A Christmas Horror Story (2015)
Call me jaded, but when it comes to Christmas movies, as the years go by, I’ve found myself turning increasingly to darker-edged holiday fare. Maybe it’s because the traditional, heartwarming Christmas films are pretty much locked in for me at this point: It’s a Wonderful Life, et al. The consumerist essence of our modern secular Christmas, which drives the phenomenon of Christmas creep and its inescapable nature for almost one-sixth of the year, inevitably makes one more cynical about the annual glut of Yuletide films. Last year, streaming services produced a whopping 172 new Christmas films. Let’s face it, the reason big business pushes Christmas so hard is because the capitalist economy literally depends on it. Pardon me if I start to get a little tired of such patently insincere product.
Enter the wonderful world of Christmas horror. Sure, there’s the parallel phenomenon of Christmas action movies, which goes back to Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and has lately ramped up its Christmas aspects to 11 with the likes of Violent Night. But Christmas horror films, thanks to the nature of the genre, are able to go even further and jump head-first into the darker aspects of the holiday season. I’m more primed than ever for that this year, which promises to be one of the most horrific Christmas seasons ever: with a genocide taking place in the land of Jesus’s birth, Christmas cancelled in Bethlehem, Israel bombing historic churches and murdering Christians sheltering there. That’s on top of the larger genocide of more than 20,000 Palestinians. The same corporations that pump out non-stop Christmas movies, music, etc. talking about peace on earth and goodwill towards men support a genocidal state carrying out gruesome acts of inhumanity that far exceed those of any horror film.
Ever since the first great horror movie boom in the 1930s and ’40s, which coincided with the Great Depression and the Second World War, audiences living through real-life horrors have (perhaps counterintuitively) found escape or catharsis in theatrical horrors on celluloid. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed A Christmas Horror Story so much. Certainly the film exceeded my expectations. A Canadian horror anthology film that features William Shatner as a radio DJ in a framework story, I went into this movie anticipating nothing more than passable shlock. What I got was a film that expertly ties together holiday lore, pagan traditions, and religious horror with a creepy atmosphere, dashes of camp humour, some genuine scares, and surprisingly strong production values.
A Christmas Horror Story really involves multiple, interwoven stories, tied together by Shatner’s alcoholic DJ Dangerous Dan, who is working a long shift at the Bailey Downs radio station on Christmas Eve. Scenes of Dan playing Christmas music, pouring himself eggnog and whiskey, and periodically updating listeners on a disturbance at the local mall provide the glue for four different horror tales.
In the first story, teenagers Molly Simon (Zoé De Grand Maison), Dylan (Shannon Kook), and Ben (Alex Ozerov) break into their school, a former convent, for a student documentary to investigate murders that took place there the year before. In the second, police officer Scott Peters (Adrian Holmes), who worked that murder case, goes into the woods with his wife Kim (Oluniké Adeliyi) and son Will (Orion John) to chop down a Christmas tree, only for Will to disappear and return acting strangely. The third story involves a family being hunted by the Krampus, a mythological creature that daughter Caprice Bauer (Amy Forsyth), who is also Dylan’s girlfriend, describes as the “anti-Santa Claus” for its punishment of the wicked. Finally, a fourth story finds Santa Claus (George Buza) in a violent, blood-soaked battle against his elves, who have transformed into zombies.
Of these stories, the one with Santa Claus, though highly entertaining, initially felt out of place. While the three other tales involve supernatural creatures such as ghosts, the Krampus, and changelings (a creature of European folklore I was unfamiliar with beforehand), Santa’s battle with the zombie elves at times dove into Evil Dead II territory, verging on outright horror comedy. (A memorable scene in which Santa is forced to decapitate a zombified Mrs. Claus with an axe will remind seasoned viewers of Ash and his girlfriend in Sam Raimi’s gore-spattered classic.)
The sight of a bloodied Santa dispatching zombie elves at his workshop inevitably feels different in tone from a story that involves forced abortions at a convent and grisly murder investigations. However, the outcome of the Santa story explains this seeming discrepancy with a brilliant twist that, to paraphrase The Big Lebowski, really ties the film together.
The actors are all fairly good. Shatner, long an underrated thespian, offers a better performance than his detractors would expect — injecting some genuine pathos into Dan, whose grandson was one of the students killed at the school the previous Christmas Eve. But don’t worry, he also hams it up enough to satisfy fans. The most surprising turn comes from young Orion Johnson as Will. As the Changeling-Will, Johnson offers a creepily unnerving performance that is particularly impressive coming from a child actor.
Aside from Santa vs. zombie elves, the stories take some time to get going, but they prove worth the wait. The school murder investigation is probably the least Christmas-related. Other than its timing on Christmas Eve, this could have taken place at any time of year. Still, that doesn’t matter if the story is strong. I also loved Better Watch Out, even though the Christmas elements of that film were largely surface-level. In this case, there is more of a connection with Christmas, which after all is technically still supposed to be a religious holiday. In this case, it points to a horror closer to reality: the hypocrisy of religious institutions that oppose abortion and claim to uphold the sanctity of life, yet in doing so often cause death. In this case, nuns cause the death of a pregnant teenage girl through a botched abortion.
Part of the appeal of anthology horror films like A Christmas Horror Story is being able to mix and match different subgenres. In this case we have a ghost story, a possession/evil-child story, a monster movie, and a gory, borderline horror comedy. The monster here is the Krampus (Rob Archer). Apart from one dodgy CGI effect of the creature’s long tongue, the reveal of the Krampus is impressive. The monster’s design is great, and appears to be achieved largely through practical effects.
This gives more weight to the scenes with the Krampus, particularly in its battle with Santa Claus (not a spoiler, since it’s depicted on the movie poster). The Krampus story itself skews closer to the entertaining horror vibe of slasher and monster movies than the creepy tone of the ghost and changeling stories. The fight between Santa and Krampus fully leans into that vibe to gloriously fun effect. “I knew it!” Santa says in some of the movie’s cheesier dialogue. “Krampus! Vile enemy of Christmas! We end this tonight.” This is a scene that will go down in the annals of holiday horror as an all-time classic.
All in all, A Christmas Horror Story offers a fantastic blend of elements that I highly recommend to any horror fan looking for Yuletide-themed entertainment. Some critics have said the movie might have been more effective if the segments were told separately rather than interwoven throughout, but it worked for me. Despite its slow start, and despite — or because of — its sillier elements, this feels like a film that could become a future holiday favourite for me, which is the highest compliment I can give to any Christmas movie.
8/10
