hull | USA | 2013 | Feature Since 2010, the Germanic lore of Krampus has slowly been re-appropriated for the North American market, heralding a slew of hooved-hood flicks shot on consumer equipment. Re-released in 2015 to coincide with the theatrical premiere of director Michael Dougherty’s studio horror film Krampus, Krampus: The Christmas Devil presents itself as a serious cop drama. When children start going missing in a podunk town, the local detective (A.J. Leslie) is convinced these disappearances are linked to his own experience as an abductee years ago. As he goes deeper down the rabbit hole he finds the fiend behind the

kidnapping is none other than Krampus, Santa Claus’s evil brother. Hull followed this film up with a sequel, Krampus: The Devil Returns, in 2016. See page 306 for more on the Krampus. (Eric Zaldivar)

K RAM P U S : THE D E VI L R E TUR NS

Director: Jason Hull | Writer: Jason Hull, A.J. Leslie | USA | 2016 | Feature Jason Hull’s sequel Krampus: The Devil Returns picks up five years later after his earlier effort Krampus: The Christmas Devil, in which grizzled cop Jeremy (A.J Leslie) is back on the hunt for his goat-horned nemesis who has returned to address an increase in local naughty behaviour. As with the first film, the Krampus is again posited as Santa’s more sinister brother (rather than his actual role as an indentured companion), who carries out punishments as directed. Jeremy returns to action in the hope that he can find out more about what happened to his daughter, who has been eerily missing since the last movie, but ultimately ends up spending just as much time fending off a gang of criminals led by the brother of a hoodlum Jeremy killed (R.A. Mihailoff). As with the last film, these parties are destined for a three-way stand-off in the final reel. Though the horror is comparatively underplayed this time out and the Krampus mask and costume have not significantly changed, this Pennsylvania-shot DV production manages some technical improvements over its predecessor, including a more fulsome exploration of its characters as they deal with the Krampus’ continued threat to their town. See page 306 for more on the Krampus. (Paul Corupe)

K RAM P U S : THE R E C K O NI NG

Director: Robert Conway | Writer: Robert Conway, Owen Conway | USA | 2015 | Feature As the Krampus has slowly worked his way into North American popular culture, he’s become—for many—an all-purpose holiday boogeyman uncoupled from traditional depictions. That’s what seems to be happening in Arizona-based writer/director Robert Conway’s first kick at the Krampus can, which seems to feature the legendary creature for marquee value only—it often feels like an existing script was changed to incorporate the Krampus just before filming. In the film’s police procedural plot, Detective O’Connor (James Ray) is hunting down a killer who sets fire to his victims. But what he doesn’t know is that the deaths are linked to Zoe (Amelia Haberman), a young girl with the ability to call a CGI-rendered demon-like Krampus to take revenge on those who have wronged her. Child psychologist Rachel (Monica Engesser) teams up with O’Connor to help, and together they uncover Zoe’s disturbing secret. Featuring a firebug Krampus that diverges notably from any other interpretation and very little mention of the Christmas season at all, the film plays out like a more typical slasher horror film, meting out punishments to morally bankrupt adults who try to take advantage of the young girl. See page 306 for more on the Krampus. (Paul Corupe)

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K RAM P U S U N L EASHE D

Director: Robert Conway | Writer: Robert Conway | USA | 2016 | Feature For this follow-up to Krampus: The Reckoning (2015), indie genre director Robert Conway ditched many of the less successful elements of his earlier effort to

embrace a new story, new characters and a better-realized Krampus. And yet, as with his previous film, Krampus Unleashed still can’t shake the impression that the Krampus was later added an existing non-Christmas script as an afterthought to capitalize on the creature’s popularity. Out visiting their relatives for the holidays in conspicuously snowless Arizona, a group of teenagers come across a strange, rune-covered rock that has the power to summon everybody’s favourite goat-horned child punisher. Some stray cigarette ashes dropped on the stone bring Krampus back to life (this time via a mask and bulky suit rather than lean and mean CGI), and sends him on a gory murder spree, taking out neighbours, locals and anyone else foolhardy enough to get in his way. Along for the ride are a pair of comic relief Bigfoot hunters and a grizzled old prospector who helps the kids come up with a plan to do in the creature once and for all. With a stronger connection to Christmas and a less convoluted storyline, Krampus Unleased is a clear improvement over Conway’s last Krampus film. See page 306 for more on the Krampus. (Paul Corupe)

L AS T C H RI STMAS

Director: Geoff Redknap | Writer: Geoff Redknap | Canada | 2017 | Short In this poignant, pitch-perfect short from prolific FX artist and director of The Unseen (2016), a young boy named Josh (Quinn Lord) lives with his grandmother (Linda Darlow), who is gradually succumbing to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. She doesn’t remember that it’s Christmas Eve, or where her husband is, and her grandson’s compassion for her condition is matched by her denial about it. But her failing memory has allowed Josh to shield her from the dark reality of what the world outside has become. One of the great Christmas horror shorts. (Kier-La Janisse)

T H E L E AGU E O F G E NTLE ME N C HR I STMAS SPECIAL

Director: Steve Bendelak | Writer: Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson, Reece Shearsmith | UK | 2000 | TV Special

A holiday expansion of the strangest and blackest of British sketch shows, The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special draws on Britain’s classic horror cinema and television comedy, as well as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it injected the show’s macabre, offkilter sensibility into a familiar horror portmanteau format. For more on The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special, see page 178 (Owen Williams)

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T H E L E GE N D O F HELL HO U SE

Director: John Hough | Writer: Richard Matheson | UK | 1973 | Feature Adapted for the screen by Richard Matheson from his own novel, The Legend of Hell House is the story of a small team assembled to investigate the former residence of degenerate and dead millionaire Emeric Belasco. The allegedly haunted mansion had been locked up for 30 years after a previous visit by a similar team ended in disaster with only one survivor, a young psychic. The new mission is headed by scientist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) along with

his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt), a medium (Pamela Franklin), and the now mucholder psychic (Roddy McDowall), who plan to use technology combined with extrasensory abilities to prove life after death. After producer James H. Nicholson parted from American International Pictures, the company he formed in the 1950s with partner Samuel Z. Arkoff, he started Academy Pictures Corporation, which debuted with The Legend of Hell House. With similarities to Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), The Legend of Hell House sometimes plays out as an update of that film. Director John Hough’s film takes place in the week leading up to Christmas, which creates the impetus to complete the investigation quickly, but by the time the film finishes it’s unlikely that Christmas matters much to the team at all. Of note is the haunting electronic score by former BBC Radiophonic Workshop colleagues Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. (Michael Helms)

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T H E L I VI N G W ANT ME D E AD

Director: Bill Palmer | Writer: Bill Palmer | USA | 2011 | Short An energetic Christmas zombie film full of clever transitions, comedic musical cues, and more wipes, swipes, and editing tricks than Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (1990-1993), Bill Palmer’s The Living Want Me Dead begins with a chase: a man (Adam Conger) races through a suburban neighbourhood, with a pair of zombies close on his heels. Arriving at a shambolic friend’s house (Teddy Nunes), he relates the incredible story of how he’d been down on his luck and signed up to be a guinea pig for experimental research, which causes him to secrete a pheromone that turns everyone around him into insatiable cannibal zombies. A humorous, if overlong, zom-com that gets extra points for using pop-

Above: Roddy McDowall and Pamela Franklin in John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973). Photo: from the collection of Movie Ink (movie-ink.com).

punk staples The Dickies’ version of “Silent Night” on the soundtrack. (Kier-La Janisse)

L U R K I N G FE AR

Director: C. Courtney Joyner | Writer: C. Courtney Joyner, H. P. Lovecraft | USA | 1994 | Feature Full Moon Features’ direct-to-video effort Lurking Fear stars Hellraiser’s (1987) Ashley Laurence as a chiseled, angry young woman hunting the creatures that took her sister, and trying to save the dying town that has been overrun by them for decades. Meanwhile, an ex-con (Blake Adams) is searching for a buried treasure with a map left to him by his father, and a mob boss (Jon Finch) is on his tail hoping to steal it. Mayhem and carnage ensue as these three characters collide on Christmas Eve. The film is loosely based on the 1922 H.P. Lovecraft story of the same name, bt transforms the unnamed monster-hunter into a fierce heroine (Laurence), and adds burglary, a treasure map, and crime syndicate subplots to the story, amongst other alterations. Adapted by Full Moon stable scribe C. Courtney Joyner (in one of his rare turns doubling behind the camera), Lurking Fear is at times difficult to follow, and the film’s creatures aren’t exactly the epitome of Lovecraftian terror with their awkward-fitting suits and masks. While typical of producer Charles Band’s output, the film is saved by the everwonderful Jeffrey Combs (having previously brought Lovecraft’s Herbert West to life in 1985’s Re-Animator) as the town doctor. His theatrical stage presence and indomitable persona elevate the film. While Lovecraft did publish a few works set during or relating to Christmas and Saturnalia, Lurking Fear was not one of them; the original serial takes place in August and November, and was published in the January through April issues of Home Brew magazine in 1923, making the Christmas setting of the film largely arbitrary. (Ariel Fisher)

M I S F OR ME R R Y C HR I STMAS

Director: Joe Stas, Lloyd Stas | Writer: Joe Stas, Lloyd Stas | UK | 2013 | Short

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The Krampus is racked with existential worry in the brutally funny M is for Merry Christmas. This short, which was created in hopes of being selected for inclusion in the anthology feature The ABCs of Death (2012), didn’t quite make the final cut, but was included in the later film The ABCs of Death 2.5 (2016), which showcased 26 finalists. It’s easy to see why—it’s a wellproduced and insightful effort. The Krampus (Lloyd Stas) returns home one evening exhausted, concerned that he’s wasting his life and worried that he’ll only be remembered as a “miserable goat fuck” who ruins people’s holidays while Santa gets all the glory. Over a few beers, a man (Paul Warren) reassures the Alpine beast that children need to be scared and that he can help the Krampus recapture the magic of his earlier years. Only it’s a trick, and the man—revealed as a kidnapee chained to the Krampus’ front porch—tries to escape while flipping off his Austrian captor. A playful and satirical take on the now-popular legend, M is for Merry Christmas features perhaps the most traditional Krampus seen on film, a dark-skinned, hairy beast dragging a kid in a sack which he occasionally beats with a rake. Also interesting is the way the film

attempts to look at the pop cultural appeal of the mythical creature, exploding the Krampus’ evil image to reveal some of the imagined concerns behind the horns, including his resentment over missing out on what is surely a lucrative Coca-Cola endorsement. (Paul Corupe)

M AS S AC R E ON AI SLE 12

Director: Jim Klock, Wiliam Mark McCullough | Writer: Chad Ridgely, A.J. Via | USA | 2016 | Feature In this horror comedy set on Christmas Eve, a hardware store employee’s first night on the job is disrupted by the discovery of a dead body and a duffel bag full of cash. (Press notes)

M E RC Y C H RI S TMAS

Director: Ryan Nelson | Writer: Beth Levy Nelson, Ryan Nelson | USA | 2016 | Feature “Sometimes it can feel like torture!” say Cindy (Casey O’Keefe) of the holidays —literally so, in this gory debut feature from Ryan Nelson, expanded from his 2010 short film of the same name. Steven Hubbel reprises his role as Michael Brisket, the Charlie Brown-esque office slave to his younger, chiseled boss (Cole Gleason) who charges him with an impossible accounting report to complete over Christmas. But Michael’s holiday blues are halted by the charity of his boss’ pretty new secretary, Cindy, who invites Michael to her family home to join them for their seasonal dinner—the only hitch is, he’s the dinner! With Michael roped up in Christmas lights in the basement alongside a host of other unlucky specimens who all await their turn at the chopping block, the deranged All-American cannibal clan upstairs—which includes his obnoxious boss, revealed to be Cindy’s brother - is preparing a holiday feast to die for, and Michael has to figure out how to get Brisket off the menu! But dysfunction binds every family, cannibals or otherwise, and as old resentments, competition and sibling rivalry distract them from dinner preparations, our zero turns hero with the help of his fellow prisoners.

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While the premise of the picture-perfect family with cannibalistic tastes is not exactly new (see Parents (1989), among other things), the film does straddle the splatter/comedy line fairly effectively and there is a great gag in the last act, when violence erupts into the “upstairs” façade and things go holiday haywire. Throughout, the expectations and disappointments of Christmas are examined, as Michael retains his childlike love for the holiday even in the face of its bloody collapse. (Kier-La Janisse)

M E RR Y F @ # $I NG C HR I STMAS

Director: Eric Williford, Jaye Lowe, Ottis Lowe, J. Michael Whalen, and Franklin Guerrero Jr. | Writer: Eric Williford, Jaye Lowe, J. Michael Whalen, Richard Finney, Franklin Guerrero Jr. | USA | 2012 | Feature Also known as Xmas Tales, Merry F@#$ing Christmas is a horror anthology comprised of three shorts strung together by a tale of betrayal and adultery. The first short is “Lady Bruins Christmas Slumber Party,” an adolescent boy’s wet

dream set at a slumber party with an array of offensive female stereotypes. Following a gift exchange, the “Loner” is given a black orb, which summons demonic forces that proceed to murder the other girls, all presumably of lesser virtue. The second short, “Alexandria,” is about a young woman coping with the loss of her child, while succumbing to horrific hallucinations. As it turns out, her husband hasn’t forgiven her for the death of their child…in utero. Yes, she had an abortion, and now the spirit of their unborn fetus has possessed her therapist to exact its zygotic revenge. The final film, “The Crann Doll,” is an attempt to appropriate the Tales from the Hood sequence “KKK Comeupance.” A man accidentally kills the infant of a young couple who are part of an incestuous clan, who then craft a voodoo doll sent as a Christmas gift to kill him. Left on the cutting room floor (but available to view on Youtube) was a fourth story, the delightfully macabre low-budget short “The Town That Christmas Forgot.” On a little cul-de-sac tucked away in Halcyon Ridge, USA, resides a community that never seems to see Santa. Turns out they’ve been slaughtering ol’ Saint Nick every year to keep him from spoiling their children. Not this year. Santa exacts his bloody revenge on these naughty parents, and the results are a treat. In the tradition of many Christmas horror flicks, the anthology leans towards cheap, dirty scares, but sadly the best segment of the lot didn’t make the final cut, and it’s a shame—”The Town That Christmas Forgot” could have made these Xmas Tales a little more palatable. (Ariel Fisher)

M E RR Y L I TTLE C HR I STMAS

Director: Manuel Marín, Ignacio Martín Lerma I Writer: Manuel Marín I Spain I 2011 I Short Studies are conflicted over whether domestic violence spikes during the holidays, though the stressful atmosphere surrounding Christmas may bring out the worst in some people. Spanish team Manuel Marín and Ignacio Martín Lerma examine family violence in their artful, but staggeringly brutal short film Merry Little Christmas. The film depicts a mother (Blanca Rivera) and daughter (Macarena Gómez) and their struggle reclaiming their lives in the aftermath of horrible violence performed by their patriarch (Jacob Torres) on Christmas Eve. As a child, Christina (Miriam Martín) witnessed her father severely beat and rape her mother. Christina’s adult life consists of self-harm and addiction, reliving the night over and over in her mind. She is visited by family friend Miguel (Jan Cornet), who offers support but has difficulty empathizing, placing blame on the two women. Christina creates her own surreal and nightmarish art as a means of coping and wishes to express her pain to Miguel on the anniversary. Merry Little Christmas is an unflinching look at family violence, practically nihilistic in its approach. Though it offers sensationalized, nearly gratuitous depictions of violent acts, these images instill in the viewer the dire consequences of not only physical, but the emotional damage inflicted on the victims—even those lucky enough to avoid domestic violence in their own lives may process the trauma of others through the film’s disturbing images. The film culminates in a shocking scene with a monstrous fantasy re-enactment of the events conjured in Christina’s damaged mind, the only honest way she can express to someone like Miguel her enduring pain. It’s the scene that follows, however—a character’s suicidal release—that leaves the viewer shaken to the core. (Chris Hallock)

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M ON S T E RS : “A NEW W O MAN”

Director: Brian Thomas Jones | Writer: Edithe Swensen | USA | 1990 | TV Episode The 1990s horror anthology TV series Monsters (1988-1990) was created by Richard P. Rubinstein, the producer for the similar program, Tales from the Darkside. In the series’ Christmas episode, the Christmas Carol riff “A New Woman,” Jessica (Linda Thorson) visits her uncle Thomas’ (Tom McDermott) death bed in an unsuccessful attempt to convince him to close a homeless shelter run out of a building he owns. She wants him to sell the building for a big profit. Ignoring the spiritual consequences of the materialism and greed, Jessica has a vision of her uncle’s funeral on Christmas Eve, where his spirit speaks to her about their mutual despicable acts in the past. As they talk, both begin to transform into ugly, sickly monsters—their outer appearances reflecting the condition of their souls. Rather than adapt Scrooge’s entire experience of meeting three ghosts to inspire moral change, this episode of Monsters merely exploits one aspect of Charles Dickens’ classic literary tale—the fear inspired by meeting the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. This adaptation manages to bypass fears of eternal damnation for moral failings, and instead it strikes at another weak point: Jessica’s fear of appearing ugly and monstrous. For more on Monsters and anthology television, see page 84. (Joanna Wilson)

M ON S T E RS : “ G LI M G LI M”

Director: Peter Michael Stone | Writer: F. Paul Wilson | USA | 1989 | TV Episode A favourite theme of many Christmas films— the loss of innocence—is prevalent in the first of two Christmas episodes of horror anthology show Monsters (19881990). In “Glim Glim,” first broadcast in February 1989, a young girl tries to calm the anxiety of the sole survivors of a deadly outbreak by coaxing a peaceful alien into mimicking the traditions of Christmas, only to prompt a violent outburst. In the world of horror anthology TV, the wide-eyed and curious can become keepers of the dark knowledge of death and destruction. For more on Monsters and anthology television, see page 84. (Amanda Reyes)

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TH E M ONSTE R ’S C HR I STMAS

Director: Yvonne MacKay | Writer: Burton Silver | New Zealand | 1981 | TV Film

The Monster’s Christmas is a 1981 New Zealand oddity sufficiently obscure that genre buffs in its home country barely know about it, and those few reviewers who have seen the film tend to focus on decrying its low budget and the apparent “cheapness” of its hand-made costumes. But at its centre is an important story about children’s reconciliation of the real and the imaginary, an affinity with wilderness and a reinforcement of childhood independence characteristic of a bygone era in children’s literature and programming. A little girl falls asleep reading the eponymous storybook, about a group of carolling monsters whose voices were stolen by a jealous witch. She wakes up Above: The Monster’s Christmas (1981).

to discover one of these monsters – a rubbery, gloopy thing oozing smoke out of a hole in its head – clumsily invading her Christmas stocking, and sets off on a strange trip through the many mysterious facets of the New Zealand landscape in order to help the monsters recover their voices. What results is a bizarre holiday fable that blends the environmental concerns of the Godzilla mythos with the wackiness of Japanese kids show Gimme Gimme Octopus (1973-1974), the colourful DIY musicality of counterculture staple HR Pufnstuf (1969-1970) and the fearless independence of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are—but with a slightly more feminist bent. (Kier-La Janisse)

M OT H E R K R AMPUS

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Director: James Klass | Writer: Scott Jeffrey | UK | 2017 | Feature Also known as 12 Deaths of Christmas, James Klass’ sophomore feature takes its inspiration from the myth of Frau Perchta, a Germanic witch who traditionally appears during the 12 days of Christmas to violently punish children who have misbehaved. A prologue explains that a rash of child disappearances occurred in a small town in 1921, causing the locals to believe that the mythical witch Frau Perchta was behind them—fears that were again brought to the fore in 1992 when five children went missing and their bodies were later found in the woods. Angry and desperate, a group of townspeople found and hung the woman they believed responsible, who cursed them with her last breath, saying that Frau Perchta would return to avenge her death by taking their children. Jumping ahead 25 years to the present, a series of brutal, seemingly targeted murders lead the vigilantes to believe that the curse is real. Character motivation ranges Above: Mother Krampus, aka 12 Deaths of Christmas (2017).

from shaky to downright nonsensical, and it’s obvious that some of the actors are struggling to transcend frequently overwrought dialogue. Christmas themes are woven through the plot as well as its festive murder setpieces—including deaths by cookie cutter, carving knife and even crucifixion—while also mining images and themes from films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Woman in Black (1989) and Candyman (1992). As with many onscreen monsters, Frau Perchta’s scare-factor is undermined by too much visibility, but Mother Krampus is commendable for being one of few films to tackle the lore of the Christmas witch. (Kier-La Janisse)

M Y M ON S TE R

Director: Izzy Lee | Writer: Izzy Lee | USA | 2018| Short Christmas is coming. If that’s not stressful enough, Lily (Brea Grant) has to contend with a cantankerous boyfriend (Adam Egypt Mortimer) and an unexpected, inter dimensional holiday guest who just wants two things—blood and cuddles. (Press notes)

T H E M U N S TE RS SC AR Y LI TTLE C HR I STMAS

Director: Ian Emes | Writer: Ed Ferrara and Kevin Murphy | USA | 1996 | Television Feature The second telefilm in the short-lived revival of 1960s monster sitcom The Munsters, The Munsters Scary Little Christmas followed on the heels of the popular 1995 effort Here Come The Munsters, but suffers from the loss of the entire cast of that film. In the movie, Eddie (Bug Hall) is bullied by other kids and ends up depressed for the holidays. Attempts to cheer him up all go predictably and goofily haphazard—Santa Claus, plucked from his sled, is turned into a fruitcake and the family find themselves in a biker bar. Can the Munsters return everything to a macabre normalcy by the holiest of holy days? Directed with flair by British filmmaker Ian Emes (of Duran Duran’s 1983 music video “The Chauffeur”), and featuring a fairly edgy cast including Sam McMurray as Herman, Ann Magnuson as Lily, and Mary Wornov as the nosy neighbor, much of the film still manages to fall flat with some of the plot bordering on offensive, including sexually aggressive elves. Despite this, a strange blackened heart beats within—McMurray and Woronov in particular make the most of the awkward material and it is reasonably innocuous, and sometimes even fun. The living doorknocker, a tribute to Jacob Marley from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a nice touch, and Santa’s ease with the strange family is sweet. Originally airing on the FOX network in 1996, this fondly remembered holiday “reunion” was partially shot at the historic Heathcote Castle in New South Wales, Australia, a glorious gothic mansion that adds a touch of cinema to the production. Sandy Baron, who plays Grandpa Munster (perhaps a little too overzealously), portrayed Grandpa’s brother in the syndicated series reboot The Munsters Today, which ran from 1988-1991. (Amanda Reyes)

