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Guest Post: ‘Horror for the Holidays: Why Horror and Christmas Go Together Like Cookies and Santa’

Guest Post by S.A. Bradley; Art: “No Gifts This Year” by Jakub Rozalski

Here we are again at that special time of the year when family and friends gather to reflect on the importance of hearth, home, and goodwill to our fellows. Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about returning to a simpler time when old-fashioned holiday traditions were honored.

Personally, I can’t wait to be visited by Mummers, bands of costumed, drunken men in hideous masks swinging horse skulls from poles. Kids will be up all night keeping a lookout for the Black Petes, supernatural rooftop spies who work for Sinterklass, a demigod on a horse. Who needs to dream of dancing sugarplums when you can have the waking nightmare of Belsnickel coming out of the forest to whip bad children with a maple branch to mark them as food for his pet demon?

Ah, yes, the good old days.

Monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural have been key figures of the holiday season long before the word Christmas existed, and they still are. Flying reindeer, talking snowmen, elves, faeries, ghosts, glowing tree spirits, and an all-knowing being who sneaks into your house while you sleep. Horror goes with the spirit of Christmas like spiced rum goes with eggnog.

We might think of Santa as a benevolent gift-giver but, upon closer scrutiny, there’s something ambiguously threatening about this guy. He retired the maple branch, but he’s still pushing binary morality like Belsnickel did. He uses spies to make sure everyone tows the party line, just like Sinterklass. He’s got a naughty list and he’s not afraid to use it. Santa absorbed the collective folklore of older fairy-tale characters that came from holidays with much older roots. Pagan roots.

Winter solstice, the shortest/darkest day of the year, was considered a time when the “veil” between the worlds of the dead and the living was very thin. Dead ancestors were addressed in scary tales told around the fire.

Ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia (named after the god Saturn) on December 25th, the winter solstice. They decorated their homes with evergreens, sang songs with neighbors, and exchanged gifts. The Germanic Norsemen celebrated Odin with Yule, which gave us decorated trees and a form of drunken revelry known as wassailing.

As Christianity took hold, many of the pagan customs and the presence of ghosts remained. Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” takes place at winter solstice and features sprites and goblins. Christopher Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta” speaks of spirits and ghosts that glide by night.

In 1647, the British Parliament passed an ordinance that abolished Christmas Day as a holiday. It was considered a Pagan festival and until the mid-1840’s, Christmas was considered a second-class holiday in Victorian England. How marginalized was Christmas? It was the second most popular winter celebration, after Boxing Day.

And then, on December 19, 1843, Charles Dickens published a novella that capitalized on a revival in rural England around the holiday traditions. The title of the book was “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.”

That’s right. Christmas was saved by a ghost story. Interestingly, Dickens had written a prototype of “A Christmas Carol” in 1836 entitled, “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton“, where a curmudgeon has a change of heart after goblins appear to show him his past and future. Just think, we could have been stuck with The Goblin of Christmas Future.

Telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve became a tradition in England, and it was Charles Dickens who popularized it. He regularly included ghost stories, like “The Seven Poor Travelers”, “The Chimes”, “The Haunted Man”, and “The Signal-Man” in the Christmas issues of magazines like Household Words and All the Year Round.

By the end of the 19th Century the tradition began to wane. It took the technological advancement of television to revive the Christmas ghost story. In 1968, the BBC series Omnibus broadcast a black and white adaptation of M.R. James’ “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” on Christmas Eve. The story is about an academic who wanders around a Knights Templar cemetery and finds a strange whistle that might be made of bone. He blows the whistle, which brings a supernatural entity looking for him…

Whistle and I’ll Come for You was a big hit, and it inspired a series of annual made-for-TV movies collectively known as A Ghost Story for Christmas. Most were adaptations of M.R. James stories and they broadcast on or around Christmas Eve. The series ran from 1971 through 1978, and then was revived in 2005.

Another British institution that carries on the Christmas ghost story tradition is Doctor Who, the longest-running science fiction show in history. Since it’s revival in 2005, Doctor Who has a Special Christmas Day episode, wherein the Doctor must save Earth from some scary monsters. The 2012 Christmas Special, “The Snowmen”, has the titular figures coming to life, replete with fangs and glowing eyes, eating unsuspecting Londoners.

For the longest time horror movies tread lightly around Christmas, and they certainly steered clear of The Fat Man. That all changed in 1984, when Silent Night, Deadly Night, the first Killer Santa film, was released. When folks saw the poster with Santa’s arm protruding out of a chimney, gripping an axe, with the tagline, “You’ve made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas”, they lost their minds.

