Christmas Evil Is The Deranged Christmas Horror Movie For All The Holiday Sickos Out There
Listening to the lyrics of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town," it's easy to read a menacing tone from its warnings. Saint Nick sees you when you're sleeping. He even knows your sins. So you better watch out ... or else.
The idea of a less jolly Santa is a wellspring of humor and broken spines in Tommy Wirkola's "Violent Night," which sees David Harbour's Santa Claus doling out "season's beatings" in defense of a child on his coveted "good" list. As "Violent Night" steers its sleigh into theaters this week, moviegoers are treated to the sight of a hammer-swinging, street-fighting Father Christmas, bedecked in Celtic tattoos and crushing the heads and hearts of numerous henchmen commanded by John Leguizamo's holiday-hating mercenary Jimmy "Scrooge" Martinez. Pat Casey and Josh Miller's script ensures that nearly every holiday element finds its gruesome employment at the hands of Santa or Scrooge: tinsel becomes a garrote, a candy cane becomes a shiv, and a nutcracker cracks limbs in 92 minutes of macabre merriment.
After the halls are decked with blood and viscera, fans might search for more wild holiday fare for their next movie night. Enter Lewis Jackson's snowbound psychological meditation "Christmas Evil," currently streaming on Shudder.
A casual stroll through the most recommended tinsel-draped horror movies will bring you by Charles E. Sellier Jr.'s 1984 slasher "Silent Night Deadly Night," which /Film's Scott Thomas points out isn't the first killer Santa story, but it's the one people tend to think of first. Scratch a little deeper to discover Jalmari Helander's Finnish 2010 treasure "Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale," whose elves are as menacing as Old Saint Nick. But those who can look past a layer of low-budget grime are sure to dig the movie that John Waters once called "the greatest Christmas movie ever made."
Here Comes Santa Claus
Waters' praise can be heard in the DVD audio commentary for "Christmas Evil," a movie that sits atop the heap of holiday-centered horror that would pepper the 1980s. In the horror cinema chronicle "Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror," NYT critic Jason Zinoman credits Bob Clark's 1974 sorority slash fest "Black Christmas" as the movie to prime the pump for bloodbaths with a holiday in the title ("New Year's Evil," "My Bloody Valentine," "April Fools Day"), with John Carpenter's "Halloween" popularizing the concept even further a few years later.
As far as Yuletide horror goes, what began with the psychodrama of "Christmas Evil" and David Hess' sorority horror "To All A Goodnight" in 1980 would continue with director Edmund Purdom exchanging a killer Santa for a Santa killer in his 1984 exploitation classic "Don't Open Till Christmas." The mischievous Mogwai of "Gremlins" would get mainstream glory by the mid-'80s, and the "Silent Night, Deadly Night" franchise would carry the candy-striped baton into the following decade.
Among the entire subgenre, Jackson's take on Christmas twinkles the brightest despite the frown it wears. It sees Brandon Maggart in the starring role as the meek and disgruntled Harry Stadling, an employee of the Jolly Dream toy company. In a moody contrast to Harbour's non-interventionist Santa, who has to be convinced to help a young hostage in "Violent Night," Stadling harbors a Santa Claus obsession that festers into a willful intervention in people's lives on a mission to adopt the role of holiday enforcer. He keeps a list and checks it twice, and naughty Grinches get something nastier than a lump of coal.
Hang your stockings and say your prayers, 'cause Santa Claus comes tonight
Christmas naturally embraces the dark and gloomy. Kids get to unwrap their gifts bright and early on the big morning, but the real show happens in the witching hours of night when Santa delivers his judgment in the form of reward or punishment. The old world knows the winter season as one beset by consequence-doling devils and witches. Harry Stadling takes on their dimensions, a countercultural Krampus who drapes his Santa suit over his belly and points at his reflection like Travis Bickle drawing his pistol before the mirror, not as the rain that comes to wash the scum off the streets but to shed Santa's Coca Cola-chugging image in favor of wild-eyed enforcement of the "be good for goodness' sake" rule.
The opening features the type of traumatic flashback seen in giallo classic "Deep Red," this time with a child observing a spicier version of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." It's naughty enough to seriously disturb young Harry Stadling. As the adult Harry dons a beard and pads himself to complete the Santa look, it takes on the air of drag performance. "He even makes his own outfit!" laughs "Multiple Maniacs" filmmaker John Waters on the DVD commentary. He continues, saying:
"It's an art movie in a weird way, but it's also almost like someone wants to get a sex change to pass as Santa, to become Santa. Instead of wanting to be a woman, he wants to be Santa Claus and fetishizing all things related to Saint Nick."
The body count in "Christmas Evil" isn't as sky-high as the massacre in "Violent Night," but it offers enough perversity and subversion of the old values to put a twinkle in the eyes of those who find humor in a back-breaking chimney.