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M Y N AM E I S K R I S K R I NG LE

Director: Drew Daywalt | Writer: Drew Daywalt | USA | 2010 | Short

The trope of the killer Santa, out punishing badly behaved children, is a common one for horror films. Although director Drew Daywalt doesn’t really tread any new ground with his short My Name is Kris Kringle, he does give the concept a slightly new sheen, running the well-worn narrative through the aesthetic of serial killer thrillers. Running less than five minutes long, the film begins with the arrest of Santa on the front porch of a home while wielding a butcher knife in one hand and a severed head in the other. Most of the story plays out during a police interrogation where a pair of grizzled cops try to get Old Saint Nick, clad in the traditional red suit covered in dirt and blood, to tell him who he really is. Amusingly, Santa offers excuses for his child-murdering behaviour that are rooted in the character’s fantastic origins (claims he used ether to drug parents to perform his evil deeds are refuted with explanations about “magic sleeping powder”). By the end it’s revealed that he’s killed more than just four youngsters—all of Earth’s children have had their names etched in Santa’s naughty book and have been appropriately disciplined. While most of the horror films about murdering Santas feature delusional individuals playing dressup, My Name is Kris Kringle at least tries to find some ambiguity over whether this Santa, who deals out deathly punishments across the globe, could be the real one. (Paul Corupe)

T H E N AU GHTY LI ST

Director: Paul Campion | Writer: Paul Campion | UK | 2016 | Short Based on a short story by horror author Brian Keene, director Paul Campion (The Devil’s Rock (2011)) turns in this bite-sized black comedy about two criminals holed up in a wintry cabin over Christmas Eve with a load of stolen cash and enough cocaine to make them uber-paranoid about the red-clad stranger who appears to be making his way down their chimney. The thuggish Tony (Vincenzo Nicoli) keeps his gun trained on the intruder (Mac Elsey) but dippy Vince (Sebastian Knapp) just wants to know if Santa brought him the porn he asked for. What Santa did bring is his giant log of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, and one thing’s for certain—someone’s going to be punished! Short and punchy with overtly hammy perfformances, The Naughty List is the perfect nightcap for a ranchy Christmas Eve. (Kier-La Janisse)

T H E N E W SC O O B Y-D O O MYSTER I E S: “ THE N UT CRACKER SCOOB”

Director: Oscar Dufau, Rudy Zamora | Writer: Charles M. Howell, Tom Ruegger | USA | 1984 | TV Episode

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Premiering in 1984, The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries was another incarnation of Hanna-Barbera’s classic old dark house-inspired cartoon series that restored all of the show’s original teen sleuth characters, some of which were missing in the previous incarnation. In this episode, the Scooby gang are at a children’s home helping the kids rehearse for a holiday pageant, when a silent and creepy Ghost of Christmas Past frightens everyone away. The mystery solvers suspect the Scrooge-like Winslow Nickelby, a wealthy neighbor who believes there is a priceless gem hidden in the building. During the performance of the pageant the Ghost reappears and absconds with the star atop the home’s Christmas tree, leading to a chase across snow-covered fields. This 1984 episode is the earliest Scooby-Doo Christmas mystery, however it is usually cited as fans’ least favourite due to its simplicity, broad strokes in character, and the addition of the

unpopular character Scrappy Doo. Further, Scooby and the gang’s pageant is a bit confused, as it attempts to combine elements from the 19th century Russian ballet The Nutcracker with a dramatic performance of A Christmas Carol. (Joanna Wilson)

N E W Y E AR ’ S EVI L

Director: Emmett Alston | Writer: Leonard Neubauer | USA | 1980 | Feature On New Year’s Eve, famed DJ Blaze (Happy Days’ (1974-1984) Roz Kelly) hosts a cross-country celebration the that’s televised live across the nation. What starts as a wild, upbeat celebration is sullied when Blaze begins receiving calls from a self-proclaimed psychotic killer named Evil (Kip Niven), who outlines a chilling plan to take a new life at midnight in each time zone across the United States. Unlike many early slashers, New Year’s Evil features an unmasked killer, setting up a more conventional, but still enthralling, movie mystery. Audiences not only have to puzzle over which character in the film is actually behind the madness but also who this mysterious man really is, and how he relates to the others. This puts an extra responsibility on Niven, who is quite good in the role of Evil, oscillating with ease between psychotic and charming. New Year’s Evil is an unexpectedly subdued effort from Cannon Films, which was more known for audacious works that ramped up genre trappings to ten. New Year’s Evil isn’t particularly bloody or violent, but Alston’s direction gives the film a lively energy, which keeps it from feeling stale or overly formulaic. Taking place a few days after Christmas, New Year’s Evil represents a close to the yuletide season; a new, exciting year is about to begin for those lucky enough to make it through the night. (Joe Yanick)

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N I GH T G AL L E RY: “ THE MESSI AH O N MO TT ST REET ”

Director: Don Taylor | Writer: Gene Kearney | USA | 1971 | TV Episode Rod Serling’s dark anthology series Night Gallery (1969-1973) didn’t always lend itself to the sentimental, but the second-season holiday episode “The Messiah on Mott Street” attempts to bring in some holiday cheer. Based on a short story by Serling, who hosted this post-Twilight Zone (1959-1964) series, this episode involves sickly grandfather Abe Goldman (Edward G. Robinson in fine form) who worries he might not be able to raise his grandson Mikey (Ricky Powell) before the Angel of Death takes him away. When the Angel appears on Christmas Eve, it’s interrupted by Mikey, prompting Abe to comfort the boy by telling him that it was the Messiah coming to restore his health. Mikey sets out to find the Messiah so he can finish the job, and runs into Mr. Buckner (Yaphet Kotto), who is not

Above: Video box for New Year’s Evil (1980).

always what he seems. “The Messiah on Mott Street” has detractors because of its borderline syrupy views of hope and cheer for the holidays, but, has an interesting take on interfaith leading to new forms of mythmaking. The romantic view of “Every now and then, God remembers the tenements,” is only a cover for a story that seeks to unpack the complexities and fluidity of religion, and how we may assemble our own beliefs from a variety of sources (and maybe that’s not a bad thing). Coming off of the original Broadway production of Great White Hope, Kotto’s underthe-radar performance is the standout, bringing both faith and fear in his quietly strong role as the Messiah (although Robinson is always a treat). Serling’s story was likely influenced by the Bernard Malmud short story “Angel Levine.” The episode aired during Night Gallery’s rocky second season on December 15, 1971. Serling, who wasn’t given complete creative control, endlessly butted heads with producer Jack Laird, which led to Universal cutting back the series to half-an-hour and moving it to a less desirable time slot for its third and final season. For more on Christmas anthology TV, see page 84. (Amanda Reyes)

N I GH T OF THE C O MET

Director: Thom Eberhardt I Writer: Thom Eberhardt I USA I 1984 I Feature Thom Eberhardt’s bratty post-apocalyptic satire Night of the Comet is usually overlooked as a holiday film. The sun-soaked SoCal backdrop and scorching red atmosphere doesn’t exactly inspire visions of dancing sugar plums. However, Eberhardt’s clever mix of 1950s flavored sci-fi, bubblegum anarchy and Reagan-era shenanigans takes aim at consumerism amid the end of the world, and does, indeed, unfold during the most wonderful time of the year. Though sneakily orchestrated, the film is imbued with Christmas cheer appearing in the art design, music, and costuming, and makes a statement for finding joy even as society literally crumbles to dust. Eleven days before Christmas, the Earth orbits through a comet making its return after 65 million years. The masses gather in celebration at the promise of a spectacular celestial light show. Reggie Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart) shacks up all night with projectionist Larry in his booth, begrudgingly skipping the festivities. Her sister Sam (Kelli Maroney) also misses out when she hides out in a lawn shed after a fight with their wicked step-mother Doris. They awaken the following day to discover that the world’s population has been reduced to red powder. The gun-toting siblings, along with fellow survivor Hector (Robert Beltran), roam the city in search of a little fun in the aftermath, fending off mutants and scavengers they encounter along the way. As Reg, Sam, and Hector scuffle with the

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Above: Yaphet Kotto plays angel to an ailing Edward G. Robinson in Night Gallery: “The Messiah on Mott Street”(1971).

mutated remnants of society, Christmas imagery envelopes them; nearly every set piece is adorned with tinsel, lights, or wreaths, and Armageddon never looked so kitschy. Sam gets decked by Doris and falls beneath a bedecked Christmas tree. The outside of the El Rey movie theater where Reggie works as an usher greets patrons with “Merry Xmas” spray-painted on the exterior doors. A rendition of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” haunts the airwaves over visions of devastation. Hector even sports a Santa Claus suit and beard, bearing gifts in one of the films darkest moments, a climactic showdown with a group of blood-farming scientists lead by a character played by Mary Woronov. Night of the Comet may not be a holiday staple, but Eberhardt’s sassy blast should be cultdom’s official guide to any cataclysmic shopping spree. (Chris Hallock)

N I GH T OF T H E K R AMPUS

Director: Thomas Smith | Writer: Thomas Smith | USA | 2013 | Short The Krampus headlines this Christmas-themed sequel to director Thomas Smith’s 2011 horror/comedy short The Night Shift, which introduced graveyard minders Rue Morgan (Khristian Fulmer) and Claire Renfield (Erin Lilley), who also liked to dabble in paranormal investigations. Following a rash of child disappearances, the pair is called back into action again, along with their companion Herbie West (Soren Odom), a wise-cracking skeleton that Morgan totes around in a backpack. Doing some door-to-door canvassing, the team determines that the kidnappings are being perpetrated by the legendary Krampus, who is summoned by a shady neighbour who always wears a hood and carries around a skull goblet. Though the Krampus doesn’t have much screentime until the 30-minute film’s last third, it’s glowing eyes and pointed accusation of “naughty!” make it the clear highlight, even if it doesn’t do much aside from get into a fistfight with Morgan and turn on his master for the expected conclusion. Featuring light humour and a burgeoning romantic subplot between the two leads, this Alabama-shot short may not be as caustic or insightful as some of the other dark comedies centred around the Krampus’ antics, but fills a comfortable niche akin to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969-1970) or The X-Files (1993-2002), with a monster of the week who is easily vanquished in service of furthering the protagonists’ relationship. For more on the Krampus, see page 306. (Paul Corupe)

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Above: Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney in Night of the Comet (1984).

N I GH T TE RR O R S

Director: Alex Lukens, Jason Zink | Writer: Alex Lukens, Jason Zink | USA | 2014 | Feature In this anthology horror movie from schlock specialists Weird On Top Pictures, a resentful teenage girl (Alyssa Benner) regales her tween brother (Dominic Crawford) with three horrendous stories. The first (and best) yarn is another entry in the seemingly bottomless maniac-in-Santa-suit-on-the-loose subgenre. This time, the ho-ho-hood (Brandon Edging) targets some punks squatting in an abandoned house. This unconventional set of victims, considering most killer Santas target middle class suburbanites, sets the segment apart from this breed of slasher. An early beheading shows false promise of the mayhem to come, but the short is relatively bloodless from then on. A filter that mimics watching the film via a knackered VHS tape isn’t nearly as convincing as some of the gore effects on display throughout. (Eric Zaldivar)

N I GH T TR AI N MUR D ER S

Director: Aldo Lado | Writer: Roberto Infascelli, Ettore Sanzò, Renato Izzo, and Aldo Lado | Italy | 1975 | Feature It’s Christmas, and two young students, Lisa (Laura D’Angelo) and Margaret (Irene Miracle of Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980)), are taking the night train from Germany to Italy to spend the holidays with Lisa’s parents. On the way, a couple of petty criminals, Blackie and Curly (played by Flavio Bucci and

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Above: Night Train Murders (1975).

Gianfranco De Grassi respectively), board the train, befriending a vicious, wellto-do nymphomaniac (Macha Méril of Deep Red (1976)). The three proceed to rape, torture and eventually murder the young girls. Attempting to cover their tracks, they get rid of any evidence the girls were ever on board. They think they’ve gotten away scot free. But despite their best efforts, they won’t escape without paying for their crimes. Also known as Last Stop on the Night Train, this nasty Italian exploitation effort is very closely modeled after Wes Craven’s iconic Last House on the Left. Craven’s 1972 landmark was directly inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s controversial The Virgin Spring (1960), which explored issues of faith and morality in the wake of the rape and murder of a young family’s virgin daughter. Craven took these themes and expounded upon them, fleshing out the controversial subject matter for contemporary audiences. Despite hitting similarly disturbing notes, Night Train Murders lacks the weight and impact of its predecessors, relying predominantly on shock value. However, the Christmas setting helps set it apart, adding to film’s hard-hitting brutality as the plot unfolds at the time of year that families usually strive to be together, a time of joy and giving. (Ariel Fisher)

N I GH T VI S I TO R S

Director: David Fulk | Writer: David Fulk, Norman Smith | USA | 1987 | Feature The Whitmore family’s cozy home life is disrupted on Chrstmas Eve by a group of bizarre characters seemingly acting under the spell of their leader. This brutal gang takes possession of their home and forces each family member to take part in eerie rituals designed to feed the leader’s apparent death wish. (Press notes)

T H E N I G H T M A R E B E FO R E C HR I STMAS

Director: Henry Selick | Writer: Caroline Thompson | USA | 1993 | Feature This musical family classic is set in a fantastical world where the holidays exist as fully functioning towns. Jack Skellington is the King of Halloween Town, where all things spooktacular reign supreme. Frustrated with the repetitive nature of his existence, Jack stumbles upon Christmas Town. There he is enchanted by an alternative way of life that perplexes him. He returns to Halloween Town with the intention of co-opting Christmas, to bring something new and different to their horrific holiday. Jack suffers an identity crisis along the way with disastrous results.

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The iconography in A Nightmare Before Christmas has become canonized, woven into the very fabric of horror and pop culture at large. And while Nightmare is, for all intents and purposes, a kids’ movie, Selick and Thompson never pander. The film balances complex themes of cultural appropriation, identity politics, and the perception of self with a child-friendly discussion of the meaning of Christmas. A debate has raged since its release as to whether Nightmare is a Christmas or a Halloween movie. The answer is simple: it’s both. Almost child-like in his gleeful exploration of all things Christmas, Jack is the representation of every kid on both Christmas morning and All Hallows Eve. That joy for the holidays transcends age and medium, immersing audiences in the elation we feel when our sack of candy is full after trick or treating, or when

we unwrap our first present on Christmas morning. Very few horror films manage to capture the joy of the holidays amidst their carnage. Nightmare captures the heart and soul of the holidays through the eyes of monsters we can’t help but love. (Ariel Fisher)

O C H RI S TMAS TR E E

Director: Greg Kovacs | Writer: Greg Kovacs | Canada | 2015 | Short A kindly-seeming elderly woman invites a group of 20-something carollers in for some hot cocoa, where it is revealed that she plans to drug and kill them for nefarious (but festive!) purposes. Ironic comedy abounds from the contrast of youthful apathy with old-age kitsch. (Kier-La Janisse)

O E X ORC I SMO NE G R O

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Director: Jose Mojica Marins | Writer: Rubens Francisco Luchetti, José Mojica Marins, Adriano Stuart | Brazil | 1974 | Feature Director Jose Mojica-Marins helmed and starred in Brazil’s first fright film, À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma (At Midnight I’ll Take your Soul) about “Ze Do Caixao” (aka “Coffin Joe”), a sadistic village mortician feared by the locals. The 1964 movie turned Joe into the country’s celebrity boogieman both on and off the screen. Following his superior 1967 sequel Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver (On This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse), Mojica-Marins relegated his Coffin Joe character to less prominent roles, although he does return as the main antagonist in O Exorcismo Negro (The Black Exorcism Of Coffin Joe), even though he does not appear until the final half hour. In the film, auteur Marins (playing himself) travels to a friend’s farmhouse to spend Christmas with family and to write his next picture only to be confronted by odd phenomena, such as

Above: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

self-playing toy pianos, family members becoming suddenly violent and snakes coiling around a Christmas tree. Marins soon realizes that it’s the work of a local witch whom the family owes their first born to. The film culminates in a black mass where Marins must save his kindred from the influence of Coffin Joe before Christmas dinner and post-meal caroling. Though historically important, Marins’ work is rarely entertaining and O Exorcismo Negro is no exception. Though it should be praised for breaking ground with a meta-fictional approach later popularized in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Lucio Fulci’s Cat In The Brain (1990). (Eric Zaldivar)

T H E OF F I CI AL R AR E E XPO R TS I NC . SAFE TY IN ST RUCT ION S

Director: Jalmari Helander | Writers: Jalmari Helander, Juuso Helander | Finland | 2005 | Short The follow-up to their popular 2003 short Rare Exports Inc., Jalmari and Juuso Helander’s The Official Rare Exports Inc. Safety Instructions fleshes out the gleefully bleak concept of man-eating Santa Clauses. Here we learn that bad behavior invites their wrath. Swearing, rudeness, loud noises, and drinking or excessive swearing will set off a Father Christmas. Along with Rare Exports Inc., the Santa-as-wild-beast premise was expanded to feature length for 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a film that, like the two shorts that preceded it, is tonally more akin to 2015’s Krampus, films that helped redefine the crazed killer Claus for the Christmas horror canon. For more on Rare Exports, see page 284. (Ariel Fisher)

ON C E U P ON A TI ME AT C HR I STMAS

Director: Paul Tanter | Writer: Paul Tanter, Christopher Jolley, Simon Phillips | UK/ Canada | 2017 | Feature A deadly duo dressed as Santa and Mrs, Claus (Simon Phillips and Sayla Vee in briliantly psychotic performances) rampage through the small town of Woodridge, NY in the twelve days leading up to Christmas. As the cops (Barry Kennedy and Jeff Ellenberger) scramble to halt the bodycount they realize the killers are working to a twisted yuletide pattern that points to a local teenager (Laurel Brady) as the final victim on Santa’s list. (Kier-La Janisse)

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ON E H E L L O F A C HR I STMAS

Director: Shaky Gonzalez | Writer: Shaky Gonzales | UK | 2002 | Feature Released on home video as a “Fangoria Presents” title, One Hell of a Christmas really gets going when ex-con Carlitos (Tolo Montana) is released from a Federal prison in Nevada at Christmas time and ends up receiving a demonically possessed claw that has the ability to control all those who encounter it. Only the dealer who originally sold the claw is desperate to reclaim the object, which has to be returned to its original owner. The subsequent outbreak of mayhem includes Carlitos waking up next to a dead female body, a decapitating demon, the snorting of black dragon powder, a stripper returning from the grave, a zombified cowboy doll and the eventual appearance of a non-traditional Santa. Many of the computer-generated visuals severely date One Hell of a Christmas, leaving it with a decidedly b-grade glaze despite some impressive make-up work. One Hell of a Christmas was lensed in Los Angeles by Chilean-

born writer/director Shaky Gonzalez, who also directed The Last Demon Slayer (2011). (Michael Helms)

OR N AM E N TS

Director: Brian Samuel Davis | Writer: Brian Samuel Davis | USA | 2008 | Feature The holidays are always difficult, exposing some of the most raw and vulnerable parts of ourselves. Ornaments, an indie dramedy about a patchwork family taps into those struggles with holiday stress, as Julie (Angela Dawe) and her Jewish girlfriend (Jordana Oberman) host their annual family Christmas get-together. Coming in for the celebration are Julie’s brother (director Brian Samuel Davis in an outstanding performance) and his boyfriend Aneiken (Romel Jamison), as well as a childhood friend (Chad Olson) and his born-again wife (Kelly May). In the grand tradition of holiday comedies like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), anything that can go wrong does, but the tone of this character study is more somber as ugliness boils to the surface and brutal honesty becomes the order of the day. Davis fully embraces the chaos of family gatherings, playing with themes of depression, abandonment, self-loathing, addiction, and betrayal while weaving together a beautiful character study whose horrific elements lie in the terrible reality of self-destruction. The production value is amateurish at best, making Ornaments feel more like a proof-of-concept piece than a finished product, but Davis’s work has spectacular bones, and is a film that actively demands, and deserves, attention. (Ariel Fisher)

P2

Director: Franck Khalfoun | Writer: Franck Khalfoun, Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur | USA | 2007 | Feature The first feature from director Franck Khalfoun, P2 is the sixth collaboration between producers Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, who are best known for their brutal, twisty take on the slasher film in their breakthrough hit High Tension (2003). P2 spends the majority of its running time in the titular parking level as the deranged security guard Thomas (Wes Bentley) takes the busy but lonely office worker Angela (Rachel Nichols) hostage on Christmas Eve, convinced he can make her love him. The film pulls in the viscerally gory horror that made High Tension a singular experience but engages the protagonists in battle of sexes as the night drags on. Set against the urban backdrop of an underground parking garage which has been ostensibly deserted on Christmas Eve, the fear and tension become palpable in the film as Angela and Thomas struggle for control over who is the captor and the captive. P2 utilizes the fear of loneliness surrounding the holidays, highlighting the tenuous grasp held between people who can occupy close quarters for over 40 hours a week but barely know each other outside of that. Made after Aja and Levasseur’s hit remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006), P2 was poorly received by critics and did even worse at the box office, but stands as a terrifying and thrilling film about the chilling need for intimacy during the brightest of seasons. For more on P2, see Page 210. (Alexandra West)

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P E ACE ON EAR TH

Director: Hugh Harman | Writer: Unknown | USA | 1939 | Short

The Oscar-nominated 1939 MGM theatrical release cartoon Peace on Earth is a stunning anti-war story set at Christmas in a post-apocalyptic society run by woodland creatures. In the short, a grandfather squirrel explains to his offspring how humans have become extinct, evoking terrifying imagery of modern soldiers with gasmasks and bayonet rifles, tanks filling the roads, skies filled with bomber airplanes and many buildings—including homes, churches and schools—collapsing from bombardments. The surviving animals rebuilt civilization in peace and cooperation from the now obsolete and abandoned human-built war machinery. Taking its name from the lyrics of popular Christmas carol “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” the short’s clear anti-war message overlaps with the Christmas sentiments of peace, goodwill, and respect for God’s rules. While the cartoon’s powerful imagery points to European conflicts at the time involving Nazi Germany (less than two years later, the United States joined in the fighting in what became World War II), the message remains as relevant as ever. The short was re-made in 1955 as Good Will to Men. (Joanna Wilson)

P E TI T P OW P O W NO Ë L

Director: Robert Morin | Writer: Robert Morin | Canada | 2005 | Feature Canadian filmmaker Robert Morin’s most unsettling film is perhaps the real-life horror tale Petit Pow! Pow! Noël (2005), a Christmas-set story recounting 24 hours in the life of a deranged individual who decides to torture, humiliate and kill a disabled old man, played by Morin’s own father as he lived out his last days in a nursing home. For more on Petit Pow! Pow! Noël, see page 200. (Ralph Elawani)

T H E P H AN T OM C AR R I AG E

Director: Victor Sjöström | Writer: Victor Sjöström, Selma Lagerlöf | Sweden | 1921 | Feature Based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, The Phantom Carriage is widely considered one of the most important works of Swedish cinema. It is said that the last person to die before the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve will be damned to drive the Grim Reaper’s phantom carriage for the following year, and The Phantom Carriage tells the story of the Reaper (Olof Ås) come to claim his replacement: David Holm (writer and director Victor Sjöström) is that man. A drunk, neglectful father and abusive husband, Holm has squandered his life. But on the night of his death, the Reaper shows him the error of his ways.

