Tis The Season: Not Christmasy Christmas Movies

There’s no inherent reason that Christmas movies have to be overly sentimental and sappy but that tends to be the offerings we get. From the checkered history of the holiday, to the stress and confrontations of familial gatherings, the fact that the default setting for Christmas entertainment is “warm and loving” strikes a rather false note. More and more, we’re seeing horror movies using the backdrop of a colorful, loudly joyous season to play out twisted or completely off the wall concepts. For those of us who can’t stomach love and caring, these movies are a welcome tonic to an otherwise saccharine sweet array of entertainment.

We start at Red Christmas (2016), a movie that is unique for a collection of reasons. First of all, it takes place in Australia, so its Christmas imagery is the opposite of what most of us have in our mind’s eye. Everything is lush and growing–there’s even a sense of Christmas day being hot. Secondly, while this movie keeps thematically in step with the holiday, the plot revolves around a long-lost family member of sorts returning to the homestead.

Diane, played by veteran scream queen Dee Wallace, is a widow who lives with her brother and son, the latter of whom has down syndrome. She also has three other children visiting for the holiday, one of whom is pregnant. On Christmas day, a stranger who speaks oddly and wears a long, tattered cloak arrives at their front porch asking to see Diane. He calls himself Cletus (Sam Campbell) and eventually reveals that he was a child that Diane tried to have aborted. He was rescued by a doctor when he saw that the fetus was still alive, and raised to adulthood. Understandably, Diane freaks out (believing it to be a joke) and demands that he leave. As this is a horror movie, we see Cletus chased out of the house then we wait until it gets dark so Cletus can return and start killing.

Part of what makes this one such an unusual watch is the weight of the subject matter and yet the neutrality of the film. There is compassion for Diane, and ultimately, Cletus is seen as a sympathetic monster–though his penchant for slaughter might retroactively support Diane’s initial decision to terminate. Another intriguing part of this film is the dreamlike visuals. Influenced by the giallo movies of the sixties, Red Christmas has a surreal light design with entire rooms inexplicably lit in pastels and holiday colors. Cletus, in his dragging cloak, resembles something unearthly like the hunchbacked cousin to the Grim Reaper. The intimate scenes with the family prior to the horror are naturalistic, making the intensely art directed, grindhouse splatter moments even more potent by comparison. In the end, Diane disembowels Cletus while hanging herself, and the only survivor is the baby that gets born in the midst of all the killing.

Christmas really does belong to the young.

For a more traditional Christmas horror film, we have Better Watch Out (2016). Not that this movie is all about goodness and kindness but it contains a lot of what we’re used to seeing in Christmas movies: lights, snow, santas, home invasion. I’m not even kidding with that last one–so many Christmas movies feature people breaking into other people’s houses.

Ashley (Olivia Dejonge) is a teenager who is babysitting Luke (Levi Miller), a 12-year-old who has a crush on her. He stages a break-in and shooter situation with his friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould) to try to seduce Ashley through fear because 12-years-olds are fucking stupid. When Ashley realizes what’s going on, she lays into Luke, calling him mental and telling him he needs help. Luke, as if trying to prove her right, hits her in the head with a brick and ties her up while she’s unconscious. From there, he goes on to kill her boyfriend by hitting him in the face with a swinging paint can ala Home Alone, kill her ex-boyfriend in a manner that looks like suicide, and kill his own friend when he decides they may have gone a smidge too far. His plan to make it look like he was a victim in the situation works except that he fails to kill Ashley, and she flips him off as she’s wheeled out of the house on a gurney. Luke asks his mother if they can go visit her in the hospital and the screen cuts to black.

Funnily enough, this is an Australian-American co-production. Australian filmmakers really have a feel for what makes an effective Christmas thriller. 

Better Watch Out could be seen as just mean-spirited, with a central villain that’s more annoying than actually frightening, but it does have concern for the characters outside of Luke. It shares DNA with The Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” where the six-year-old boy has the power to bend the world to his will. There is a subtext to the movie that suggests Luke might not even really understand what he’s doing. Not that he doesn’t understand that he’s doing something wrong, but that he’s too young to absorb just how horrific his actions are. He’s too smart to be deluded, but on the same note, he’s too smart to really believe this is all fun and games. Ashley makes for a formidable opponent who clearly can’t believe this is happening yet keeps a level head in an outrageous situation. A down-to-earth performance by Dejonge helps with that. She plays her with mounting trauma in her eyes that turns on a dime to cold survival mode.

Both Better Watch Out and Red Christmas are complicated, weird, and slick in a way that identifies them as modern. With the advent of digital filmmaking, even the lower end movies can look shiny, which has been a real game changer for horror. Still, who doesn’t love to visit their roots with some grimy early eighties Christmas exploitation?   

Christmas Evil (1980) a.k.a. You Better Watch Out a.k.a. Terror In Toyland a.k.a. John Water’s favorite Christmas movie, is billed as a slasher but is more Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer: Christmas Edition. Harry Stadling is a middle-aged man who once saw his dad dressed as Santa groping his mother when he was a child. He hasn’t amounted to much, is unhappy in his rote job, and is often mocked by everyone around him. The one thing he does enjoy is “observing,” i.e. spying on the people in the neighborhood, and determining who’s naughty and who’s nice. Harry’s grip on reality gets increasingly shakier until Christmas Eve, when his delusions take over and he believes himself to be the real Santa Claus. He hands out toys to the kids on the nice list, bags of dirt to the ones on the naughty list, and kills several people before being driven off a cliff by a literal torch-bearing mob.

Christmas Evil is a lot sadder than the other two, and while Harry is unquestionably sick, he’s also pathetic and ineffectual. He allows himself to be completely and truly haunted by a somewhat benign moment from years earlier. There is a childishness to him, and similar to Luke, he approaches serious actions with a flippancy that disregards the heaviness of what he’s doing. If asked outright, Harry would think that he was performing a service, and that he was dispensing a form of justice that the modern world (of 1980) was sorely lacking.

But between the Santa-centric fugue states and slow slide into insanity, Christmas Evil has some genuinely sweet and powerful moments, like Harry delivering gifts to a children’s hospital or his post-breakdown destruction of the toys he helped build. In many ways, this is only a horror movie in name. There’s a case to be made that its actually a human drama about disillusionment and feeling powerless in the face of a changing world. Give it Scorcese-level money, and you’ve got Taxi Driver with Santa flair.

Christmas may always be the season of sap and treacle, but there’s no reason to suffer through boring, trite entertainment just to be thematically appropriate. Don’t fall for the “but Christmas isn’t supposed to be scary” line you’ll undoubtedly hear when trying to watch these movies in between screenings of A Christmas Story. There’s monsters and ghouls available for all holidays, and Christmas time is rich for having them.