PTA organizations across the United States picketed the film and it was immediately pulled from theaters. However, that didn’t stop the movie from spawning five sequels and close to a hundred Killer Santa imitators.

Obviously, the concept struck a nerve. Why?

I think it’s safe to say that, even though the holiday emphasizes peace and goodwill, the Christmas season also brings us a lot of anxiety, stress, family tension, and even childhood trauma. For some, family gatherings can be as terrifying as any slasher film could be, and the manic energy of unbridled consumerism and the oppressiveness of insincere “good cheer” may make some fantasize about starting their own personal slasher film.

A good horror film gives us a safe place to confront these dark emotions and acknowledge the shadow self we all carry within us. It lets us have a friendly handshake with our own demons, even during The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

So, I want to honor the Christmas Horror movies that I consider some of the better ones for people who value the pleasure of a good shiver on Christmas.

Krampus (2015)
Michael Dougherty’s movie about a boy who accidentally summons the demon for Christmas to deal with his horrible relatives has a lot of promise. The look of Krampus himself, with a death mask of an eyeless Santa, is worth the price of admission. The movie gleefully skewers family holiday anxiety, but I wish it went further into the anarchic darkness that Krampus represents. Search out the “Naughty Cut” extended version if you’re a real freak (like me).

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
This Finnish gem has the Old-World pagan folklore collide directly with the more modern Christian mythos in a story where an archaeological dig might have just unearthed the tomb of the “real Santa Claus”. What pops out of the tomb stands holiday tradition on its head. This movie has a satirical premise about how we bury our dark history under new history to commodify it, but when the monsters get revealed, the movie takes itself deadly serious.

Sint (2010)
Killer Santa” movies think they are transgressive, but Sint (Saint) delivers the goods. More accurately, this is a “Killer Sinterklass” movie that openly mocks the revisionist folklore and cultural appropriation of the Americanized Saint Nicholas. This movie makes up its own wildly subversive history that makes Sinterklass into a murderous apostate who comes back from the grave specifically to kill off children. Did I say this was transgressive? There is some really biting social commentary in this Yuletide Slasher, but the copious gore and body count will have you picking your jaw off the ground.

A Christmas Horror Story (2015)
This anthology of short horror vignettes will sneak up on you and freeze you in your tracks. A jolly radio host tells us ghost stories on Christmas Eve, just like the old tradition. Each of these stories is creepy, but the real horror comes from the how the wraparound story brings the vignettes together into a terrifying social commentary. A bonus: if you’re a monster fan, there is a fantastic beast in this film, too!

The Children (2008)
Just like children are the central focus of the Christmas Holiday, children are ground zero for Christmas Horror movies, too. Most of the time it’s a threat to the children that drives the anxiety. But what if the threat came from the children themselves? Have you ever walked into a room where a group of children were playing, and they stop everything when you enter…and they just stare at you? You know they were planning something, and you’ll never figure it out, and they’ll never tell. It’s that unknowable nature of children, and how we as adults dismiss their behavior until something goes critical, that puts the chill into this film. Two families spend Christmas together, but the vacation house becomes a hunting ground as the children turn on their parents. The brilliance of this film is that nothing overt happens, we are watching two families drive each other crazy cooped up for too long in the same house. But it’s not until we look closer that we realize that something is really, really wrong with the children and, just like the parents, we realize it too late.

Christmas and horror have been connected to each other since the very beginning. Just as it’s natural to experience comfort and joy, it is also natural to experience the lack of it. It’s okay to admit that the holidays can bring anxiety, and fear, and loneliness, and loss, and grief, and uncertainty. And, for some of us, a good horror movie works better for curing those Christmas Blues than a Peppermint Schnapps.

So, enjoy these horror movies, and enjoy the season with family and friends in the time-honored traditions you are accustomed to. Swinging poles with horse skulls on them.

 

About S. A. Bradley


S.A. Bradley is the host of the Hellbent For Horror podcast and author of Screaming for Pleasure: How Horror Makes You Happy and Healthy. A lifelong lover of horror, Bradley turned his passion into purpose, sharing all things horror in dozens of podcasts and outlets like SyFy Wire, Dread Central, iHorror, Horrorhound, Medium Chill and EvilSpeak magazine Connect with Bradley at HellbentforHorror.com.

 

 

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