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With groundbreaking in-camera special effects and a complex narrative that propels the audience backwards and forwards through the plot, The Phantom Carriage has been noted as an influence on not only Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) but also Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The Phantom Carriage also serves as a bleak precursor to It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Though centered on an inebriated, abusive fool, as opposed to the altruistic benevolence of the latter’s George Bailey, the sentiment is similar: it’s never too late to realize the potential of your life. Unlike Bailey, Holm is scarcely trying to find a silver lining to be thankful for—there is none. But he can make amends for the damage he’s done. The message remains profound—we are responsible for the life we lead, and the choices we make—so choose wisely. (Ariel Fisher)

Right: French cinema card for Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921).

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P OP E Y E TH E SAI LO R : “ SPI NAC H G R EETI NGS”

Director: Seymour Kneitel | Writer: Unknown | USA | 1960 | TV Episode One of the more gentle entries for horror fans, this five-minute segment from an episode of TV series Popeye the Sailor has the popular animated strongman saving Santa Claus from the clutches of his nemesis the Sea Hag. Seeing how Popeye and his friends celebrate Christmas, angry witch Sea Hag and her pet vulture attempt to stop Santa from making his annual delivery of toys. When Old St. Nick doesn’t arrive, Popeye makes his way to Sea Hag’s isolated mountaintop home to save Santa and prepare the vulture for a sumptuous holiday dinner. The Sea Hag throws a tantrum because her Christmas is ruined by everyone else’s happiness. Introduced in the 1929 comic strip Thimble Theatre, Popeye the Sailor and his frequent adversary the Sea Hag were created by E. C. Segar, eventually adapted for theatrical shorts by Max Fleischer for Paramount in the 1930s, and expanded to television in 1960. The Sea Hag’s traditional witch appearance and menacing pet vulture create a (relatively) frightening foe for Popeye. (Joanna Wilson)

P S Y CH O

Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Writer: Joseph Stefano, Robert Bloch | USA | 1960 | Feature Few people, if anybody, ever consider Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to be a Christmas horror film, but it does take place at the yuletide season. The film opens by establishing a precise date (Friday, December 11) and we follow Marion (Janet Leigh) as she goes through the last two days of her life, famously being killed in the shower at the Bates Motel on Saturday, December 12. Then, there’s a plot ellipse of a week or so before private eye Arbogast (Martin Balsam) and then Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) and boyfriend Sam (John Gavin) trace her to the motel where Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) seems to be twitchily covering up crimes committed by his mad mother. It follows that the climax of Psycho must take on the December 19 or 20, just days before Christmas arrives. Psycho was shot rapidly from November 1959 to February 1960. The December date was chosen in post-production since Christmas displays are dimly visible in the shops in some of the location scenes shot in Phoenix, Arizona. It was obviously a late decision, because none of the interiors are decorated accordingly. Surely, the folksy Sheriff (John McIntire) and his wife (Lurene Tuttle) ought to have a tinsel-swathed home and a fully-decorated tree in their living room? And Norman might have a couple of cards sent by local businesses and a pathetic sprig of holly or two around the motel. He could even wear a badly-knitted homemade reindeer sweater his mother once gave him. The other major unChristmassy Christmas horror film is John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), which takes place in the week before Christmas—though everyone is too haunted and on edge to mention it. And no one would dare hang mistletoe up in the Belasco house. (Kim Newman)

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P S Y CH O S AN TA

Director: Peter Keir | Writer: Peter Keir | USA | 2003 | Feature While driving to a family holiday get-together, a man tells his wife the history

of a murderous, Santa-suited psychopath who claimed victims during past Christmastimes. Among those stalked and terrorized are a couple of sexy friends having their annual yuletide sleepover party; a couple of burglars who have killed the maniac’s blind mother; a little boy playing “Deck the Halls” on the piano and his mom; and a brother and sister whose car breaks down on an outing to cut down a tree. Naturally, the two motorists ultimately have their own run-in with the red-clad maniac. This appears to be, like The Christmas Season Massacre, (2001), a Midwest production, and like that one carries nary a trace of wintertime ambience. Though not billed as such, Psycho Santa essentially qualifies as an anthology feature, as what initially seems to be the central story ends up being the framing device for a series of lengthy flashbacks. “Lengthy” is the operative word, as each of these segments is padded out with tediously prolonged scenes of the soon-to-be casualties wandering through the woods and houses. Nonetheless, writer/director Peter Keir shows an occasional sense of style and visual imagination one doesn’t always find in shot-on-video cheapies. He also came up with a sickly amusing punchline to the first flashback, and found a great automobile-graveyard location for one girl to be pursued through. (Michael Gingold)

P U P P E T MASTE R VS D EMO NI C TO YS

Director: Ted Nicolaou I Writer: C. Courtney Joyner I 2004 I USA/Germany I TV Film Two of Full Moon Features’ popular franchises cross paths for a miniature clash of wills as Andre Toulon’s puppet guardians from the prolific Puppet Master series lock horns with the possessed playthings of Demonic Toys. Direct-to-video wizard Charles Band undoubtedly corners the market on pint-sized terror, and these killer toys are part in an arsenal containing the Ghoulies and Subspecies series, as well as the tiny terrors found in Prehysteria! (1993), The Creeps (1997), and Blood Dolls (1999). Corey Feldman hams it up as Robert Toulon, the great-grand nephew of Andre Toulon, carrying on his uncle’s legacy at Toulon’s Toy Hospital. On Christmas Eve, Robert and his daughter Alexandra (Danielle Keaton) use the Toulon family’s blood formula to resurrect Pinhead, Jester, Six-Shooter, and Blade, while a rival company plots against them. Sharpe Toys’ owner Erica Sharpe wants to ensure that her Christmas Pals line becomes the holiday’s most popular toy craze since the Cabbage Patch Kids, and mom and pop businesses like Toulon’s are obstacles to profit domination. Sharpe strikes a deal with Bael, the demon of wealth, to bring her own evil dolls to life, sending Baby Oopsy Daisy, Jack Attack and Grizzly Teddy to hijack Toulon’s blood, kidnap Alexandra, and dispatch his puppet protectors once and for all.

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Empire Pictures veteran Ted Nicolaou, who helmed the entire Subspecies series, along with cult favorites The Dungeonmaster (1985) and TerrorVision (1986), knows how to navigate a Charles Band property. He embraces the campiness inherent in the concept, and applies a cable-friendly blend of wisecracks, sleaze and bloodletting while commenting on the shameless and destructive nature of corporate greed. He also updates both franchises using modern technology in the form of computer hacking, spy cameras embedded in toys, and Toulon outfitting the puppets with cybernetic appendages for next level

mayhem. Of course, all we really want is the inevitable showdown between Toulon’s stoic but deadly puppets and the unruly Demonic Toys gang. The film’s climax falls short of spectacle, but Nicolaou gleefully delivers the demon Bael clad in a Santa outfit, zany ritual sacrifice, laser gun mayhem, and the promised fisticuffs between animated toys that kill. (Chris Hallock)

QU AN T U M L E A P: “A LI TTLE MI R AC LE”

Director: Michael Watkins| Writer: Sandy Fries, Robert Wolterstorff| USA| 1990 | TV Episode The horror elements are toned down in favor of heartwarming emotions in this TV adaptation of Dickens’ novella, which sends Dr. Sam Beckett back to December 24, 1962. Al’s Ghost of Christmas Future is quite similar to Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice (1988). For more on A Christmas Carol, see page xx. (Leslie Hatton)

RAR E E X P OR TS: A C HR I STMAS TALE

Director: Jalmari Helander | Writer: Jalmari Helander, Juuso Helander, Petri Jokiranta, Sami Parkkinen | Finland | 2010 | Feature In a Finnish mountain, an excavation team digs up the living remains of the punisher of naughty children, Santa Claus. Soon, the young son of a local reindeer hunter (Onni Tommila) finds himself the target of this very ancient and very evil being. Unlike most of its Christmas horror brethren, which normally never break free of their simple, exploitative shackles, Rare Exports delivers a nuanced story and accomplished filmmaking that brings Steven Spielberg to mind. The film’s story of adolescents stumbling on something marvelous and otherworldly fits right in line with Hollywood’s most famous confectionist, right down to placing kid characters in an adult world that they take charge of in the final reel. Starting as a web series almost a decade earlier, the feature film is a prequel of sorts, with the origins of a Santa-hunting organization depicted in Rare Exports’ final moments. Rare Exports is, quite possibly, the best entry in the “Evil Santa” subgenre. For more on Rare Exports, see page 284 (Eric Zaldivar)

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R AR E E X PO R TS, I NC .

Director: Jalmari Helander | Writers: Jalmari Helander, Juuso Helander | Finland | 2003 | Short

Jalmari and Juuso Helander created a viral sensation with Rare Exports Inc., a seven-minute short that features a specially trained group of Finnish hunters hunting a most rare creature: Father Christmas. The blackly comedic short is about the hunting, training, and trafficking of these elderly men who live free and nude and running wild through the vast expanse of Finland’s Lapland. Dangerous and violent, they should be treated with respect, and wariness. They are captured, and trained to avoid eating little children who sit on their laps, while bringing them joy and the promise of gifts. Once ready, they are shipped around the world, conceivably to malls where they will sit on display for the public to see. Rare Exports Inc. (as well as its follow up The Official Rare Exports Inc. Safety Instructions) offers an inventive take on the potential terror of Santa. Instead of a demonic or psychotic figure, we’re offered a feral fantasy

creature that must be tamed to please spoiled children around the world. It’s a delightfully sardonic twist that fits neatly into the canon of killer Clauses alongside such gems as Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). For more on Rare Exports, see page 284. (Ariel Fisher)

T H E R E AL G HO STB U STE R S: “ X-MAS M ARKS T H E SPOT ”

Director: Richard Raynis | Writer: J. Michael Straczynski | USA | 1986 | TV Episode Based on the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, this clever holiday episode of the animated TV series The Real Ghostbusters (1986-1991) pits the paranormal exterminators against the season’s most famous spirits. Driving through a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, Ghostbusters Egon, Ray, Peter and Winston are unknowingly transported back to Victorian England, where they capture several ghosts they witness harassing an old man. Later, the Ghostbusters learn their interference has accidentally changed history—by capturing the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Scrooge’s “bah, humbug” philosophy has triumphed over holiday spirit. The Ghostbusters have to go back in time to fix their mistake, while Peter gets over his own seasonal depression. Viewers don’t see much of the ghosts’ frightening context from Dickens’ original tale, and the Ghostbusters’ attempt to gaslight Scrooge into experiencing a moral conversion—a distraction while they try to retrieve the original ghosts from their disposal unit—lacks much fear-inducing storytelling as well. Despite these weaknesses, this cartoon does take the business of ghosts quite seriously. (Joanna Wilson)

RE D C H RI STMAS

Director: Craig Anderson | Writer: Craig Anderson | Australia | 2016 | Feature Tension lurks just beneath the tinsel of many family Christmas gatherings. In Red Christmas, the first feature-length Australian Christmas horror film, recently widowed Diane (Dee Wallace, who also co-produced) hosts her extended family for Christmas in her remote country home for what might be the last time. As they thrash out a variety of issues, upping the homecooked angst to unbearable levels, a bandaged and hooded stranger appears, sending Diane into a fit of apoplectic rage and setting off a seasonal massacre. The blackly comic feature debut of writer/director Craig Anderson (co-creator of excellent absurdist TV series Double the Fist (2004)), Red Christmas

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Above: Dee Wallace is confronted wth her past in Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas (2016).

goes out of its way to explode familial tensions all over the landscape of Diane’s remote country house. While it will never be confused with either version of Bush Christmas, Red Christmas has a great respect for the season. Stick around for the end credits where Anderson lists half a dozen titles that directly influenced it. (Michael Helms)

RI F T

Director: Erlingur Thoroddsen | Writer: Eringur Thoroddsen | Iceland | 2017 | Feature Breakups affect everyone differently. Gunnar (Björn Stefánsson), for example, has already gotten over his ex, Einar (Sigurður Þór Óskarsson), and moved on to a serious relationship with someone new. But Einar hasn’t been able to get over the relationship as easily and a chance encounter at a party has Gunnar worried about his ex’s mental state. When Gunnar is awoken by an odd phone call, he makes his excuses to his current boyfriend and heads off to check on him at the isolated vacation home that his parents own. There he finds an Einar that he’s unsure how to deal with, a man who’s bouncing between longing and despair with alarming frequency. Gunnar can’t quite decide how to handle the situation and considers leaving, but can’t quite pull himself away. He gets drawn into a complicated web when both men’s fears begin to manifest as external, possibly malevolent forces. It’s rare enough to see a horror film from Iceland, but to find one centred on a homosexual relationship is truly unique. While this is only his second feature, writer/director Erlingur Thoroddsen confidently paints a picture about how our fears convince us to hide from each other and ourselves. This seemingly simple relationship drama morphs into an acute thriller that slowly increases tension and an odd sense of foreboding like a crescendo. The film is set in the weeks leading up to Christmas and the crisp cold and long, dark nights only add to the atmosphere. The line between what’s real and what’s not becomes increasingly blurry, forcing us to question everything that we’re shown. The lead actors are both sensational, allowing you to feel the love that they shared and the pain that they’ve clearly caused each other. Beautifully shot almost like a postcard from or a love letter to Iceland, Rift is a gorgeous, concentrated rumination on love and loss and the fear inherent in both. (Luke Mullen)

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R. L S TI N E ’ S T HE HAU NTI NG HO U R : “A C R EAT URE WAS ST IRRIN G”

Director: Terry Ingram | Writer: Dan Angel, Billy Brown, R.L Stine, James Thorpe | Canada/USA | 2010 | TV Episode Narrowly escaping death at the hands of a destructive, acid-spitting creature may not be everyone’s idea of “the best Christmas ever,” but that’s exactly how it turns out for little Timmy Morgan (Thomas Robinson) this first-season episode

Above: Björn Stefánsson in Rift (2017).

of the anthology series R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour (2010-2014). Squarely aimed at the tween demographic familiar with author R.L. Stine’s hugely popular Goosebumps book series and other horror-tinged works, The Haunting Hour’s stand-alone stories feature youngsters dealing with life issues, familial problems and a raft of monsters, ghosts and otherwise supernatural goings-on. In this early episode, the Morgan’s efforts to spend a loving, family Christmas Day together are ruined by strained sibling relationships and the revelation that mom and dad are soon to be divorced. It appears that Santa has ignored Timmy’s plea to make the Morgans feel like a family again, with an apparent added insult being the arrival of the aforementioned creature as a present from Santa himself. Trapped in the family home by a freak blizzard that coincides with the present’s mysterious delivery, the Morgans have to work together as a unit to survive the demonic creature’s attacks, thus rediscovering their love for one another and re-attaching the frayed familial bonds. With the Morgan’s emotional problems solved, and Timmy’s Christmas wish granted, Santa calls off the creature and moves on to his next delivery. “A Creature Was Stirring” employs its horrific elements in order to bring one dysfunctional family back together at a time of year synonymous with familial love. (Neil Mitchell)

ROAD S I D E

Director: Eric England | Writer: Eric England | USA | 2012 | Feature An extremely simple suspense thriller, Roadside is modestly effective, if slender. On Christmas, Dan (Ace Marrero) and Mindy Summers (Katie Stegeman), a couple who aren’t getting on well at least partly due to their insecurities during pregnancy, are squabbling as they drive on remote roads to make their way towards relatives, having already encountered a Duel-like pick-up truck driven by an angry redneck (Marshall Yates). The real trouble starts when the way is blocked by a felled tree in the middle of nowhere—a calm voice (Brad Douglas) talks to Dan from the woods, and occasional shots from a high-powered rifle keep the couple in place. There are tiny cutaways with a park ranger (Lionel D. Carson), a folksy gas station attendant (Jack E. Curenton) and a relative (Alan Pietrruszewski) shows up late in the day to join the body count (unsurprisingly, the family dog doesn’t make it far into the story), but for most of the film we’re in the same cleft stick as Roadside’s protagonists. The victims keep asking their tormentor why this is happening—and, as is often the case, no satisfactory answer is forthcoming. In some cases, this insoluble mystery adds to the suspense, but there are enough feints here to suggest something that ultimately doesn’t arrive—there’s no sense as to what the sniper’s endgame might be, and the film is just stuck with the

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Above: R.L Stine’s The Haunting Hour: “A Creature Was Stirring” (2010).

not-very-pleasant, but not-very-interesting-either couple limping through old arguments (has Dan had a fling with a dental assistant?) towards a redemptive arc. The well-spoken sniper projects an air of menace, resisting Dan’s attempts to get him to reveal anything—even whether he is as cold as his victims—but a last-moment reveal is just a fillip rather than a twist. Roadside is certainly less memorable than Ryuhei Kitamura’s 2017 film Downrange, but does prefigure the premise of that higher-profile picture. (Kim Newman)

ROS E AN N E : “ HALLO W EEN I V ”

Director: Andrew D. Weyman| Writer: Rob Ulin | United States | 1992 | TV Episode Switching Christmas for Halloween makes this adaptation of A Christmas Carol more seasonally appropriate for Roseanne’s favorite holiday. Yet it’s not Christmas or Halloween that’s at stake; it’s the possibility that Roseanne might turn into her own mother. For more information, see page xx. (Leslie Hatton

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S AF E N E I GH B O R HO O D

Director: Chris Peckover | Writer: Chris Peckover, Zack Kahn | Australia | 2016| Feature With his sophomore feature Safe Neighborhood (released in the U.S. as Better Watch Out), director Chris Peckover (2010’s Undocumented) chose to go a bit Above: Olivia DeJonge in Safe Neighbourhood, aka Better Watch Out (2016). Photo © Storm Vision Entertainment.

lighter and less political. The film retains an arresting air of cynicism and includes several funny moments, but is still quite a shocker too. Shot in Australia, with a predominantly Australian cast, Safe Neighborhood places itself in what seems like Suburban Utopia, USA, with all of the holiday accouterments audiences have become accustomed to seeing from the uppermiddle classes in Christmas movies. Heading off to a yuletide party, the parents of smart tween Luke (Levi Miller) call upon their trusted (and beautiful) babysitter, Ashley (Olivia DeJonge) to keep him company. Alone in the house, they are subjected to a home invasion that is quickly turned on its ear, as the terrorized become the terrorizers. A strange and wonderful film, Safe Neighborhood’s portrayal of self-aware millennial children is thick with contempt and biting humor. And yet, there’s an air of innocence that permeates the film, which makes the horrors that much more unhinged. The more than capable young cast is terrific and charming. The violence is over the top and humorous, and perhaps makes Safe Neighborhood a film that isn’t for everyone. While stars Virginia Madsen and Patrick Warburton only bookend the film, they are one of the most memorable aspects. Their dialogue was mostly improvised thanks to Warburton’s quick-asa-whip wit and Madsen’s undeniable power as a strong actress in any role. The holiday setting feels like an afterthought, but does add to the world-gonemad aesthetics that permeate the horrors happening within the safe spaces of domesticity during the Christmas season (while also working as fodder for a couple of sight gags). The overall clever presentation makes it worth a visit. (Amanda Reyes)

S AL OON BAR

Director: Walter Forde | Writer: John Dighton, Angus MacPhail, Frank Harvey | UK | 1940 | Feature

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Set on Christmas Eve, Saloon Bar—originally written for the London stage by Australian playwright and screenwriter Frank Harvey in 1939—is a quick-witted and charming British thriller that takes place the night before an innocent man’s hanging. Eddie Graves (Alec Clunes) has been tried for murder, and found guilty. However, many believe him to be innocent, including a bookie named Joe Harris (Gordon Harker). He and his friends are all regulars at the local pub, the Saloon Bar. When some shocking information comes to light, Joe must race against the clock in order to prove Eddie’s innocence, and save him from the gallows. Harker’s Joe Harris spends the majority of the film deep in the seedy underbelly of his community, sussing out whatever corruption he can find that might prove Eddie Graves’ innocence. The notion of waiting for absolution

Above: Levi Miler and Virginia Madsen in Safe Neighbourhood, aka Better Watch Out (2016). Photo © Storm Vision Entertainment.

bookends the film, with Joe’s attempts to liberate Eddie, and the bar owner’s (Norman Pierce) agonizing wait for the birth of his child. Given its gallows humor and bleak subject matter, Saloon Bar is an unconventional choice for Christmas viewing. And yet the film is still steeped in holiday spirit, presenting thematic motifs of goodwill, family, kindness, and generosity and suggesting that it’s the family you make for yourself—even at the local pub—that matters most. (Ariel Fisher)

