The best thing about Christmas is the day off from work.
The second best thing about Christmas are Christmas horror movies. I’m decrepit enough to remember when Silent Night, Deadly Night was a major media controversy, mostly for its poster that some felt was too disturbing for the kids of 1984 to see. At the time there were also very few Christmas horror movies (there was pretty much just Black Christmas and maybe Christmas Evil, when it came to what you could find at the video store back then). Exploitation filmmakers just didn’t go there often.
Whole different story today. Now, kids come out of the womb already jaded and no one bats an eye at a Santa slasher or a few severed heads rolling under the Christmas tree anymore–and we have about seven thousand holiday hack-’em-and-slash-’em flicks for your approval.
Where to start? The creeps at the Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson are here to help with their SECOND annual Christmas horror mini-marathon. My kinda holiday party.
It works exactly like October’s Dismember the Alamo. The movies are a secret and they don’t show anything that this Alamo has ever shown before, which means no easy crowd-pleasers. The big difference is that this one is a triple-feature as opposed to October’s quintuple-feature, BUT they also throw in a short film before each one (a stocking stuffer, if you will) so it’s still a full feast.
Last year’s set was fun (the features: Jack Frost, Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker and Don’t Open Till Christmas; the shorts: Treevenge, the Christmas episode of HBO’s old Tales From the Crypt and something else that I don’t remember; feel free to remind me in the comments).
For this year, they went even better and bolder. It was all foreign films. I didn’t even know there were many foreign Christmas horror flicks, so I had no guesses whatsoever. I ordered up some popcorn and beer and was ready to get enlightened.
First up was Rare Exports Inc., the original 2003 short that eventually hatched the 2010 cult film Rare Exports (which the Alamo here has already shown, so it’s off the table for Dismember.) Though made seven years earlier, it’s a professional piece of work that looks like a perfect companion to the later film. Director Jalmari Helander was already rock-solid, darkly witty and free with the old man full frontal nudity.
From there, we were ramped up and ready for Sint (or Saint in English) a slam-bang 2010 gut-stabber about ancient mystical Christmas zombies on the loose in modern-day Amsterdam. It’s a film that illustrates one difference between American Christmas horror films and European Christmas horror films.
In the USA, where Christmas is a secondhand holiday when you think about it, our villains are typically just maniacs in Santa suits.
In Europe though, the Christmas tradition has evolved across well over a thousand years. The stories are told in 700-year-old paintings and art on cathedrals. Christmas is old and mystical, with plenty of room for a horror writer find something sinister going on with this St. Nicholas or Father Christmas or Sinterklaas or whatever you call him– and that’s where Sint sits.
The next short was M is for Merry Christmas, a quick blip of a Krampus story from one of the ABCs of Death movies.
Then we went to France for 36.15 Code Pere Noel (or Deadly Games or Game Over), which, okay, yeah, is a maniac-in-a-Santa-suit flick. He’s a psychotic man-child off the streets who stalks a wealthy toy company exec’s preadolescent son who’s alone with his blind, diabetic grandpa in their 900-room mansion. The twist is that the boy is a computer whiz who also has an endless supply of rich-kid war toys to fight back with. This 1989 film starts out light-hearted and then turns into a violent thriller. Think Home Alone if it was dead serious. And yes, in the 80s, a movie could be serious and still have a montage set to a Bonnie Tyler song. It was a different time.
These shows usually end with a heavy-hitter. I was ready. My order for a turkey burger was in. I had another beer on the way. The Christmas spirit was rising within me. Or maybe that was gas. I’m not sure.
But first, another short. It was the charming segment from the 1972 British film Tales from The Crypt where Joan Collins croaks her husband on Christmas Eve, the same night that an escaped mental patient in a Santa suit is on a rampage in their neighborhood. Life just works out that way sometimes.
The finale was 2016’s Better Watch Out, one of the 500,000 or so movies that are sitting in my various streaming service watchlists (it’s on Shudder). I don’t know when I would have gotten around to it, but the Alamo guys made me finally sit down and watch it this night and I’m glad for that because it was great. It’s a film that thrives on the unexpected and I don’t want to tell you ANYTHING about the plot except that it starts off like it’s going to be the hack story of a babysitter and whatever seems to be making strange noises outside–and then it turns the tables on all of that. It’s mean and clever and its resolution got the biggest applause of the night.
And now I’ll shut up about it, except to say that it’s an Australian-made film, so it still qualifies as foreign despite seemingly being set in the US. Everyone has American accents and I didn’t spot any kangaroos in the background, at least.
We got one more little bonus film after that, the second Rare Exports short Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions from 2005, another frosty dark comedy that shows just how much these guys were ready back then to get that feature film made.
When it was all over, we went out into the night with visions of sugar plums and violent stabbings and decapitations dancing in our heads.
I am now in the Christmas spirit.