S AN TA

Director: Dionysis Atzarakis, Manos Atzarakis | Writer: Dionysis Atzarakis, Manos Atzarakis | Greece | 2013 | Short Clocking in at just 90 seconds long, this dialogue-free Greek film about a disturbing visit from a suspiciously Krampus-like Santa is among the more all-out frightening Christmas horror shorts, a quick blast of glossy, strange imagery that stays with viewers in its effective presentation of Santa himself. Hearing some rustlings in the chimney on Christmas Eve, the film follows a young girl as she slips out of bed to try and catch a glimpse of the man with the bag. Only when she creeps to the living room does she see a nocturnal visitor who sports not only the usual fur-fringed red outfit, but also long, creepy claws and a withered, blue-tinged face. When her brother also awakes to see the commotion, she’s shocked to see the Krampus-like monster rise behind him and pull him into the darkness before launching towards the girl. More of a showcase for technical craft by sibling filmmakers Dionysis and Manos Atzarakis, Santa is still an admirably made effort full of dark doorways and corrupted Christmas imagery that does more in a few scenes to create a scary Saint Nick than some featurelength films. (Paul Corupe)

S AN TA CL AU S

Director: René Cardona, Ken Smith I Writer: René Cardona, Adolfo Torres Portillo I Mexico I 1959 I Feature Santa’s signature “Ho Ho Ho” registers as a peculiar cackle in the opening moment of Mexican-produced Santa Claus, signifying to the viewer that something is a bit irregular about this incarnation of jolly St. Nick. Here we find Father Christmas (José Elías Moreno) presiding over an interplanetary Toyland, watching over the children of Earth from a “Magic Observatory” with the aid of his space-age devices the Tele-Talker, Cosmic Telescope, the Master Eye and the Dreamscope. This may seem an intrusive duty, but it’s all in service of sorting the naughty from the nice before his annual journey of gift-giving. When Lucifer sends Hell’s chief agent Pitch (Jose Luis Aguirre) to recruit the children of the world to commit evil (he prefers the rudest ones), Santa resists the mischief caused by the scheming demon with the help of his devoted helpers. A kooky blend of science fiction and folklore, Santa Claus was introduced to U.S. audiences by the “King of Kiddie Matinee” K. Gordon Murray, an American producer who specialized in redubbing foreign kid’s fantasy films for North American release. Director René Cardona was a Cuban ex-pat, accomplished actor, and filmmaker in Mexico whose massive body of work spans historical adventures like The Count of Monte Cristo (1942) to cult titles Night of the Bloody Apes (1969). Murray, a keen businessman, recognized the potential to profit from the enduring mythology of Santa packaged in this

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strange and whimsical contest between good and evil. Sometimes retitled as Santa Claus vs. The Devil, Santa Claus catches flack for its bizarre goofiness—a hodgepodge of surreal dance sequences, grandiose set pieces, sci-fi gadgetry, and subversion of tradition. At its core, however, is an earnest exploration of the seductive power of temptation, exemplified by innocent Lupita (Lupita Quezadas), a kind-hearted little girl who is coerced by Pitch to steal a doll she’s coveted from afar. Santa Claus may skirt logic and cohesion, but it’s an undeniably imaginative celebration fully committed to its creators’ eccentric vision of the holiday. For more on Santa Claus, see page 264. (Chris Hallock)

S AN TA CL A US C O NQ U ER S THE MAR TI AN S

Director: Nicholas Webster I Writer: Glenville Mareth, Paul L. Jacobson I USA I 1964 I Feature The children of Mars are plagued by sullen detachment resulting from machinefed educations and a restrictive lifestyle. A Martian council, led by King Kimar (Leonard Hicks), consults with elder Cochem (Carl Don) to discuss concerns over their welfare. “We need a Santa Claus on Mars,” advises the 800-year-old sage who is critical of the red planet’s stringent society. Mars’ leaders devise a plan to kidnap jolly Saint Nick (John Call) to deliver joy to the children of the planet. Voldar (Vincent Beck), Kimar’s ideological rival, plots to kill Santa before Earth’s culture of toys, television, and Christmas cheer corrupts Martian civilization. Though they share no direct production connection, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians could be viewed as a companion to Mexican-produced Santa Claus (1959); the films are constructed similarly, using whimsy and absurdity to comment on a variety of social ills, pitting a good-natured Saint Nick against extraordinary foes. Director Nicholas Webster worked primarily in television, directing episodes of Mannix (1967), Bonanza (1959), and the terrific paranormal/conspiracy/cryptozoology investigative series In Search of… (1976) hosted by Leonard Nimoy. Webster and his team fully embrace the outlandish premise of this peculiar blend of sci-fi and holiday fantasy, a film that boasts dastardly green men brandishing weapons like the deadly “tickle ray.” Santa Claus Conquers the Martians has been unfairly targeted as one of cinema’s worst films, inescapably lampooned by programs like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988) and RiffTrax. Beneath its goofy visage, however, churns a cautionary tale warning against the dangers of automation, conformity, and repressed individual thought. These examinations are offered free of heavy-handedness, delivered by storytellers who have no qualms ending their film with a raucous interplanetary toy battle. While no masterpiece, it supersedes its reputation as fodder for patronizing sarcastic commentators, earning a cult audience on merits of bizarre holiday delight. (Chris Hallock)

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S AN TA CL A US VE R SU S THE ZO MB I E S

Director: George Bonilla | Writer: George Bonilla | USA | 2010 | Feature Santa Claus Versus the Zombies tells the story of a suburban family that finds themselves barricaded in their house following the outbreak of the zombie plague. Along for the ride are a couple of elves and an actor that just might be the real Santa Claus. In the meantime, the President and his military advisers are holed up in a bunker feverishly trying to hatch a plan to rescue Santa and the desperate family. (Press notes)

S AN TA CL AW S

Director: John A. Russo | Writer: John A. Russo | USA | 1996 | Feature Years after discovering his mom and uncle indulging in Christmastime hankypanky and shooting them both at age 14, Wayne (Grant Cramer) has become obsessed with horror actress/Scream Queens Illustrated model/next-door neighbor Raven Quinn (Debbie Rochon). He has finagled his way into babysitting her two young daughters (while her photographer husband is off boinking one of his models), and, unbeknownst to Raven, he commits murder in defense of her career. Taking a cue from Raven’s movie The Hooded Claw (no relation to the villain from The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1969)), Wayne wields a threepronged weapon to do in his victims, eventually putting on a Santa suit as he indulges in his slaughter spree. Night of the Living Dead (1968) co-writer John A. Russo brought several of his earlier film’s cast and crew on board Santa Claws, though the inspiration belongs far less to that zombie classic than to creating a feature-length plug for Russo’s actual Scream Queens Illustrated magazine. A good deal of the movie was shot at the mag’s offices, and many of its models and staff have acting roles; indeed, just as much footage is devoted to the young ladies posing for the camera in various states of undress as it is to the stalking and slashing. Although Wayne does don the garb of St. Nick (which he spray-paints black in Santa Claws’ one novel twist on the form), there’s a lot more Christmas spirit to the film’s decor than to his murder methods. And gore fans hoping to be gifted with some seasonal splatter will likely be disappointed by the largely bloodless killings. (Michael Gingold)

S AN TA’ S S L AY

Director: David Steiman | Writer: David Steiman | USA | 2005 | Feature In this “evil Santa” entry, Claus (ex-pro wrestler Bill Goldberg) is revealed to be the anti-Christ, who is sentenced to 1,000 years of good deeds and toy giving after losing a curling match to an angel. By 2005, the punishment runs out and Saint Nick returns to his evil ways. Santa’s Slay opens with exuberant glee as the big guy in red comes down a chimney and lays to waste a dysfunctional family (Chris Kattan, Fran Drescher and James Caan; all Jewish actors) as they sit down for Christmas dinner. Likewise, an early stop-motion flashback detailing the origins of Santa’s forced benevolence authentically evokes Rankin/Bass specials. While previous “Evil Santa” films focused on a few scenes of yuletide destruction and killing, this is the main focus of Santa’s Slay, as this Santa employs violent mayhem to clear room after room, even after it starts to feel repetitive. Goldberg’s St. Nick tears through a police station and a strip club, but by the time he uses a menorah to impale the owner of a Jewish delicatessen, the gallows joke has grown tiresome. While Goldberg brings his usual physicality to the demonic Santa role, Santa’s Slay is more memorable for its celebrity cameos, including ‘70s tough guy Robert Culp as the protagonist angel. (Eric Zaldivar)

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S ATAN CL AU S

Director: J.X. Williams | Writer: J.X. Williams | USA | 1975 | Short The work of reclusive experimental filmmaker J.X. Williams—who supposedly “directed 54 feature films, wrote 78 screenplays, and compiled an FBI file 6,000

pages long”—has been obsessively catalogued by his personal archivist, filmmaker Noel Lawrence, since the 1990s. Lawrence has often accompanied the films to retrospectives, leading some to suggest that he himself is J.X. Williams (we’ll preserve that mystery here). One of Williams’ many short films is a reworking of Rene Cardona’s 1959 kids film Santa Claus, with a smattering of footage from Argento’s Deep Red (1975) and Inferno (1980) and topped off with some clever satanic scratch animation. Williams’ own notes on the film’s genesis go something like this: “In the mid-Seventies, I was working as a projectionist for this crummy movie theatre in downtown LA. The owner owed me six weeks back wages and when I ask him for the money, the scumbag has the gall to inform me that I’m getting laid off Christmas week. If he’d known my reputation for mischief, he might have thought twice about it. On my last day of work, I had to project a Christmas matinee for kids. Before the main feature, I added an unannounced opener to the program called Satan Claus. I fled the theatre right after my film ended but I heard the owner had to refund the entire box office. Even then, several outraged parents filed a lawsuit against the theatre. Merry Christmas, you cheap bastard!” (Kier-La Janisse)

S ATAN CL A US

Director: Massimilano Cerchi | Writer: Simonetta Mostarda | 1996 | USA/Italy | Feature A kitschy effort that arose as part of the resurgence of interest in trash cinema in the 1990s, Satan Claus follows a mysterious malevolent character who summons an evil spirit into a man dressed as Santa Claus (Robert Cummins). This costumed killer wanders New York killing innocent people, lopping off limbs which he uses to decorate his Christmas tree. Helping the police solve the murders is failing actor Steve Sanders (Robert Hector) and his voodoo-practicing mother (Lauretta Ali). There is little information available regarding the cost of the film, yet it has the telltale production value of a low-budget passion project—the lighting is so dark it’s a struggle to see the action on screen, the sets appear cobbled together from whatever furniture was at their disposal, and the cast frequently seems to have trouble with delivery, visibly forgetting lines from time to time. The script features some heavy-handed allegories for violence in America, while creating a character that leans heavily on the problematic cinematic trope of the Magical Negro. Though it will likely appeal only to a very niche group of trash movie cinephiles, Satan Claus is a beautiful disaster. (Ariel Fisher)

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S CAR Y L I TTLE FU C K ER S (A C HR I STMAS MOVIE)

Director: Nathan Suher I Writer: Lenny Schwartz I 2015 I USA I Short On Christmas Eve, drunken dad Saul (Rich Tretheway) brings home a pair of strange creatures as gifts for his teen son Kyle (Josh Fontaine). The gibbering, mischievous things, called Fookahs, come with a set of rules their caretakers must

Above: J.X. Williams’ Satan Claus (1975).

abide or face dire consequences. When the rules are broken, the destructive devils wreak havoc on the holiday, and Kyle and his girlfriend Peggy (Anna Rizzo) must stop them before Fookahs demolish their town. Sound familiar? From Ghoulies (1984) to Munchies (1987), riffs on Joe Dante’s beloved Gremlins (1984) appeared frequently throughout the mid-to-late 1980s. Scary Little Fuckers is a direct descendent of that era of little monster movies, and even though it’s a trashy parody, its foundation involves dysfunctional families confronted by strange forces of the Spielbergian persuasion. Whether our heroes are competent (and sober) enough to save the day is another story. Director Nathan Suher’s vision fully embraces the spirit of its predecessors while subverting tropes with vulgar naughtiness. Screenwriter Schwartz likes to push buttons, evident in productions like the short Accidental Incest (2014), a blackly comic love story between a brother and sister. Here, he and Suher crank the sleaze factor up to 11 with moments featuring lecherous fatsher Saul shamelessly hitting on his son’s girlfriend, an outbreak of herpes, and the Fookahs chowing down on some unfortunate carollers. The Fookahs themselves are crude puppets with glowing eyes and sharp teeth, perfectly suited to the zany material. The film is capped with Niki Luparelli’s rousing end credit song “Go F Yourself (This Christmas),” the perfect middle finger to fuzzy nostalgia and sentimentalism associated with the holidays. (Chris Hallock)

S COOB Y D OO! HAU NTED HO LI D AYS

Director: Victor Cook | Writer: Michael F. Ryan | USA | 2012 | Short Though the animated canine Scooby Doo character has remained an important part of HannaBarbera’s cartoon TV properties since the 1960s, he and his mystery-solving friends in Mystery Inc. started appearing in directto-video films and anthologies as early as 1987. This TV episodelength short film, which hit DVD as part of a compilation of old and new TV episodes (13 Spooky Tales: Holiday Chills and Thrills), has a monstrous shape-shifting snowman scaring shoppers away from the lavish Menkle’s Toy Store. Scooby and the gang begin their own investigation that casts suspicion on the cranky store owner and a creepy janitor. It’s no coincidence that the elaborate holiday parade in front of Menckle’s store may remind viewers of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, with fancy holiday parade floats, marching bands, and inflatable balloons. A more unique aspect to this episode’s story is the inclusion of the Old World-style glockenspiel located in the store’s clock tower that incorporates animatronic elves that strike large bells on the hour. However, the scary elements in this children’s program centre

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Above: The Scooby gang in Scooby Doo! Haunted Holidays (2012).

on the menacing, shape-shifting giant snow creature that chases Scooby and his gang through the streets and around the store. The sinister snowman has glowing eyes, sharp teeth, and it quickly changes shape from a three-tiered ball snowman into a creepy spider, or a bloodthirsty giant leech or worm. Following the 2012 DVD release, this short debuted on the Cartoon Network. (Joanna Wilson)

S COOB Y DO O ! MYSTE R Y I NC O R PO R ATED: “ WRAT H OF T HE KRAMPUS” Director: Curt Geda | Writer: Michael F. Ryan | USA | 2012 | TV Episode

Originally created in 1969, Hanna-Barbera’s animated dog star Scooby Doo and his teenage mystery-busting pals have gone through more revivals than perhaps any other cartoon character. In an effort to keep things fresh, the 2010 series Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated saw the team given a seasonlong story arc in addition to the stand-alone mysteries they solved each week. Although this season two episode does not take place during Christmastime, the Scooby gang nevertheless comes up against the Krampus, who is punishing rowdy, misbehaving children by frightening them and turning their hair white. The gang chases Krampus from the roller disco to the old haunted toy factory, only to unmask him as a robot controlled by someone else. This episode of the Mystery Incorporated series also includes nods to previous iterations of the characters, including the appearance of Charlie the Haunted Robot (also known as Charlie the Funland Robot) who first appeared in the 1969 series Scooby Doo, Where Are You? The complexity of the story makes this series most enjoyable for viewers old enough to appreciate its self-references. For more on the Krampus, see page 306. (Joanna Wilson)

S CR OOG E (o r MAR LE Y ’S G HO ST)

Director: Walter R. Booth| Writer: Unknown | UK | 1901| Short Film Director Booth’s short is notable as the earliest known adaptation of A Christmas Carol that still exists and for being based on J.C. Buckstone’s play from the same year. Although originally around 11 minutes long, only six minutes remain. For more on A Christmas Carol, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

S CR OOG E

Director: Leedham Bantock | Writer: Seymour Hicks | Great Britain | 1913 | Feature

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Based on J.C. Buckstone play of 1901, this early cinematic adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol stars Seymour Hicks as Scrooge. Scrooge is comprised of single camera shots of the interior of Scrooge’s office (which also doubles as his home) as well as the outside entrance. Scrooge opens with a title card comparing the Cratchit family home to that of Charles Dickens himself; a subsequent title card remarks “there is also a suggestion of the tragedy of the boyhood of the author.” The film emphasizes the connection to Dickens by showing an exterior shot of the author’s home before cutting to Dickens in his study writing A Christmas Carol. There are a few other noteworthy changes to the original narrative, including a nameless poor woman who arrives at Scrooge’s office to ask for charity and is rebuffed. Marley’s ghost arrives in a white shroud with skull-like make-up on his face but, instead of announcing the

future appearance of the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come, he states “I come to you representing ghosts.” Later, after Scrooge has vowed that he is no longer the man he used to be, a title card describes how Scrooge “imagines himself enjoying the feast with the Cratchit family.” The next scene depicts this daydream, in which Scrooge holds mistletoe over Mrs. Cratchit’s head and gives her a kiss on the cheek. Although not as imaginative or horrororiented as other film adaptations, Scrooge does a decent job of conveying the major themes of A Christmas Carol. (Leslie Hatton)

S CR OOG E

Director: Henry Edwards | Writer: H. Fowler Mear | UK | 1935| Feature The second of two cinematic adaptations starring stage actor Seymour Hicks, who also performed as Scrooge in J.C. Buckstone’s 1901 play. This version is the first feature-length sound adaptation of Dickens’ novella. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

S CR OOG E

Director: Brian Desmond-Hurst| Writer: Noel Langley | UK | 1951| Feature Released as Scrooge in the UK and as A Christmas Carol in the United States, this popular version of Dickens’ classic stars Alistair Sim in the titular role and is often considered the gold standard by which other adaptations are judged. For more information, see page 114. (Leslie Hatton)

S CR OOG E

Director: Ronald Neame | Writer: Leslie Bricusse | UK | 1970 | Feature A 34-year-old Albert Finney took the mantle of Scrooge in this musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. A darker portrayal of the timeless classic, Finney offers one of the more grim renditions of the familiar miser, appearing almost grotesque when made up as the elderly Scrooge. Finney portrays the character as unkempt and filthy, with dirty clothes and fingernails, rotting teeth, and thinning, greasy hair. He lives in self-imposed squalor, his barren home littered with cobwebs and dust; a man so far removed from society that he retreats into his own filth. There are interesting morbid touches, too. When visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Paddy Stone), Scrooge mistakenly joins in the town’s gleeful chorus, unaware that he’s dancing at his own funeral. Upon being shown his own grave, Scrooge plummets into his tomb, landing in a red-hot room of stalagmites and stalactites,

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Above: Albert Finney’s Ebenezer Scrooge sees his own death in Scrooge (1970).

with warped faces of tortured souls bound to the rock formations. It’s in this way that Scrooge bridges the gap between classic storytelling and horrific imagery in a unique way worthy of the holidays. For more info see page 114. (Ariel Fisher)

S CR OOG E D

Director: Richard Donner | Writer: Mitch Glazer, Michael O’Donoghue | USA | 1988 | Feature A Christmas horror comedy classic, Scrooged blends the potent impact of A Christmas Carol with a manic modernity. The frantically paced film brings a message of kindness, love, generosity and family that shines through in moments of profound emotion. TV executive Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is an overpowering egomaniac blissfully at ease with his heartless lust for wealth and power. It’s Christmas Eve, and Frank finds himself visited by the ghost of his former boss (John Forsythe), who emerges with seven years of decomposition on his breath, rats crawling around in his skull, and empty eye sockets. In keeping with the traditional A Christmas Carol, Frank, is visited by three ghosts; The Ghost of Christmas Past (David Johansen), a chain-smoking, filthy Elvin cabbie; The Ghost of Christmas Present (Carol Kane), a volatile and violent fairy; and the mute Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Robert Hammond), a towering inferno of suffering whose body is covered with screaming, tortured souls. As Cross’s love interest, Karen Allen’s benevolent Claire is the checkpoint against which he can regain control of his life. There are some genuine moments of Christmas spirit in this unconventional version of Dickens’ classic, laced with a manic frenzy that permeates the entire production. Along the way, it offers some of the more accurate grotesquerie originally envisioned by Dickens himself: rotting corpses, hellish visions, and the imminent threat of death. For more information see page 114. (Ariel Fisher)

S E C R E T S ANTA

Director: Jamie Russell | Writer: Jamie Russell | UK | 2014 | Short Leaving work for the evening, a woman (Emily Rudd) is surprised to find a brightly-wrapped Christmas gift box on top of her car that contains only a typewritten message promising another gift. It’s the first part of a poem that is slowly revealed to the woman in subsequent gifts she discovers inside her car and on her doorstep. Unable to figure out who the gifts are from, she finally discovers the final box under the tree in her home, in which a final, bloodstained note reveals that “on this Christmas I’m taking your head.” While getting mysterious gifts from an unknown person can be exciting, Secret Santa helpfully illustrates the dark side of this holiday tradition. Running less than three minutes, the short features no dialogue—instead, Bing Crosby croons “Jingle Bells” throughout, until it becomes distorted at the end when the mysterious gift giver is revealed to be a creepy stalker Santa brandishing a knife. Director Jamie Russell’s short diverges from similar works is in its minimalist approach—featuring just two actors and a handful of locations, the menace is almost entirely implied, making this an effective if ultimately restrained effort. (Paul Corupe)

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SEEDS

Director: Andy Milligan | Writer: John Borske, Andy Milligan | USA | 1968 | Feature Likely the magnum opus of Times Square trash auteur Andy Milligan, Seeds is a misanthropic murder mystery that takes place on Christmas Eve, playing out like a John Waters remake of And Then There Were None (1945) with incestuous overtones. The film gets rolling and the blood starts spilling when screeching family matriarch Claris (Maggie Rogers) invites her hated adult children over for a holiday banquet, including sexedup daughters Carol (Candy Hammond) and Margaret (Lucy Silvay), her cruel son Michael (Anthony Moscini), preening priest Matthew (Neil Flanagan) and suicidal teen Buster (Gene Connolly). As the secret-harbouring siblings, their significant others and a pair of scheming servants end up electrocuted, stabbed, poisoned or worse, a struggle to uncover the killer ends in tragedy. Also released as Seeds of Sin, a slightly recut version that includes unrelated softcore footage meant to give audiences a break from the film’s insistently high-strung melodrama, this bizarre effort is probably the most clear example of Milligan’s singular aesthetic, in which unlikable, mean-spirited characters relentlessly berate each other (at least, when they aren’t trying to fuck). The film’s Christmas Eve setting, briefly mentioned early on and then never brought up again, exists simply a pretext for the family get-together. There’s no tree, decorations or presents in sight, but it’s unlikely that this fractured family really intended on going carolling or sharing a cup of cheer. Still, there’s something about Milligan’s hateful reunion that may spark unpleasant memories of your own most hellish family holiday parties, where bitter tidings are always lurking under the surface. (Paul Corupe)

428

LA SENDA

Director: Miguel Ángel Toledo | Writer: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Miguel Ángel Toledo | Spain | 2012 | Feature Raúl, in a desperate attempt to salvage his marriage with Ana, suggests

Above: Andy Milligan’s seedy Christmas movie, Seeds aka Seeds of Sin (1968).

spending Christmas in a remote cabin in the mountains, together with their seven-year-old son, Nico. When Ana and Nico make friends with one of the locals, Samuel, Raúl becomes insanely jealous. He tries to get rid of the intruder but discovers, to his despair, that Ana and Samuel have been meeting on their own and seem to share some kind of secret. Raúl decides to invite Samuel to dinner on Christmas Eve, planning to expose their affair, but the evening comes and goes without conflict. That night, Raúl has a nightmare in which he witnesses his family’s involvement in a bloody incident. On awakening, he discovers, to his relief, that Ana is innocent and that the secret meetings were to organize a surprise gift for him. But something isn’t quite right. Looking back over the photos of that holiday, Raúl realizes that some of them show situations that he doesn’t remember ever happening. Now, Raúl will have to take a sinister trip down memory lane and face up to the terrible reality. Also known as The Path. (Press notes)

S H E I TAN

Director: Kim Chapiron | Writer: Kim Chapiron, Christian Chapiron | France | 2006 | Feature Sheitan, produced by and starring Vincent Cassel, incorporates all the characters of the Nativity while upending nearly everything about the story. Here, the wise men are a group of decidedly unwise young troublemakers (all of different ethnicity and religious background, much like their classic depiction). They are led by a woman named Eve to her remote country house, where she introduces them to the slightly deranged housekeeper Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary (both played by Cassel) who enlist the hedonistic youths as witnesses to the birth of their unholy family. For more on Sheitan, see chapter 19. (Dave Canfield)

S I L E N T N I G HT

Director: Steven C. Miller | Writer: Jayson Rothwell | Canada | 2012 | Feature Pitched as both a quasiremake and yet another sequel to the 1984 classic Silent Night, Deadly Night, the more simply titled Silent Night borrows a few plot points from the notable franchise but otherwise exists in its own universe. The film features a killer on a Christmas Eve murder spree (Donal Logue) who decides that a Santa costume would be a great disguise as he’s tracked by the local law enforcement (Malcolm McDowell). A latterday Christmas exploitation flick set in Wisconsin (though filmed in Manitoba) Silent Night primarily uses Christmas as a convenient background, but also incorporates some trappings of Christmas as part of its murders. Just before the

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Above: Santa with a flamethrower. Silent Night (2012).

opening credits we witness the electrocution of a man tied up with Christmas lights and further violence also includes a more conventional axe/wood chipper combo. This murderous Santa also wreaks havoc and freshly lopped limbs at a topless models shoot before being confronted by a flamethrower. Featuring Ed Wood’s (1994) Lisa Marie in a small role and directed by Steven C. Miller, who helmed the TV movie Scream of the Banshee in 2011. (Michael Helms)

S I L E N T N I G H T, B LO O D Y NI G HT

Director: Theodore Gershuny | Writer: Jeffrey Konvitz, Ira Teller | USA | 1972 | Feature A murder mystery that spans several decades, Silent Night, Bloody Night was written and directed by Theodore Gershuny, who was married to co-star Mary Woronov at the time. The film involves Christmastime killings at an old dark country mansion inherited by John Carter (Patrick O’Neal). Though Carter wants to sell the place, the locals begin to block proceedings for their own seemingly obscure reasons, and the body count piles up. The diverse cast features John Carradine and several Warhol/New York underground luminaries including Ondine, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and filmmaker Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures (1963)) in a critical role. Much of the crew went on to make the Lloyd Kaufman-produced sexploitation classic Sugar Cookies (1973), including composer and Moog musician Gershon Kingsley, who had a chart hit that same year with “Popcorn.” For more information see page 188. (Michael Helms)

S I L E N T NI G HT, B LO O D Y NI G HT: THE HOMECOMIN G

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Director: James Plumb | Writer: James Plumb, Andrew Jones | UK | 2013 | Feature

“What five year old orphan doesn’t dream that their mother is an underage jail bait with mental health issues?” Welsh-based director James Plumb and writer Andrew Jones remade George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead (as Night of the Living Dead Resurrection (2012)), so it’s a step down in hubris to follow up that needless exercise with a remake of Ted Gershuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), a minor psycho movie that tends to be overlooked thanks to the higher profile of the unrelated Silent Night, Deadly Night films. That said, Silent Night Bloody Night: The Homecoming is a ham-fisted, underfunded piece of amateur tat that fails completely as mystery-horror as it spotlights a series of thudding gore effects. It feels like an attempt to evoke the performance, directorial and dialogue style of porn without featuring any sex—though there is some prurience as the sexually active are bludgeoned, throttled with fairy lights or otherwise killed by a madwoman lurking in the old Butler house, where bad things once happened (in a minimal prologue). She gets revenge on the small-town worthies who are vaguely to blame, but offs so

Above: Theodore Gershuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972).

many other people that the vengeance point is blunted. Adrienne King, star of the first Friday the 13th films, contributes a voice-over part making ranting phone calls. Everyone else seems fresh out of community theatre and struggles to get through their lines—though, to be fair, most of the dialogue is so awkward that it’s hard to see how better delivery could help. (Kim Newman)

SIL EN T N IGH T, DEADLY N IGH T

Director: Charles Sellier | Writer: Michael Hickey | USA | 1984 | Feature Filmed in Utah by accomplished regional filmmaker Charles E. Sellier Jr. (creator of the Grizzly Addams film and TV series and producer of docsploitation features including Chariots of the Gods (1970), In Search of Historic Jesus and The Bermuda Triangle (both 1979), Silent Night, Deadly Night became the most widely distributed and wellknown yuletide horror film on the planet, thanks to canny marketing that included wide scale protesting on its original U.S. theatrical and home video releases. Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) is seriously traumatized on Christmas Eve of 1971 when his parents are accosted and killed by a convenience store robber in a Santa suit. He spends the next ten years in an orphanage run by nuns before getting a job at Ira’s Toys, where he begins to have serious flashbacks. When offered the job of shop Santa he puts on the suit and becomes the antithesis of Santa Claus when he immediately embarks on a killing spree. As seminal as the original Black Christmas (1974) and somewhat similar to Christmas Evil (1980) (although delving more into the killer’s backstory) Silent Night, Deadly Night is perhaps the most commercially successful example of yuletide terror to date. Silent Night, Deadly Night has spawned six sequels (including one directed by Monte Hellman) and provides imagery that is now conventional for Christmas exploitation including using an axe as a weapon along with as much creative death as possible, including strangulation with Christmas lights, death by claw hammer, axe, box cutter, arrow, decapitation and—most famously—Linnea Quigley being impaled on reindeer horns. For more on Silent Night, Deadly Night, see page 24. (Michael Helms)

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S I L E N T N I G HT, D E AD LY NI G HT PAR T 2

Director: Lee Henry | Writer: Lee Henry, Joseph H. Earle | USA | 1987 | Feature The first sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night may just set the world record for the most recycled footage from the original film. On Christmas Eve, Ricky (Eric Freeman), the younger brother of the enraged killer from the first film, tells his tale to a psychiatrist, which gives him the opportunity to relentlessly flashback to the first movie for 40 minutes. Ricky tries to remain as malevolent as possible, before recounting some of his own activities, which include engaging in heroic

Above: Careful with that axe, Billy. The original Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984).

autocide, committing comical murder while watching a killer Santa movie, car battery electrocution and a casual killing spree with a handgun. Director Lee Harry kicked-on to helm Street Soldiers (1991) while low-budget stalwart Elizabeth Kaitan, appearing here as Jennifer, has graced films including Necromancer (1988), Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987) and later entries in the Vice Academy series. (Michael Helms)

SI LEN T N IGH T, DEADLY B ETTER WAT CH OUT !

N IGH T

3:

Director: Monte Hellman | Writer: Rex Weiner, Monte Hellman and Arthur Gorson | USA | 1989 | Feature Six years after his angry murder run in Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, Ricky (this time essayed by Bill Moseley) has been kept alive in a coma by Dr. Newbury (Richard Beymer), who is trying to establish a psychic link between Ricky and another patient, Laura (Samantha Scully). When Laura begins to have her own violent hallucinations on Christmas Eve and takes off to her grandmother’s country home, the awakened Ricky breaks out to follow her. On the way, he continues to do what he does best: killing all who he dislikes, only this time he’s doing it while wearing a glass bowl helmet to protect his exposed brain. Director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop (1971))—who also has a cameo in the film, as does his daughter Melissa— claims he reluctantly got involved as a favor to first-time producer Carlos Laszlo. Despite a hefty body count and flashbacks from the two previous films, this sequel is much more contemplative than the kill-crazy earlier entries, with a lot of the action occurring off screen. One of Ricky’s first kills on the road happens as the victim is watching The Terror (1963), a film Hellman worked on for Roger Corman. (Michael Helms)

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S I L E N T NI G HT, D E AD LY NI G HT 4: I NI T IAT ION

Director: Brian Yuzna | Writer: Woody Keith | USA | 1990 | Feature The fourth film in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, this time directed by Brian Yuzna (Society (1989)), jettisons much of the story established in the earlier films. This time, the action revolves around newspaper classified section editor Kim (Neith Hunter) as she attempts to catapult herself through the glass ceiling. She sees a story opportunity when a spontaneously-combusting young woman throws herself off the roof of a local building, but events take a turn for the weird when she hooks up with a coven of Lilith-loving enthusiasts. Kim’s investigations soon turn to hallucinations as everything eventually goes rancid for her and others inside a meat storage locker. This time out the character of Ricky exists in name only, portrayed in sleazy and demented high style by Clint Howard, a completely memorable oddball degenerate but relatively minor character. Above: poster for Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987).

The film is not up to the standards of Yuzna’s earlier horror efforts, and isn’t saved by the makeup by FX master Screaming Mad George, despite some interesting body melting scenes. The eclectic cast including Reggie Bannister (Phantasm (1979)), Maud Adams (Octopussy (1983)) and Jeanne Bates (Eraserhead, 1977) doesn’t really gel, though Neith and Howard went on to small roles in the next sequel. (Michael Helms)

S I L E N T N I G HT, D E AD LY NI G HT 5: THE T OY MAKER

Director: Martin Kitrosser | Writers: Martin Kitrosser and Brian Yuzna | USA | 1991 | Feature Producer Brian Yuzna returns for another stab at the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, this time with a more cohesive effort that’s still a step or two removed from the original. When young Derek (William Thorne) innocently rips into an anonymously-delivered present marked “Don’t open until Christmas” he discovers a vicious Santa-shaped ball with face-hugging strangulation capabilities. It’s just one of the killer playthings created by toymaker Joe Petto (Mickey Rooney) and his son Pino (Brian Bremer). When the ball kills Derek’s father (Van Quattro), his mother (Jane Higginson) starts to investigate the Pettos’ suspicious toy shop. For this sequel, Yuzna brought back special effects creator Screaming Mad George for some innovative death scenes, but it’s Mickey Rooney who truly destroys the scenery here. Now in the director’s chair, professional script supervisor Martin Kitrosser brings a steady hand to a film that could’ve only been improved with a larger special effects budget. (Michael Helms)

S I L E N T N I G HT, ZO MB I E NI G HT

Director: Sean Cain | Writer: Sean Cain | USA | 2009 | Feature Silent Night, Zombie Night takes place during Christmas, when a zombie apocalypse breaks out. A cop whose marriage is on the rocks, Frank Talbot (Jack Forcinito), brings his injured partner, Nash Jackson (Andy Hopper), back to his place in the wake of the outbreak. Frank marks his territory as the Alpha Male of the house, while his wife, Sarah (Nadine Stenovitch), starts to fool around with Nash. Hiding out, they try to avoid not only the zombies, but also bands of survivors who very quickly become part of the body count. Silent Night, Zombie Night feels like an in-joke made between friends that is more concerned with cameos by veteran genre stars like Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp (1983)), Vernon Wells (The Road Warrior (1981)) and Lew Temple (The Devil’s Rejects (2005)) than with chronological consistency. Which is too bad, since zombies and Christmas should go together like milk and cookies, but instead viewers are only left with an empty stocking. (Ariel Fisher)

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T H E S I L E N T PAR TNE R

Director: Daryl Duke | Writer: Curtis Hanson, Anders Bodelsen | Canada | 1978 | Feature One of the more successful films released during Canada’s notorious tax shelter era of the 1970s, The Silent Partner is an unflinching, Christmas-set cat-and-mouse thriller that pits a clever shopping mall bank employee against an unforgiving armed robber. In the film, bank teller Miles (Elliott Gould) inadvertently discovers

that one of the mall’s donation-collecting Santas, Reikle (Christopher Plummer, in a creepy performance), has a plan to pull a holiday heist. Just before it happens, Miles secretly squirrels away almost $50,000 of the bank’s cash for his own use, hiding it in a safe deposit box and reporting that the pilfering Santa, once he finally commits the robbery, got away with far more than he did. Realizing he’s been duped, Reikle terrorizes Miles and his girlfriend (Celine Lomez) in an attempt to recover the missing money. While Miles at first seems to outsmart his opponent, he loses his deposit box key, requiring him to devise a convoluted plan to get at his ill-gotten gains. While ostensibly more a heist thriller than a horror film, The Silent Partner nevertheless features a handful of harrowing scenes, especially as Reikle tries to intimidate Miles into telling him where the rest of the money is. As Reikle calls the usually mild-mannered bank employee, peers through his mail slot and even breaks in to ransack his apartment, Miles becomes increasingly frightened by his pursuer’s menacing behaviour, and the film at times crosses the line into a home invasion film. Perhaps more importantly, The Silent Partner also plays with the idea of goodwill and charity at the holiday season, in this case using Santa’s squeaky clean image as a clever cover for Reikle’s violent and greedy ambitions. In portraying a scene of dangerous intrigue behind the holiday gloss of oversize mall decorations, the film is not only one of the best Canadian films of the 1970s, but also a suitably chilling yultetide thriller. (Paul Corupe)

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S I L E N T S N OW, SE C R ET SNO W

Director: Gene Kearney | Writer: Conrad Aiken | USA | 1966 | Short This obscure short film was the first of two adaptations by director Gene Kearney

Above: Christopher Plummer and Celine Lomez in beloved Canadian psycho-thriller The Silent Partner (1978).

of the well-loved Conrad Aiken story—he would later revisit it for an episode of Night Gallery (1969-1973), narrated by Orson Welles. There is often confusion concerning the two versions; online listings frequently mix up the date and credits, as little documentation exists on the earlier version and its production history. The story tells of a normal boy’s descent into a dream world of snow, and his increasing emotional withdrawal and hostility toward the real world. In the skewed universe of the story, told from the point of view of this disturbed child, the events occur over a matter of days, an insulating process—“the delicious progress”—that he is both aware and in awe of. One morning he imagines that the postman’s steps outside are muffled by something— perhaps snow that has fallen in the night—and it is this notion that sets his hasty mental deterioration in motion. Paul is acutely aware that he has to put on an act to feign interest in the world around him – but as the snow closes in, he ceases to be interested in maintaining that façade. Stark black-and-white images of bare tree branches are underlaid with eerie music by composer George Kleinsinger that is punctuated by sharp atonal bursts—like nerves being plucked; the film establishes itself as a horror tale from the opening frame. Children watching this—who would have been in grades seven or eight, judging from old educational film manuals—would know from this portentous music to settle in and steel themselves for an experience that, however thrilling, was sure to invade their dreams that night. (Kier-La Janisse)

435

SINT

Director: Dick Maas | Writer: Dick Maas | The Netherlands | 2010 | Feature Sint may be a Dutch film, but it has the polished flavour of a Hollywood production (it was released internationally as Saint). Playing with the tradition of the Netherlands’ Sinterklaas (aka Saint Nicholas), the film recasts the mythical Dutch figure as a harbinger of death who, when summoned by the full moon, demands gifts—including young children. Essentially a love letter to John Carpenter, Sint starts out like Halloween (1978), as the film focuses on the exploits of three horny teenage high school babysitters (Madelief Blanken, Caro Lenssen

Paranoid imagery from Gene Kearney’s Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1966).

and Escha Tanihatu) stalked by a killer (Huub Stapel, as the titular centuries-old murderer), but it later resembles The Fog (1980) as it shifts focus to St. Nicholas’s mist-shrouded boat and the army of Black Peters that man it. The bouncy first half contains the film’s most exciting set piece, in which Sinterklaas and his undead steed engage in a rooftop chase with the police. As with Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Sint caused controversy when concerned parents complained to Dutch theatre chains that the film’s advertising imagery of a malevolent St. Nicholas would “confuse children.” For more on Sint see page 284. (Eric Zaldivar)

SLAY BELLS

Director: Ama Lea | Writer: Ama Lea | USA | 2012 | Short “I’m just a jolly old man!” proclaims the dirty, crazed killer Santa of Slay Bells as he takes out another victim in this over-the-top attempt to play off the popularity of the Santa slasher craze that seemed to dominate the 1980s VHS era. Racking up an impressive body count over five minutes, this short film follows the antics of a killer Santa and his chattering evil elves as they murder their way through a family household. The film builds up some suspense as a couple plan a romantic evening in front of the fire only to be interrupted by killer Kris Kringle armed with a variety of holiday-themed weapons. Santa soon turns his attention to their kids and some friends who stop to see what all the commotion’s about. Shot by L.A.-based filmmaker and photographer Ama Lea, this colourful, campy tribute to slasher films past features gratuitous T&A, buckets of blood splattered over wreathes and campy killings—including glass ball ornaments shoved in orifices and sharpened candy cane stakes. Mixing practical and CGI effects, Slay Bells deserves a few points for creativity in what some might believe is an overstuffed subgenre of yuletide terror. (Paul Corupe)

THE SLAYER

Director: J.S. Cardone | Writer: J.S. Cardone, William R. Ewing | USA | 1982 | Feature Planning on a relaxing vacation, two couples are met with trouble when a storm traps them on a remote island and a mysterious killer begins picking them off one-by-one. Kay (Sarah Kendall) begins to sense danger and is subject to a series of nightmares, which seem to manifest into reality. This pre-A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) entry considers whether a nightmare really is “just” a nightmare. Released in 1982, The Slayer was, until Arrow Video’s 2017 remaster, a lesser-seen slasher, existing only in various VHS or truncated forms. The first film of J.S. Cardone—who went on to pen remakes for The Stepfather (2009) and the critically panned Prom Night (2008)—The Slayer is a far more measured effort than most of the slasher films of the era, featuring strong performances from the central cast. There are some moments of blood and viscera, but the majority of the plot is concerned with Kay’s psychological underpinnings. While not a visual stylist, Cardone successfully captures a sense of doom and dread, and effectively uses space to create a strong sense of claustrophobia; each scene seems to exist in a separate location unto itself, disorienting viewers and preventing them from finding comfort in the film’s island setting. While not a yuletide horror film in a strict sense, The Slayer’s entire plot hinges on its ambiguous conclusion, which takes place on Christmas morning. (Joe Yanick)

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S OM E TH I N G U ND E R THE C HR I STMAS T REE

Director: Danny Villanueva Jr. | Writer: Danny Villanueva Jr. | USA | 2014 | Short Although it uses a common Christmas horror set-up—a child, having awakened on Christmas Eve, decides to investigate noises that he hopes are caused by Santa’s stocking stuffing—Something Under the Christmas Tree ultimately goes in an entirely different direction. This short, created for the How Bizarre online channel, doesn’t feature a killer Santa, but an elf who may have done in his jolly old boss. Initially spotting Santa delivering packages, the boy (Diego Lodor) sneaks downstairs to discovers a gift with his name on it but gets distracted by rustling in the family Christmas tree. He’s surprised to find a creepy elf sitting underneath, and when a toy train goes by with Santa’s hat, the boy begins to worry about the fate of Old Saint NIck, especially when he opens his gift—inside is simply a brand new shiny hatchet with a note that says “Kill It.” While horror shorts that take a similar approach often have murderous Santas and monsters prowling the house, it’s much less common to have Kris Kringle as a victim and turn curious kids into revenge killers, making Danny Villanueva Jr.’s effort stand out. (Paul Corupe)

S TAL L E D

Director: Christian James | Writer: Dan Palmer | UK | 2013 | Feature Hapless maintenance man W.C. (Dan Palmer) is trapped in a stall in the ladies’ toilets during an office Christmas party which gets out of hand. First, he hides in embarrassment when a pair of drunken fancy-dress women (Victoria Broom, Sarah Biggins) wander in and start French kissing. Then, he stays in terror as an escalating zombie infection overcomes the revellers and brings a horde of dressed-up shamblers (including Zombie Jesus and a Zombie Elf) into the restroom. A girl (voiced by Antonia Bernath) trapped in another stall strikes up a conversation with him, which ranges widely about their troubled lives, and W.C. is inspired to make creative attempts to extricate them from their predicament. Director Christian James and writer/star Palmer, who previously collaborated on the indulgent Freak Out (2004), deliver a surprisingly fresh effort, considering the enclosed setting and overworked zombie apocalypse theme. Palmer’s everyman hero is on screen constantly and the film only ventures outside the ladies’ room for one (very funny) drug-fuelled dance scene and an epilogue which leads the hero to an even smaller space. With a sweet, yet barbed voice-over performance from Bernath, Stalled’s character drama is genuinely funny and—thanks to a late-film revelation—a little deeper than expected. The confined space is cleverly used, with every object to hand—a tool-box, a ladder, even a bin full of used tampons—turned into a zombie-fighting prop. At one point, W.C. has to use a discarded bra as a slingshot to aim severed fingers at a fire-alarm button. Running jokes flesh out the characters of the office types—including the legendarily heroic Jeff From I.T. (Mark Holden)—who pass through as zombies, while Tamaryn Payne shows up at the end as an office angel whose snippy, selfinvolved attitude pays off with a post-credits comeuppance. (Kim Newman)

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S CH AL CK E N T HE PAI NTER

Director: Lesley Mehagey | Writer: Lesley Mehagey | UK | 1979 | TV Film Based on the 1839 short story by Sheridan Le Fanu, this chilling Christmas episide of the series Omnibus (19672003) was meant to follow on the tradition of A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971-1978), which had been cancelled the year prior. A fictional tale involving real historical characters, Schalken the Painter involves the attempts of 17th century Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (played by Jeremy Clyde of 60s pop duo Chad & Jeremy) to save his true love (Cheryl Kennedy) from being married off to a sinister but wealthy stranger by her father (and his mentor), Gerrit Dou (Maurice Denham). With a tone and palette inspired by the work of Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk and the painters Vermeer and Schalcken himself, Schalken the Painter remains one of the most macabre films in the British Christmas horror canon. (Kier-La Janisse)

T H E S TON E TA PE

Director: Peter Sasdy | Writer: Nigel Kneale | UK | 1971 | TV Film Broadcast on Christmas Day 1972, Nigel Kneale’s teleplay The Stone Tape is probably the most famous (and influential) of the non-Christmas-themed British Christmas specials. Many of Kneale’s stories are set in the present, interacting with an archaic past, and this is the setup for The Stone Tape, in which a team of researchers headed up by Peter Brock (Michael Bryant, who also appeared in A Ghost Story for Christmas: “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1974)) and his highstrung lover, computer whiz Jill Greeley (Jane Asher) move their operations to an old stately home in the British countryside only to discover that their experiments in recording technology are picking up some unexpected messages from beyond. Kneale revisited the processes and effects of broadcasting throughout his career; aside from The Stone Tape these included his radio play “You Must Listen” (1952), his celebrated 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) and even his ill-fated script for Halloween III (1982). But aside from being recognized as one of Kneale’s most terrifying teleplays, The Stone Tape is significant for another reason, namely being the namesake of what is now referred to as “Stone Tape Theory.” In 1949 the term “Electronic Voice Phenomena” came into use with the establishment of The Spirit Electronic Communication Society in Manchester, UK, and by the early-to-mid-1970s, similar groups had been formed all over the world, following on the success of Friedrich Jürgenson’s book, Voices from Space (1964) and Carl Jung protégé Konstantins Raudive’s book Breakthrough in 1971. In Britain, Raymond Cass began to experiment using reel-to-reel recorders and battery radio, tuned to “white noise” to act as a carrier for the voices. It is the work of Raudive and Cass and the concurrent broadcast of The Stone Tape—which proposed the idea of residual haunting as a “recording” laid upon inanimate objects and buildings—that the current means of EVP practice is most directly descended from. (Kier-La Janisse)

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Above: John Justin as a ghostly suitor in the Omnibus episode “Schalcken the Painter” (1979).

S U P E R D A R K TI ME S

Director: Kevin Phillips | Writers: Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski | USA | 2017 | Feature It’s December in an upstate New York town, but the chill in the air has nothing to do with the weather. High-school best pals Zach (Owen Campbell) and Josh (Charlie Tahan) find their friendship tested after they and a couple of other friends are involved with a horrific tragedy, and they attempt to carry on as if nothing has happened. This inevitably proves to be impossible, leading to a downward spiral of psychological breakdown, paranoia and further acts of violence that also draws in their classmate Allison. Making his feature debut following a number of shorts (including Too Cool for School (2015), which served as a trial run for Super Dark Times), director Kevin Phillips takes a compelling deep dive into teenage trauma. Working from Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s always compelling and emotionally plausible screenplay, he imbues what is essentially a tragic drama with a chilling sense of dread, maintaining consistent tension while never straining for effect. Similarly, while Super Dark Times is set in the mid-’90s, there are only enough signifiers to establish the period, eschewing overdone nostalgia—and Phillips and his production team use the cheery decorations of Christmastime as quiet background counterpoint, avoiding unnecessary emphasis and easy ironies. Still, the final act does see a string of holiday-tree lights being used for an unintended, unpleasant purpose. (Michael Gingold)

S U P E RN AT UR AL: “A VER Y SU PER NATU RAL CH RIST MAS”

Director: J. Miller Tobin | Writer: Jeremy Carver | USA | 2007 | TV Episode Santa-like monsters are on the radar of monster-hunting brothers Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) in this third-season episode of their long-running monster-of-the-week horror series Supernatural (2005-). During the holidays, the Winchester brothers investigate a string of disappearances in which victims’ bodies are forced up through the chimney. Rather than a Krampus or evil St. Nick figure, the brothers realize they are hunting two ancient pagan gods (disguised as a pleasant Midwestern couple) who require human sacrifice at the winter solstice (Merrilyn Gann, Spencer Garrett). Only the branches from a Christmas tree, refashioned as wooden stakes, can stop them. Despite the episode’s light touches, at its heart is a darker story in which the brothers debate whether to celebrate Christmas. While Dean wants to make the most of his last year alive (thanks to an earlier demonic pact), Sam says the holiday reminds him too much of their absent father. This third season episode begins with “A Special Presentation” animated logo introduction, an homage to the intro used by CBS in the 1970s and ‘80s to announce TV specials, including Christmas specials. (Joanna Wilson)

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S V AR T L U CI A

Director: Rumle Hammerich I Writer: Rumle Hammerich, Carina Rydberg I Sweden/Denmark I 1992 I Feature Mikaela (Tova Magnusson) is a promising secondary school student whose unbridled imagination blurs the line between fantasy and reality. After penning an erotic essay for a literature class, she becomes infatuated with her teacher

Spielman (Reine Brynolfsson), whom she spies on in his home. As she and her friends prepare for a big party for the Feast of Saint Lucy, Mikaela becomes embroiled in a mystery when someone starts leaving distressing offerings around the school in closets and lockers. When one of her schoolmates is murdered, she suspects her teacher, the object of her increasingly dark fantasies. Mikaela’s closest friends also exhibit suspicious behavior: Max (Björn Kjellman) is a prankster with sociopathic tendencies who tends to take things too far; Joakim (Figge Norling) harbors has his own simmering obsession with Mikaela. Director Hammerich is recognized for a diverse array of film and television work in Denmark and Sweden, including the edgy crime drama series Livvagterne (2009-2010) and eccentric coming-of-age films like Otto er et næsehorn (1983) and Hunden som log (1989). Released in English as The Premonition, Svart Lucia is firmly central in that body of work, a psychological thriller powered by complex young people. Any religious allegory we may glean from the film is secondary to themes of voyeurism, desire, and deception. It’s hinted throughout that Mikaela’s own fertile imagination may be informed by a past trauma, depicted as hallucinatory dreams. As the story unfolds, it becomes challenging to trust her point-of-view. Hammerich puts a sinister spin on the annual Christian event the Feast of Saint Lucy, a celebration of the martyred saint taking place days before the Winter Solstice and signaling the arrival of Christmas (the title’s literal English translation is Black Lucy). It’s a compelling atmosphere in which to set a psychological thriller, and refreshing to have a story with a religious holiday as the backdrop, but relatively free of on-the-nose religious allegory. The film is not saturated with holiday imagery as you’d find in North American films, but spread throughout is the notion of gift-giving. Some of these appearances are subtle— incidental characters carrying shopping bags full of wrapped gifts—in addition to grisly ritualistic offerings left around the school. Svart Lucia is a splendid antidote to generic ensemble teen thrillers, a tightly wound Scandinavian treat that will keep you guessing. (Chris Hallock)

TAL E S F R OM THE C R YPT

Director: Freddie Francis | Writer: Milton Subotsky | UK | 1972 | Feature Long before the American film and television industry celebrated EC Comics’ famous comic book line Tales From the Crypt with a TV series and a number of associated feature films, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg’s British company Amicus Productions released a portmanteau horror of the same name. Deriving its tales from the EC Comics roster—though only two of the stories actually appeared in the original Tales comics—Tales From the Crypt has as its opening section a Christmas set tale of familicide with a suckerpunch twist starring British screen icon Joan Collins.

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Having encountered the Crypt Keeper (Ralph Richardson) while exploring a set of catacombs on a tourist trip, Joanne Clayton (Joan Collins) is the first of five strangers to have the details of their death laid bare by the mysterious hooded figure. Clayton’s story sees the married woman brutally bludgeoning her husband to death in the family home on Christmas Eve as a radio broadcast warns that an escaped lunatic dressed as Santa Claus is on the loose in the local area. When Clayton spies the madman on her property she cannot call for assistance without exposing her murderous activity. Trapped by her own crime, Clayton’s self-induced predicament turns fatal when her young daughter

Right: Joan Collins in the Amicus portmanteau film Tales From the Crypt (1972). Photos: from the collection of Movie Ink (movie-ink.com).

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opens the front door to the lunatic, believing him to be the real Santa Claus. This brief segment is one of many Christmas horror tales in which the image of Santa Claus is turned on its head, in this case resulting in the meting out of some swift karmic justice to an unrepentant, cold-blooded killer. (Neil Mitchell)

TAL E S F R O M THE C R YPT: “AND ALL THROUGH T H E HOUSE”

Director: Robert Zemeckis | Writer: Fred Dekker | USA | 1989 | TV Episode This anthology horror TV series based on the format—if not always the stories— of 1950s horror comic Tales from the Crypt took a stab at Christmas terror in their first season episode “And All Through the House.” The story, which actually appeared in another title from Tales from the Crypt publisher EC Comics (The Vault of Horror #35), was also one of the adaptations featured in the 1972 Tales from the Crypt anthology movie. On Christmas Eve, a wife (Mary Ellen Trainor) kills her husband (Marshall Bell) with a fireplace poker. While cleaning up, the woman misses the radio announcement that a mad killer dressed in a Santa suit has escaped from a nearby mental institution. When the dangerous stranger (Larry Drake) appears in the yard, she gets the idea to frame him for the murder, but the killer Santa has other ideas. This powerful, suspense-filled story is a faithful adaptation of the original 1954 comic book story by Johnny Craig. Compared to the 1972 movie segment, this version runs slightly longer and includes more action. Director Robert Zemeckis’ other Christmas entertainment credits include the animated features Polar Express (2004), and Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009). For more on the HBO Tales From the Crypt, see page 98. (Joanna Wilson)

TAL E S OF THE THI R D D I ME NSI O N

Director: Earl Owensby, Thom McIntyre, Worth Keeter, Todd Durham | Writer: Thom McIntyre, Worth Keeter, Todd Durham | USA | 1984 | Feature An odd, little-known horror anthology that came about in the wake of George Romero’s 1982 classic Creepshow (1982), Tales of the Third Dimension is modelled after classic EC Comics such as Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror, Tales was produced by E.O. Studios. Director Earl Owensby also tried to take advantage of the 3D revival that was underway, following up on the success of films like Jaws 3-D (1983) and Friday the 13th Part III (1982) with this North Carolina-shot 3-D horror anthology—the highlight of which is its final short, “Visions of Sugarplums,” wherein a kindly grandmother (Helene Tryon), off her anti-psychotics, spends the holidays thinking up new and shocking ways to kill the grandkids (Neale Powell and Kathy O’Toole) who are staying with her, until Santa saves the day. Equal parts funny and shocking, with a delightfully sardonic conclusion, the short is the strongest of the three segments—one about a vampiric couple who unwittingly adopt a werewolf boy who proceeds to devour them and, another about a couple of grave robbers who are set up on a heist, and entombed with carnivorous rats. The

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Left: Santa is invited in by an innocent child in Tales From the Crypt (1972). Above: Tales of the Third Dimension (1984).

film’s greatest appeal lies in the graveyard-set introductions by Igor, a Rod Serling-like rotting corpse who pops out of a coffin, with additional commentary from five vultures based on classic comedians—all animatronic. Self-aware and full of self-mockery, Tales of the Third Dimension is a twisted treat for genre fans. (Ariel Fisher)

TAL E S OF T H E UNE XPEC TE D : “ B AC K FO R CHRIST MAS”

Director: Giles Foster | Writer: Denis Cannan, John Collier | UK | 1980 | TV Episode After it was adapted by Francis M. Cockrell for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series (1955-1962), John Collier’s short story “Back for Christmas” was also brought to British small screens, this time by Denis Cannan, as part of the long running anthology series Tales of the Unexpected (1979-1988). Created by Roald Dahl, the popular series ran for nine seasons, with “Back for Christmas” airing in 1980, midway through the second season. Directed by Giles Foster, this adaptation is punchier and gorier than Cockrell and Hitchcock’s earlier take on Collier’s material, with the horror once again being visited upon the audience, the victim and finally the murderer. Richard Johnson takes the lead role as Machiavellian “henpecked” husband Dr. James Carpenter (renamed from Herbert), with Sian Phillips cast as his overly efficient and tragically doomed wife, Hermione. More overtly unhappy and dysfunctional than Herbert and Hermione in the earlier adaptation, James and Hermione’s marriage is clearly on the rocks in Foster’s reimagining, with James’ penchant for attractive young ladies spelled out during the leaving party for the Carpenters that opens the episode. Instead of a wine cellar being pivotal to the murder and its discovery, a greenhouse used to cultivate and grow orchids is the site of Hermione’s ad-hoc grave. Ensconced in an LA apartment, and awaiting the arrival of the attractive party guest, James learns that he will indeed be back for Christmas with the delivery of paperwork from the company his dead wife hired to construct a new greenhous for her husband as a Christmas present. (Neil Mitchell)

TAL E S OF THE UNE XPEC TE D : “ THE PA RT Y ”

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Director: Giles Foster | Writer: Doug Morgan, Chaim Bermant | UK | 1980 | TV Episode

The march of time, office politics and a seemingly unbridgeable generational gap converge into a special kind of hell for Harry Knox (Robert Morley) in this seasonal episode of UK anthology series Tales of the Unexpected (1979-1988). Pompous, conservative and deeply suspicious of change, Knox finds his position as manager of the toy factory where he has worked for forty years under threat as rumours of a foreign takeover circulate. Further undermining his standing within the company is the revelation that younger staff members have planned a disco to take place the day before the annual office Christmas party that Knox traditionally organizes. Hubris and a disdain for contemporary cultural and social mores drive Knox to sabotage the disco—or “orgy” as the disgruntled manager deems it—by literally fanning the flames of a fire he accidentally starts at the party venue. There is no peace and goodwill to be found in Knox’s actions as he leaves the venue to be consumed by fire and under the impression that his drink-fuelled actions are in some way justified. As was the norm for Tales of the Unexpected, the antagonist

experiences the real horror at the centre of each story, and for Knox it comes with the climactic realization that his malicious and ill-conceived act of petty jealousy has spectacularly backfired, exposing him as vain, snide and, in the eyes of the law, an arsonist. Backed by a selection of familiar Christmas songs, “The Party” gleefully underlines how the pressures of the holiday season can be too much for people already on the edge. (Neil Mitchell)

T E RR Y P R ATC HETT ’S HO G FATHER

Director: Vadim Jean | Writer: Vadim Jean | UK | 2006 | TV Film It’s Hogswatch (equivalent to Christmas) on the Discworld and the Hogfather has gone missing, requiring Death to take his place while his granddaughter Susan endeavors to find out what has happened. (Press notes)

T H RE AD S

Director: Mick Jackson | Writer: Barry Hines | UK | 1982 | TV Film

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While not specifically a Christmas film, Mick Jackson’s devastating statement against nuclear war pulls no punches and remains the most horrifying dramatization of both the immediate and long term effects of nuclear war. The film contains a sequence of a child born on Christmas day into the wasteland of nuclear winter, surrounded by a rag-tag group of strangers, as an obvious subversion of the Nativity. (Kier-La Janisse)

T J H OOK E R: “ SL AY R I D E ”

Director: Bruce Kessler | Writer: Rick Husky | USA | 1983 | TV Episode William Shatner’s career outside of the small and big screen versions of Star Trek (1966-1969) has seen the veteran star involved in such horror genre entries as The Devil’s Rain (1975), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) and the yuletide themed

Above: Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006).

A Christmas Horror Story (2015). One wouldn’t, however, automatically think that his stint as the titular crime fighting character in the early ‘80s cop show TJ Hooker (1982-1986) would be the place to look for further horror-related works involving the erstwhile Captain Kirk. Though it’s fair to say that this episode from season three—which screened during the 1983 holiday season—isn’t a horror genre piece, it does contain elements within its crime story narrative that make a mockery of Christmas as being the season of goodwill to all men. After a routine drug bust (involving Hooker dressed as Santa) goes awry during the episode’s opening sequence, “Slay Ride” then revolves around a strung-out couple and the baby they abandon. A subsequent armed robbery, breakdown of the fragile relationship and a tense final stand off between the police and the male half of the couple (Robert Dryer), bring the holiday special to a bittersweet climax. The “horror” in “Slay Ride” is realistic but banal; the senseless murder of a store clerk, the callous abandonment of a baby and the spiritually corrosive effect of drug use on both the user and the dealer. (Neil Mitchell)

T O AL L A GOOD NI G HT

Directed: David Hess | Written: Alex Rebar | USA | 1980 | Feature Set against the backdrop of a California Christmas, To All a Goodnight takes place at the Calvin Finishing School for Girls two years after the accidental death of one of their students. The sorority girls that remain have invited their boyfriends over for the holidays, and are picked off one by one by a maniac in a Santa Claus costume. In traditional slasher fashion, the women play fast and loose, and pay the price. Sex, booze and debauchery are interspersed with murder and mayhem. In its attempt to follow the trends of the day, the film blends elements of Black Christmas (1974), Friday the 13th (1980) and The Last House on the Left (1972), but isn’t quite as successful as its influences. The sole directorial feature credit of David Hess, who perfected the sleazy villain early on as Krug Stillo in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and parlayed that into a successful career working repeatedly with Craven and genre great Ruggero Deodato, it’s a shame there isn’t more punch to Goodnight given Hess’ exploitation pedigree. Although it has some charm, it’s not the bawdy slasher one might expect. (Ariel Fisher)

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TR E E S 2 : THE R O O T O F ALL EVI L

Director: Michael Pleckaitis | Writer: Jim Lawter, Michael Pleckaitis I 2004 I USA I Feature

The original Trees (2000) was a goofy parody of Steven Spielberg’s seminal blockbuster Jaws (1975), and featured a “Great White Pine” terrorizing the small Vermont town of Hazleton on Memorial Day weekend. Its sequel continues in that vein, but pokes fun at the one-upmanship inherent in Hollywood imitative sequel-churning found in films like Piranha 2: The Spawning (1981) and Deep Blue Sea (1999), where the original threat is superseded by a super threat. The survivors of Hazleton are now terrorized by a pack of government-created (of course), genetically-enhanced trees (naturally) fresh from captivity in a Christmas tree farm and thirsty for blood. Again we find the town’s leadership impotent in the face of crisis, but unwilling to shut down the ski lodges crucial to their tourism industry, especially close to Christmas. The Root of All Evil is an improvement in many ways over its predecessor, notably in the technical

aspects and larger set pieces, chiefly a Lord of the Rings-inspired climactic battle where a character called Fang (Tom Erb), donning a Santa Claus suit, leads the charge against vicious, coniferous foes before battling an enormous reptilian creature that bears little resemblance to a tree. Unfortunately, the juvenile humor frequently falls flat and the pastiche overstays its welcome. A filmmaker of Larry Cohen’s calibre would have the tools to elevate this type of absurd material, but the writers have no interest in crafting satire beyond irreverent, overdone spoof of nature-gone-amok horror films. Your mileage may vary depending on whether you think poorly animated jumping spider-trees, or a hero character named “Squint,” modeled after Robert Shaw’s iconic role, make for clever entertainment, or deserve a lump of coal. (Chris Hallock)

T R E E VE N GE

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Director: Jason Eisener | Writer: Rob Cotterill, Jason Eisener | Canada | 2008 | Short An early short from Hobo With A Shotgun (2011) director Jason Eisener, Treevenge opens on a placid scene of a Christmas tree farm. Crazed townsfolk soon break the calm, descending upon the trees for the annual tradition of adorning them with lights, baubles and other trinkets. But this year, the pines conspire against their captors and murder them in wildly gory fashions. Treevenge is an inspired title amongst the (admittedly small) timber terror subgenre. Films with monikers like The Crawlers (1993), Trees (2000), and its sequel Trees 2: The Root of All Evil (2004) (also featuring Christmas trees that menace a town) fall short by comparison. Treevenge gives good grue for the gorehound with a smirk on its face; but one wonders if it would have been even funnier played straight. (Eric Zaldivar) Above: Jason Eisener’s Canadian Christmas mini-classic Treevenge (2008). Photo: courtesy Rob Cotterill.

T R U E B OO

Director: Isadore Sparber | Writer: Unknown| USA | 1952 | Short In this Christmas-themed animated short film that later was broadcast on TV as part of The Harveytoons Show, popular children’s character Casper the Friendly Ghost helps restore a poverty-stricken child’s faith in the season. When Casper, who isn’t as fear-inducing to viewers as he is to others he meets, overhears a boy crying out for Santa, the little ghost poses as St. Nick and cleverly builds some toys from re-purposed items found around the home. When the youngster’s mother awakens, she is frightened by Casper and chases him away, but the child raises such a fuss about his new friend Santa that his mother asks the ghost to come back. This short, which was originally produced by Paramount’s Famous Studios, recalls the 1936 Fleischer Studios Color Classic cartoon “Christmas Comes But Once A Year,” in which the character Grampy repurposes found items into a collection of toys for children in an orphanage, including a toy train similarly made of a steam-powered coffee pot. (Joanna Wilson)

T W AS T H E N I G HT O F THE TR EE B E AST

Director: Cody Kennedy, Tim Rutherford | Writer: Cody Kennedy, Tim Rutherford | Canada | 2012 | Short Popular Edmonton video store The Lobby provides the backdrop for this second in an ongoing series of shorts by filmmaking collective The House of Heathens. Some familiarity with recurring characters Kevin (Kevin Martin, the faux-curmudgeon who owns The Lobby) and Josh (Joshua Lenner, innocent employee) is assumed, though certainly not necessary to enjoy the film. This time around, Josh excitedly celebrates Christmas as Kevin gets drunk on a variety of seasonal substances (as the rhyming narrator—Adam Brooks of Winnipeg’s Astron-6 filmmaking collective—riffs on classic poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) and tries to wreck the tree in a fit of Bah Humbug-itude. Josh calls upon the tree to come alive and show Kevin the true magic of Christmas, and a flurry of blood, branches and intestines ensues. Short, sweet and suitably cynical. (Kier-La Janisse)

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TH E TW I LI G HT ZO NE : “ FI VE C HAR AC T ERS IN SEARCH OF AN EXIT ”

Director: Lamont Johnson | Writer: Rod Serling | USA | 1961 | TV Episode

One of a number of Christmas-themed episodes of The Twilight Zone (19591964), “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is only revealed to be set during the holiday season at the conclusion of its bizarre, intriguing narrative. A clear influence on contemporary films set in one location and/or featuring amnesiac characters such as Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997), Rod Serling’s adaptation of Marvin Petal’s unpublished short story “The Depository” revolves around the titular figures and their desire to free themselves from an apparently irreversible situation. Awakening in a giant cylindrical space with no memory of who he is or how he got there, and with no apparent means of exit to be found, an army major (William Windom) discovers he shares the same predicament with a clown (Murray Matheson), a ballerina (Susan Harrison), a bagpiper (Clark Allen) and a hobo (Kelton Garwood). Existential angst, psychological pressure and a sense of hopelessness consume the imprisoned characters as they bicker, aimlessly occupy themselves and finally come together in a bid to escape

their mysterious prison. An unsurprisingly claustrophobic tale, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is driven by a horrific central conundrum that is only alleviated—for the viewer at least—in the final revelatory moments of the story. As Rod Serling’s voiceover narration explains, however, the arrival of Christmas Day does suggest an end to the tragic suffering of the central protagonists. This Christmas horror story is at least tinged with hope, despite its less than cheery premise. (Neil Mitchell)

T H E TW I L IG HT ZO NE: “ NI G HT O F THE MEEK ”

Director: Jack Smight | Writer: Rod Serling | USA | 1960 | TV Episode With its horror grounded in urban deprivation, mindless consumerism and the apparent erosion of emotional and spiritual fulfilment in American society, this Christmas-themed episode from the second season of The Twilight Zone 1959-1964) offers its characters and the viewer the comfort of fantasy to dispel the daily grind of reality. Never one to shy away from confronting the ills of society even in the most fantastic of narratives, Rod Serling paints a sorry picture of life on the poverty-stricken streets where “Night of the Meek” takes place that rings just as true today as it did back in 1960 when the episode first aired. For the otherwise unemployed alcoholic Henry Corwin (Art Carney), a seasonal stint as a department store Santa ends in acrimony as he’s fired for being drunk on the job. Declaring himself to be “an aging, purposeless relic of another time,” Corwin launches into an impassioned, if slurred, speech about how the true message of Christmas—charity, compassion and love—has been replaced by commercialism at the expense of the less fortunate members of society. Corwin’s miserable, sozzled evening takes a strange upturn upon the discovery of a huge sack that dispenses whatever gift “Santa” is asked for. For Corwin and the cast of supporting characters, the supernatural affords them some respite from their every day troubles. A gentle, homely tale, “Night of the Meek” seeks to spread seasonal cheer by employing the supernatural, something that is more often used to spread fear. (Neil Mitchell)

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Above: Kevin Martin and Joshua Lenner in Twas the Night of the Tree Beast (2012).

T H E TW I L I GH T ZO NE : “ C HANG I NG O F THE GUARD”

Director: Robert Ellis Miller | Writer: Rod Serling | USA | 1962 | TV Episode Airing during the same season but just after the earlier The Twilight Zone Christmas episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” “Changing of the Guard” stars a heavily made-up Donald Pleasance as elderly, bookish teacher Ellis Fowler. As much a part of the fabric of the Rock Spring School for Boys as the bricks and mortar of the establishment itself, Fowler has plied his trade at the school for more than 40 years with no thought of retirement. With the arrival of the current academic year’s seasonal holiday, however, Fowler’s entire raison d’être for life is to be upended by the news that the school governors have decided to replace the ageing teacher with a younger man. For Fowler, news of his enforced retirement is a psychological hammer blow that immediately fills him with existential dread and a wave of hopeless depression that destroys the usually genial and contented Fowler’s festive spirit. Serling’s tale of time waiting for no man touches on the very real emotional horrors of despair and shame before introducing a supernatural element to the narrative in an emotionally restorative manner. Convinced he hasn’t contributed anything of real worth to the world, and on the verge of suicide, Fowler is visited by the ghostly apparitions of dead former pupils. What would traditionally be a horrific narrative scenario is subverted, as the spectres appear in order to successfully convince the wise and gentle Fowler of the positive impact he played on their lives. (Neil Mitchell)

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T W O F R ON T TE ETH

Director: Jamie Nash, David Thomas Sckrabulis | Writer: Jamie Nash | USA | 2006 | Feature Taking its title from a famous novelty holiday tune, Two Front Teeth is a lowbudget digital film that satirizes holiday horror films. In the delightfully ludicrous

Above: A heavily-made up Donald Pleasence in The Twilight Zone: “The Changing of the Guard” (1962).

plot, a troubled married couple (Johnny Francis Wolf and Megan Pearson) come to possess Rudolph’s red nose, which is said to hold a power that can “upset the balance of Christmas.” A small army of blood-sucking elves and their vampiric lord, Santa Claus (credited “as himself”), arrive to get the glowing schnozzle back, but must first deal with a gunslinger (Joseph L. Johnson) and ninja nuns who protect the couple against the plasma-hound denizens of the North Pole. Two Front Teeth throws everything at the wall to see what sticks, and while nothing does, the sheer audacity is to be admired. For instance, it’s revealed that “Clausferatu” is actually the tooth fairy masquerading as the benevolent gift bringer, and she later fights the real Saint Nick in an inept martial arts duel, witnessed by Tiny Tim (“Kick his motherfuckin’ ass Santa Claus!”). Even the Easter Bunny manages to squeeze in some screen time before the credits roll. (Eric Zaldivar)

U N H OLY NI G HT

Director: Arni Jonsson | Writer: Ottó Geir Borg, Ómar Örn Hauksson | Iceland | 2010 | Short Original Icelandic legend provides for 13 Santa Clauses (the”Yule Lads”), each of whom arrive in succession on different nights. But their Santas aren’t as benevolent as ours, and tonight is the night for the one they call “Meathook.” (Press Notes)

V: T H E S ER I E S: “A R E FLEC TI O N I N TERROR”

Director: Chris Manheim | Writer: Kevin Hooks | USA | 1984 | TV Episode Following the TV mini-series V (1983) and V: The Final Battle (1984), the well-received science-fiction drama about an invading race of reptilian humanoids moved to a (far less successful) weekly show with V: The Series in October 1984. Lasting for just one 19-episode season before being cancelled, V: The Series contained a Christmas episode, “A Reflection in Terror,” which aired during that year’s festive period. Combining the series’ over-arching science-fiction narrative, a dash of body horror and a sprinkling of Christmas-related imagery and themes, “A Reflection in Terror” is a typical example of a weekly show’s incorporation of the holiday season into its schedule. Revolving around the alien visitors’ execution of a dastardly plan to clone Elizabeth (Jennifer Cooke)— the mixed species “Star Child” borne of a human mother and an alien father— the episode’s writer, Kevin Hooks, puts a horrific spin on the Nativity story. That the genetically engineered result of this decidedly un-immaculate conception is violently deranged rather than supernaturally gifted affords the opportunity

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Above: Cast publicity photo for V: The Series (1984-1985).

for moments of visceral and psychological terror. Aside from the crazed, murderous behaviour and visible emotional turmoil of the cloned Elizabeth, the destruction of the resistance movement’s headquarters by a bomb blast provides a more earthly moment of horror towards the end of the episode. Despite the narrative’s downbeat trajectory, “A Reflection in Terror” does end on a festive note—Michael Ironside, playing grim-faced hard-man Ham Tyler, dressed as Santa Claus. (Neil Mitchell)

V AU LT OF T H E MAC AB R E : SC AR Y LI TTLE CHRIST MAS

Director: Darren Field | Writer: Darren Field | UK | 2015 | Short Writer/director Darren Field has made no less than five short films, presented under the “Vault of the Macabre” banner, that feature darkly humorous poems, sometimes narrated by genre personalities and featuring accompanying creepy imagery. In Scary Little Christmas, the first of two Christmas-themed entries, Field weaves together three distinct pieces in less than four minutes. “Santa” offers a peak at what Santa might do to misbehaving children he visits, as the narration moves from a “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” tone to suggest that Santa likes to dismember brats. Narrated by Adam Baldwin, “Footprints in the Snow” is another macabre twist on Christmas legend, depicting Jack Frost as an undead creature lurking in the snow for lonely victims. Finally “Traditions” is a timely reminder that to clean out any limbs from stockings before they’re hung by the mantle with care. A delightful, Gothic film that eschews the usual Christmas horror approach for a more literate style, the film’s visuals are done almost entirely with miniatures, stills, and inanimate objects, keeping the focus on the wordplay and macabre morals of Field’s short but pithy poems. A second Christmas-themed Vault of the Macabre short, The Fright Before Christmas, followed in 2016. (Paul Corupe)

W E ALW AY S F IND O U R SELVES I N THE SEA

Director: Sean Hogan | Writer: Sean Hogan | UK | 2017 | Short A lonely recluse prepares to celebrate Christmas alone when a figure from his past unexpectedly reappears. But are the old ghosts stirred up by her arrival just bad memories or something more? In this windswept tribute to the classic English ghost stories of M.R. James and the 1970s A Ghost Story for Christmas series they spawned, writer/director Sean Hogan reteams with his co-producers on Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD (2014) and The Devil’s Business (2011) star Billy Clarke to bring this Christmas horror short made especially to coincide with the limited edition version of this very book you now hold in your hands. (Kier-La Janisse)

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Above: Preliminary marketing poster for Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea (2017).

W H AT ’ S N EW, SC O O B Y-D O O ? : “A SC O OBY-DOO! CH RIST MAS”

Director: Scott Jeralds | Writers: John Collier, George Doty IV, Jim Krieg, Ed Scharlach | USA| 2002 | TV Episode The Headless Snowman is out to chill the gang in this Christmas-themed episode of the 2002 revival of everyone’s favourite canine crime solver, Scooby-Doo. On their way through New England, the Scooby gang spends the night in Winterhollow, where the town’s residents are terrorized by a nine-foot frozen monster each year at Christmas. A local legend says that the monster is the ghost of a 19th-century robber who froze to death, but the gang unravel the mystery and set a trap with outdoor space heaters. The scariness of any Scooby-Doo episode usually depends on the monster, and the giant Headless Snowman is menacing—not only does he destroy the local’s homesteads, he also keeps the residents of Winterhollow from celebrating Christmas. Fans of the 1990s TV series The Drew Carey Show will get a kick out of hearing Kathy Kinney voice the character of Sheriff Perkins. (Joanna Wilson)

T H E W H I TE R E I ND EER

Director: Erik Blomberg | Writer: Erik Blomberg, Mirjami Kuosmanen | Finland | 1952 | Feature The debut feature film of Finnish cinematographer, director and producer Erik Blomberg, The White Reindeer is an atmospheric, tragic tale of vampirism, shape shifting and shamanism. While not occurring during Christmas, the snowy Lapland setting and narrative focus on the titular sleigh-pulling creature makes it an ideal viewing experience for those looking for seasonal chills of the less obvious kind. Cowritten by Blomberg with his wife and leading lady, Mirjami Kuosmanen, The White Reindeer draws on preChristian Finnish mythology and shamanism as practised by the Sami (Laplander) people to tell the doomed story of Pirita (Mirjami Kuosmanen). Having met, fallen in love with and married reindeer herder Aslak (Kalervo Nissila), Pirita soon finds herself fending off loneliness while her new husband is off working. Visiting a local shaman in an effort to ease her emotional suffering,

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Above: Finland’s first horror film: Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer (1952).

Pirita drinks a love potion in a bid to drive Aslak wild with passion, but instead it has devastating consequences. Pirita is inadvertently turned into a vampiric, shape-shifting white reindeer with the ability to seduce any man while in her human form, luring them to their deaths in the process. Filled with striking imagery and brimming with a strong sense of Finnish culture and mythology, The White Reindeer weaves superstition, animism, witchcraft and the yearning for earthly pleasures into a clear horror genre narrative. The prevailing Christian view of reindeer as loveable assistants of Santa Claus is left in tatters by this dark, folklore-inspired tale. (Neil Mitchell)

W H I TE REI ND EER

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Director: Zach Clark | Writer: Zach Clark | USA | 2013 | Feature

“It’s gonna be a sad December, sweet pea.” The fourth feature of indie director Zach Clark (Modern Love is Automatic (2009), Little Sister (2016)) is a Christmas comedy black as a lump of coal in a brat’s stocking. Suzanne Barrington (Anna Margaret Hollyman) is a real estate agent with a happy marriage (read: they still have kitchen sex) to a TV weatherman who’s just had the best Christmas news ever—he’s gotten a promotion and they’re moving to Hawaii! But before she can say “Ho Ho Ho,” she comes home from the mall to discover his dead, bludgeoned body in their front foyer. The sweetness of the protagonist’s Christmas obsession (even her middle name is literally “Noel”) is contrasted with this gruesome discovery through Clark’s trademark ironic editing and soundtrack choices. But the film also deals adeptly with the absurdity of grief, and how everything just… stops. Every exchange, every encounter with “reality” suddenly seems like a cruel joke. It’s this dark humor that White Reindeer so brilliantly taps into.

Above: Suzanne (Anna Margaret Hollyman) eats, drinks and shops her way into Christmas oblvion in Zach Clark’s White Reindeer (2013).

When her husband’s colleague spills the beans that the weatherman had been having an affair with a 22-year old erotic dancer named Autumn (well, that’s her stripper name—her real name is Fantasia), Suzanne engages in a progression of destructive behavior that includes compulsive online shopping, overdosing on eggnog and other, less legal mind-altering substances, shoplifting, participating in a neighbourhood swinger party (presided over by mumblecore stalwart Joe Swanberg and Clark alum Lydia Hyslop) and making friends with the woman who was intimate with her husband, in a desperate attempt to cling to an unknown piece of him. But this latter act will be the thing that leads to her healing from the loss of both her husband and the holiday she loved. The image of a despondent character moving in a daze through a world beset upon by grotesque caricatures of holiday cheer is perhaps the best summation of how Christmas is experienced by most people—which makes White Reindeer simultaneously the most appropriate and inappropriate choice for seasonal viewing. (Kier-La Janisse)

W H OE V E R SLEW AUNTI E R O O ?

Director: Curtis Harrington | Writer: David D. Osborn, Jimmy Sangster, Robert Blees, Gavin Lambert | UK | 1971 | Feature In 1971, avant-garde filmmaker Curtis Harrington (Night Tide (1961)) went to England and made his single stab at the Christmas horror subgenre with Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Shelley Winters stars as the titular Auntie, who hosts an annual Christmas party for the local orphans, or at least that percentage of them lucky enough to be picked, is a two-day kiddie bacchanal featuring sumptuous meals, games aplenty and generous gift giving. Included among the children are Christopher (Mark Lester) and Katy (Chloe Lambert), a slightly creepy brother and sister who soon become the focus of Auntie Roo’s attentions; Katy, it transpires, reminds Roo of her own lost little girl, who died some years earlier in a bannister accident. In Katy, Roo has her little girl again, and will not let her go; the kids in their turn have read Hansel and Gretel, so they know what to do. For more on Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, see page 188. (Caelum Vatnsdal)

W I N D CH ILL

Director: Gregory Jacobs | Writer: Joseph Gangemi, Steven Katz | USA/ UK | 2007 | Feature

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When classes end for Christmas holidays, an entitled and bitchy student (Emily Blunt) shares a ride back home with a creepy stranger (Ashton Holmes, doing his best Jesse Eisenberg impression before Eisenberg was a name) who seems to know way too much about her. After a backroads car collision, they’re both left stranded in the middle of the frightful weather. The cherry on-top? The road is haunted by spirits, including a rapey highway patrolman (Martin Donovan), who appears when the car radio plays “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.” While a relatively big-budgeted affair in a subgenre dominated by z-grade material, Wind Chill still doesn’t rise above the pack, largely due to its lack of originality. Most viewers will guess the ending long before the film gets going, and the spectral menaces are routinely designed. Wind Chill is eerily similar to, but not as good as another haunted highway Christmas horror movie, Dead End (2003). (Eric Zaldivar)

T H E W I N T E R STALK E R

Director: Stephen Reedy | Writer: Stephen Reedy | USA | 2010 | Short Running for about the same length as the average feature film trailer, American writer, director and producer Stephen Reedy’s short film The Winter Stalker riffs on and subverts both the spirit of Christmas and the image of the benevolent Santa. One of the ten finalists at the 2010 Halloween Horror Nights Scary Good Film Competition, Reedy’s yuletide themed horror short was made for around $2,000 and features Darrell Robb as the titular stalker and Rome Shadanloo as “Woman,” the object of his twisted obsession. Flitting between a decidedly grotty grotto and a pristine home, the stalker—an unkempt and half-dressed overweight male with a big bushy white beard à la Santa Claus—provides a creepy, menacing voice-over narration (voiced by Josh Petersdorf) as he prepares to leave a “special gift” for the sleeping woman, Katie. Assuming it is Christmas Eve and the stalker is Santa Claus himself, Reedy’s two-minute tale puts a dark spin on the traditional image of Christmas as a time of peace, love and contentment. Similarly, Reedy’s Santa Claus—or madman who believes himself to be Santa Claus—oozes sexual suggestion, murderous intent and general malevolence rather than appearing as the good natured, kindly figure we all recognize as the norm, which are fully accentuated by the short film’s ominous score and sinister milieu. An unexpected and slightly ambiguous twist at the end, as “Santa” delivers his gift to Katie, acts as a release of tension and a curveball to the simple narrative’s imagined trajectory. (Neil Mitchell)

W K R P I N C I N C I NNATI : “ B AH, HU MB UG ”

Director: Rod Daniel | Writer: Lissa Levin | USA| 1980 | TV Episode The popular radio-station set sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-1982) tackled Christmas horror for a third-season holiday episode. After devouring one of Dr. Johnny Fever’s (Howard Hesseman) “special brownies,” and informing the staff there will be no Christmas bonus, station manager Herb Carlson (Gordon Jump) drifts into a hallucinogenic nap which brings Charles Dickens’ famous ghosts from A Christmas Carol. Although this WKRP episode looks like a lot of other Christmas Carol riffs that were so prevalent in sitcoms of this era, it is also a poignant and bittersweet look at just how prescient the series was in terms of the future of radio. Putting Mr. Carlson in the past in 1954, with a ragtag but optimistic staff listening to Perry Como over the station’s speakers, the ghosts follow through to the struggles of then-modern day radio, before finally going into a computerized future where there is no staff, save one lonely employee and a computer. And while this is not the strongest episode of the series, it is a fascinating document of the history of radio, which was even then beginning to envision its own demise. WKRP enjoyed a strong ensemble cast, and most of the humor was derived from its realistic setting and characters. Despite several Emmy nominations during its four-season run (including an Emmy win for Andy Ackerman’s editing of this episode), the series struggled during its original airing. It found a new audience in syndication, and has since reached cult status. (Amanda Reyes)

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T H E W OM AN IN B L AC K

Director: Herbert Wise | Writer: Nigel Kneale | UK | 1989 | TV Film

The Woman in Black was always explicitly a Christmas ghost story: Susan Hill’s original 1983 novella is bookended by fireside Christmas sections in which the older Arthur Kipps reflects back on the haunting he endured in his youth. Those were excised in Nigel Kneale’s unnerving 1989 television adaptation, but the film nevertheless formed part of the UK’s festive schedule that year, broadcast on ITV on the evening of December 24th. That airing remains a lasting psychological scar on the generation that remembers it. The story involves young solicitor Arthur Kidd (Adrian Rawlins), who is sent to the (fictional) English village of Crythin Gifford to wrap up the estate of the recently deceased widow Alice Drablow. Drablow was the sole occupant of Eel Marsh House, which is separated from the mainland by a causeway accessible only when the tides allow. Kidd is immediately and repeatedly visited by the malevolent title character, later revealed to be the harbinger of childrens’ deaths in the village, in vengeance for her own past tragedy. Hauntings were often the spine of Kneale’s work (including in Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and The Stone Tape (1972), the latter a Christmas chiller for the BBC in 1972), although he favoured modern twists on the traditional form. With this adaptation, Kneale adheres to the bones of Hill’s plot, but adds embellishments according to his own preoccupations. Updating the setting to the 1920s, Kneale playsup the encroachment of new technologies on the old world. His Eel Marsh House has electric light from a generator, and Mrs. Drablow’s diaries are now recorded on wax cylinder, a modern way for the dead to communicate with the living. Hill told UK newspaper The Telegraph in 2012 that she dislikes this version, but its scarcity has only helped its terrifying reputation—re-broadcast only once (on Channel 4 on Christmas Day, 1994), this adaptation has received only limited releases on VHS and DVD. (Owen Williams)

T H E X - F I L ES: HO W THE G HO STS STO LE CHRIST MAS

Director: Chris Carter | Writer: Chris Carter | USA | 1998 | TV Episode Given The X-Files’ (1993-2002) fondness for drawing on real-life mythology and folklore as well as popular culture for its fantastical scenarios, it’s unsurprising that the show’s creator Chris Carter wrote and directed a yuletide-themed episode. Airing as part of the sixth season in 1998, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” neatly combines humour, melancholy and Gothic horror in an, at times, self-referential tale of restless spirits, emotional bonds and how Christmas can be a time of deep loneliness for some. Promoted with the tagline “This holiday season… give the gift of terror,” this stand-alone monster-of-the-week episode opens on a suitably stormy Christmas Eve as Scully (Gillian Anderson) reluctantly joins Mulder (David Duchovny) on a stakeout at an abandoned but apparently haunted mansion house in Maryland. Mulder has been sufficiently intrigued by the story of the mansion’s former occupants to investigate its veracity. On Christmas Eve 1917, besotted couple Maurice and Lyda (portrayed in their ghostly forms by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin) took the drastic decision to end their lives in a suicide pact to avoid one having to live without the other if death should come calling. With the always-sceptical Scully in tow, Mulder sets out to discover whether the dead couple haunt the mansion every Christmas Eve as the legend attests. A nod to both literary haunted house tales and other Christmas ghost story-themed TV shows, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” invites the viewer to take stock of their own closest relationships. (Neil Mitchell)

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Y OU B E T TE R W ATC H O U T

Director: Steve Callen| Writer: Steve Callen | Australia | 2008 | Short A well-produced and scripted Australian short, You Better Watch Out tells the story of a foul-mouthed, drunken mall Santa who is kidnapped by a pair of masked men who insist he’s the real McCoy. Chaining him to a chair in a windowless room heavily stocked with implements of torture, the men try to get the ersatz Santa to explain why they didn’t get the Christmas gifts that they wanted when they were kids. The red-clad man’s attempts to prove he’s not Santa don’t convince the rather dense siblings, who begin snipping off their captive’s toes with bolt cutters for retribution. Along with these bloodier trappings, the film features some intriguing Chirstmastime discussions, including about faith in the fantastic in the face of indisputable facts. But perhaps most importantly, the film also delves deeply into the idea of holiday disappointment—both from those who didn’t get what they wanted as well as those who must play the role of Santa every year. It’s a unique take on Christmas horror that serves as a springboard for some interesting musings about the way that we can be unexpectedly affected by the holidays. Still, this is ultimately a horror film and when the mall Santa escapes and sees he’s being held in a house accented with hundreds of Santa decorations, he knows he won’t be magically saved from his inevitable fate. (Paul Corupe)

YULE DIE

Director: Seth Middleton | Writer: Seth Middleton | USA | 2010 | Feature In this amateur production, a young girl named Emily (Shania Mangrum) is left with a severe phobia surrounding the Christmas holiday after an attack a year earlier. When the man who attacked her escapes from prison, Emily finds herself holed up in a cabin with her mother (Nikki Spiess) and the local man (BJ Lampley) who saved her the first time around as they wait for the killer to close in. (Press notes)

Y U L E TI D E

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Director: Marinah Janello I Writer: Marinah Janello I USA I 2016 I Short Film

Woe be to you who misbehaves, for you’re certain to incur the wrath of Krampus! Marinah Janello’s eerie short film Yuletide deposits the malevolent horned beast into a cinematic landscape of composited Super-8 home movie footage salvaged from thrift stores. It’s a surreal journey into secular and religious holiday traditions presided over by a vengeful mythological creature as he pursues a girl he’s caught spying on him in the woods. Janello’s warped vision is a hallucinatory blend of recycled memories, surreal fantasy, and social critique aimed at distorting our ideas of holiday tradition. Yuletide is fashioned in a style similar to Janello’s Of Birth and Brittle Teeth (2015) using a voyeuristic approach that positions the lurking viewer in the private acts onscreen. Whether witnessing the film’s joyous gift exchange, festive family meal, or march in a Catholic procession, we’re allowed entry to these events with the prying eyes of Janello’s intuitive techniques. A rampaging Krampus—who travels via television transmissions—is superimposed into these scenes, a juxtaposition of found and original footage designed to elicit the feeling of a lucid dream. Janello’s fever nightmare is perfectly expressed within the compressed frame of forgotten

time-worn small-gauge film—a terrific aesthetic for examining bourgeoisie ideas of reward versus punishment, consumerism, and religious ceremony in a jarringly artful manner. As a result, the film offers hypnotic visual poetry we don’t often find in an age of storytelling gimmickry. Janello hails from New Hampshire, and implements a distinct New England brand of wintery gloom to the atmosphere guided by her handmade Krampus. The presence of Krampus reminds us of rituals and otherworldly spirits wrested from freer pagan practices and absorbed by Christianity for purposes of control. The journey is fueled by Evan Phennicie’s crunchy heavy metal score set against vérité and fantasybased imagery making for an unnerving descent into holiday despair. (Chris Hallock)

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AL E X AN D R A W EST

Alexandra West is a freelance genre film journalist, co-host of the Faculty of Horror podcast and author of Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity (2016) and The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula (2018). She lives in Toronto, Canada.

AM AN D A RE Y ES

Amanda Reyes is archivist, an academic and a freelance writer from Austin, Texas. She is a specialist on the made for television movie genre, and is the co-writer and editor of the book Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium: 1964-1999 (Headpress, 2017). She has been featured as a guest lecturer on the topic across the globe and also hosts a blog called Made for TV Mayhem, as well as its companion podcast.

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AN D RE A SU B I SSATI

Andrea Subissati is a writer, podcaster and journalist. She is the editor of Toronto-based genre magazine Rue Morgue, as well as producer and co-host of The Faculty of Horror podcast and co-founder of The Black Museum horror lecture series. Her publications include When There’s No More Room In Hell: The Sociology of the Living Dead (2010) and contributed chapters to The Undead and Theology (2012) and The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (2015).

AN D R E W N E T TE

Andrew Nette is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. He has written extensively on pulp publishing in Australia and overseas, as well as on film and television. He is co-editor of Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 – 1980 (PM Press). You can find him via his website www.pulpcurry. com or on Twitter at @Pulpcurry.

AR I E L F I S HER

Ariel Fisher is a writer, editor, and podcaster from Toronto, Ontario. She has written for Toronto Film Scene, Sound on Sight, and Rue Morgue Magazine, and contributed to the BBC Culture 2017 poll of the 100 greatest comedies of all time. She co-hosts the podcast A Frame Apart, comparing and contrasting films in obscure ways. She co-hosts, edits, and produces After All, a cross-generational podcast exploring the social, political, and personal impact of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

C AE L U M V ATNSD AL

Caelum Vatnsdal is a writer and filmmaker living in Winnipeg. He has made music videos, horror movies, Bigfoot documentaries and TV murder shows; he is the author of They Came From Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema and an upcoming biography of Dick Miller, the best actor in Hollywood, titled Dick Miller: The Best Actor in Hollywood.

C H RI S H A LLO C K

Chris Hallock is a writer and film programmer in Philadelphia. He’s a regular contributor at Diabolique Magazine, VideoScope Magazine, and Cemetery Dance. He’s a member of the programming team for the Boston Underground Film Festival, the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, and the Cinedelphia Film Festival. He’s currently writing a biography of prolific character actor Billy Drago and a book about quiet genre films entitled Just a Whisper for Midnight Marquee Press.

D AV E CANFI E LD

Dave Canfield is a co-founder of and contributor to Screen Anarchy as well as a staff writer with Magill’s Cinema Annual. He believes Halloween and Christmas are almost interchangeable and gives out mistletoe to trick ‘r treaters.

D AV I D B E RTR AND

David Bertrand is a film programmer and artistic director for The Royal Cinema in Toronto, and works in film and TV development and production for Toronto-based Markham Street Films. He co-founded Montreal’s Blue Sunshine Psychotronic Film Centre (2010-2012). As a musician, David has performed with Broken Puppy, Sacral Nerves, and Chris Alexander’s Music For Murder. His writing on film and music have appeared in Hazlitt, Fangoria, Shock Till You Drop, and Spectacular Optical’s Satanic Panic: PopCultural Paranoia in the 1980s.

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D E R E K JOHNSTO N

Derek Johnston is a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, where he teaches the analysis of media. His first book, Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween, was published by Palgrave in 2015, and looks at seasonal horror on television, where it came from, and what it suggests. It stems from being introduced to the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas and wondering why the idea of Christmas as a time for ghost stories did not seem unusual. His research more broadly examines fantastic genres, such as science fiction and horror, on television, radio and film.

D I AN E A. RODG ER S

Senior Lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University, I specialise in alternative and cult film, television, music and comics. My PhD research and recent conference presentations in the UK examine folklore in ‘wyrd’ 1970s British Film and Television folk-horror. Before academic life, I worked as a digital film and video editor. Outside of work, I sing and play guitar in my trashy garage punk band The Sleazoids and adore Godzilla, sci-fi, horror, drawing comics and collecting vintage Viewmaster reels.

E R I C Z AL D I VAR

Eric Zaldivar is a filmmaker, screenwriter, researcher and Spaghetti Western film historian. He co-wrote the original screenplay for Django Lives! and remains involved on the project as a producer (Indie darling John Sayles and Case 39 director, Christian Alvart, are now involved). He also co-produced The Scarlet Worm (the world’s first “abortion Western”), assisted on an Alex Cox documentary about Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, and was second-unit director on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime! documentary.

F E D E R I C O CAD D E O

Federico Caddeo is a filmmaker and journalist born in Sardinia in 1978. His company Freak-O-Rama (www.freakorama.org) was established in 2006 and he has since written, shot, directed and produced more than 400 featurettes and documentaries as extra features for as many blu rays/dvds released in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan by many different labels. He lives and works between Pisa and Rome.

F L OR E N T C H RI STO L

Florent Christol received his PhD in American cinema and history from the University of Poitiers, France. His research on gender, disability and the politics of carnival has been published in journals such as Simulacres, CinémAction, Cinémas, Lignes de fuite. He has also contributed book chapters to several collections including Cinéma et Histoire, George Romero, un cinéma crépusculaire, Représenter l’horreur, Fashioning Horror: Dressing to Kill in Horror and Literature and more. He is a lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3 (France). He is currently writing a monograph on Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.

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JOAN N A W I L S O N

Joanna Wilson is a Christmas entertainment author. Her books include Tis the Season TV: The Encyclopedia of Christmas-themed Episodes, Specials and Made-for-TV Movies (2010) and The Christmas TV Companion: A Guide to Cult Classics, Strange Specials, and Outrageous Oddities (2009), among others. Right now, she’s probably watching something awesome on TV.

JOE Y AN I C K

Joe Yanick is a writer and film professional living in New York City. His work has been published in Vice, Complex, Delirium Magazine, and more. He is currently an assistant editor at Cineaste Magazine, Festival and Non-theatrical Manager for the worldwide sales company Visit Films, as well as the co-director of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies - NYC.

K I E R - L A J ANI SSE

Kier-La Janisse has been a film writer and programmer since 1997. She is the owner of Spectacular Optical, founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012). In addition to Yuletide Terror, she co-edited and/or published the anthology books Kid Power! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and is currently writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.

K I M N E W MAN

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula series, Life’s Lottery, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, An English Ghost Story, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School and Angels of Music; his non-fiction includes Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Quatermass and the Pit. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines. He has also written comics and plays for the radio and the stage. His official website is at www.johnnyalucard.com. He is on Twitter as @AnnoDracula.

K RI S TOP H E R W O O F TE R

Kristopher Woofter teaches courses on the American Gothic, the Weird tradition, and literary and cinematic horror in the English Department of Dawson College, Montréal. He earned his PhD from Concordia University. He is co-editor of the upcoming collection, Joss Whedon vs. Horror: Fangs, Fans and Genre in Buffy and Beyond (I.B. Tauris). Kristopher is also a programmer for the Montréal Underground Film Festival and served for ten years as a co-chair for the Horror Area of the PCA/ACA annual national conference.

L E E GAM BI N

Lee Gambin is a writer, author and film historian. He writes for various film related magazines and sites and has written the books Massacred By Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film, We Can Be Who We Are: Movie Musicals of the 1970s and Nope, Nothing Wrong Here: The Making of Cujo. He will soon be releasing new books: The Howling: Studies in the Horror Film and Tonight, On A Very Special Episode: A History of Sitcoms that Sometimes Got Serious. He also runs Melbourne-based film society Cinemaniacs and lectures on cinema studies.

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L E S L I E H ATTO N

Leslie Hatton created the pop culture website Popshifter (2007 – 2015) and has written for Rue Morgue, Diabolique Magazine, Everything Is Scary, and Modern Horrors, among others. She contributed a chapter on Ricky Kasso in pop culture to the second Spectacular Optical anthology, Satanic Panic. More recently she wrote about 1973’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark for the feminist horror anthology Women with Guts. Her favorite Christmas horror film is À l’intérieur.

L U K E M U LLEN

Luke Mullen is a lifelong cinephile. A resident of Austin, Texas, Luke is part of the

programming team for Fantastic Fest, the largest genre film festival in the US. In addition to films of all kinds, He loves his wife, his dogs, and baking cookies.

M I C H AE L G I N G O LD

Michael Gingold spent 28 years with Fangoria magazine and its website as an editor and writer. He currently contributes to Rue Morgue, Birth.Movies. Death, Time Out New York, Scream, Delirium and others, and is the author of The Frightfest Guide to Monster Movies (FAB Press). Michael has produced and directed featurettes and written liner notes for numerous Blu-ray and DVD releases, appeared in many feature and short documentaries, and taken part in several disc audio commentaries. Among his screenplay credits are Shadow: Dead Riot (Fever Dreams), Leeches! (Rapid Heart Pictures) and the upcoming The Doll for director Dante Tomaselli.

M I C H AE L H E L MS

Michael Helms is a long-term horror film enthusiast who cannot be stopped. Stakes, silver bullets and well-thrown incendiary devices aimed at his head have proved futile. Cursed with eternal good taste he founded and edited the Melbourne-based fanzine turned magazine Fatal Visions while spreading the bloody word by interviewing hundreds of horror filmmakers in local and international publications such as Fangoria, where he was a contributor for 24 years. Currently he introduces all features on the Fatal Visions label distributed by Monster Pictures and can be found stalking horror film festivals across the globe.

N E I L M I T C H E LL

Neil Mitchell is a writer and editor based in Brighton, UK. He is the author of Devil’s Advocates: Carrie for Auteur Publishing and the editor of World Film Locations: London for Intellect Books among other titles. He writes regularly for the BFI and his work has been published by Sight & Sound, The Guardian and Total Film.

OW E N W I LLI AMS

Owen Williams is a British film journalist. He lives in the Yorkshire Dales with an academic and a cat. He is a regular contributor to Empire magazine and has been widely published elsewhere, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, Fangoria and Rue Morgue. He is also the author of Alien: The Augmented Reality Survival Manual, published in 2017 by Carlton Books. He genuinely thinks Papa Lazarou is way more disturbing than Giger’s Alien.

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PAU L CORU P E

The creator of Canuxploitation.com, Toronto-based writer and editor Paul Corupe has been exploring and documenting the secret history of Canadian genre movies for more than 15 years. A regular contributor to Rue Morgue magazine, he is has also written about film for The Toronto Star, Take One Film and Television in Canada and Cinema Sewer, among others.

RAL P H E L AW ANI

Ralph Elawani is a Montréal-based writer and independent journalist. He is the author of a biography of novelist and filmmaker Emmanuel Cocke,

C’est complet au royaume des morts, and of an essay on counterculture in Quebec: Les marges détachables. He has contributed chapters to several books, including Bleu nuit, Satanic Panic and L’ère-seconde. His article “Les identités victimaires”, published in Nouveau Projet #10, earned him the 2017 Quebec Grand Prize for Independent Journalism (opinion / analysis). Elawani is a frequent commentator on CBC/Radio-Canada, and collaborator to Le Devoir, 24 images, Nouveau projet, LQ, VICE Québec and Spirale Web.

S H E L AG H R O W AN-LE G G

Shelagh Rowan-Legg is a writer, film critic, and filmmaker. She is a Contributing Editor for ScreenAnarchy, and a critic for Sight & Sound. Her book The Spanish Fantastic: Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy and Sci Fi was published by I.B. Tauris in 2016.

S T E P H E N THR O W E R

Stephen Thrower, writer and musician, was born in Lancashire in 1963. After moving to London in 1985 he began writing reviews for the seminal horror magazine Shock Xpress, before launching his own film periodical Eyeball in 1989 with contributors including novelist Ramsey Campbell, filmmaker Ron Peck, and critics Kim Newman, Daniel Bird and Alan Jones. His first book, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, was published in 1999, followed by The Eyeball Compendium (2003) and Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007). His most recent work is Murderous Passions; the delirious cinema of Jesús Franco, published by Strange Attractor in March 2015. Thrower and his partner Ossian Brown are founders of the avant-garde music group Cyclobe, who recently recorded new soundtracks for three Super-8 films by the British filmmaker and queer activist Derek Jarman (Sulphur, Tarot and Garden of Luxor). As a solo artist, Thrower scored Pakistan’s first gore film, Zibahkhana aka Hell’s Ground (2007), contributed electronic music to Down Terrace (2010) by Ben Wheatley, and was commissioned by the BFI in 2012 to score three silent short films by the pioneering director of gay erotica Peter De Rome.

Z AC H CL A R K

Zach Clark is the writer and director of the feature films Little Sister, Whte Reindeer, Vacation! and Modern love is Automatic. His films have screened across the United States and Europe, winning awards and stuff. He’s written about film for The Talkhouse, Filmmaker Magazine, and L Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Z AC K C AR LSO N

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Zack Carlson is part of Bleeding Skull and the Vice series Outsider. He lives in Austin, TX, where he writes with Bryan Connolly. Their show The Suplex Duplex Complex, created with Todd Rohal, recently premiered on Adult Swim. They just shot a new project called Hunky Boys Go Ding-Dong. Zack and Bryan also edited the book Destroy All Movies!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film. But enough about them. Tell me about you.

S P E CI AL THANK S TO :

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Ramsey Campbell, Wim Jensen at Movie-INK, Christian McLaughlin and Beth Hall at Westgate Gallery, Marc Walkow, John Campopiano, Lawrence Gordon Clark, Larry Edmunds’ Bookshop, Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee, Lewis Jackson, Elric Kane, Rebekah McKendry, Rob Galluzzo, David Gregory, Elisabeth Royce, Joe Rubin, Brandon Upson and James Neurath at Vinegar Syndrome, Justin Erickson, Justin Brookhart, MONDO, Maria Zellerland, Joe Lynch, Nick Parisi, Jeff Miller, Per-Ingva Tomren, Steve Davis, Stuart W. Bedford, Mitch Davis, King-Wei Chu, Joe Yanick, Mike Keegan, Ned Hinkle, Nicole McControversy, Jeff Mandel, Vincent Guastini, William Cooke, Paul Talbot, J. Joly, Fred Dekker, Eyesore Video, Andrew Barr, Trevor Henderson, Rick Trembles, Gary Pullin, Josh Saco, Geoff Pevere, David Szulkin, Rob Jones, Spencer Hickman, Michelle Winer, Andrew Tweedie, Jeremy Dyson, Robert Morin, Coop Video de Montreal, Kristopher Woofter, Luke Mullen, Jean Anne Lauer, Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Fabrice Du Welz, Rene Manzor, Marie L. Manzor, Federico Caddeo, Chris Bavota, Lee Paula Springer, Alisdair Wood, Dick Maas, Jalmari Helander, Petri Jokiranda, Lauri Ahonen, Izzy Lee, Toronto Indie Horror Festival, Justin McConnell, The Shock Waves podcast, Rob Cotterill, Karim Hussain, Brandon Cronenberg, The Film Noir Cinema, The Horse Hospital, The Royal Cinema, The Winnipeg Cinematheque, Blood in the Snow, The Brattle Theatre, PhilaMOCA, Bar Le Ritz, Adam Abouaccar, Ariel Estaban Cayer, Drawn & Quarterly, and all our Indiegogo supporters without whom this project would not be possible.

Dedicated to Bob Clark and Lawrence Gordon Clark

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Above: Polish poster for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by Leszek Zebrowski. From the collection of Movie-INK Amsterdam.

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Top: Cletus (Sam Campbell) in Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas (2016). Bottom: Blood Beat (1983). Photo courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome.

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Top: Black Christmas (1974), under alternate title Silent Night, Evil Night. Bottom: Safe Neighbourhood, aka Better Watch Out (2016).

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Top: Stuart W. Bedford’s Good Tidings (2016). Bottom: Per-Ingvar Tomren and Magne Steinsvoll’s Christmas Cruelty! (2013).

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Top: Todd Nunes’ All Through the House (2015). Bottom: Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2007). Photo: © Sonar Entertainment.

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Top: Jack Frost (1997). Photo courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome. Bottom and left: Tales From the Crypt (1972). Poster from the collection of Westgate Gallery | westgategallery.com

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Above: Italian poster for 3615 Code: Père Noël (1989). Poster from the collection of Westgate Gallery | westgategallery.com

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Alternate poster art by Germain Mainger Barthélémy at www.mainger.com

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Original market/festival poster for Kevin Phillips’ Super Dark Times (2017).

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Above: Lewis Jackson’s Christmas Evil, aka You Better Watch Out (1980). Photos courtesy of Lewis Jackson.

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Top: Mexican lobby card for New Year’s Evil (1980). Above and top right: Ronald Neame’s Scrooge (1970). Bottom right: À l’intérieur, aka Inside (2007).

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CHRISTMAS HORROR FILM AND TELEVISION YULETIDE TERROR ON

“A hugely informative compilation of studies of the shadows Christmas brings—a splendid gift for any horror film enthusiast, which will last all year round.” —Ramsey Campbell

For many, Christmas is an annual celebration of goodwill and joy, but for others, it’s a time to curl up on the couch in the dead of winter for a good old fashioned fright. The festive holiday season has always included a more somber side, and scary tales of childstealing demons to ghost stories told ‘round the fireplace go back to pre-Christian celebrations. These long-standing traditions have found modern expression in the Christmas horror film, a unique and sometimes controversial subgenre that cheerfully drives a stake of holly through the heart of cherished Christmas customs. Yuletide Terror delves into the world of festive fright favourites and obscurities, from American Santa Slashers (and the ensuing controversies) to British ghost stories and Eastern European folk horror, providing insight on these subversive film and television presentations that allow viewers to engage ISBN 9780992146337 in different ways with the complicated 90000 > cultural history of the Christmas season. Spectacular Optical is a small press publisher of film and pop 9 780992 146337 culture books based in Canada. www.spectacularoptical.ca $36.95 CAN | $29.95 US