Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas
For this year’s penultimate entry, a boy’s waning belief in the spirit of Christmas summons not Santa, but his dark counterpart, Krampus!
Max gets into a fight during the nativity play with a boy who tells the first graders Santa doesn’t exist, Max's family is stressed out at the thought of their in-laws coming for the holidays, and those in-laws are aggressively mean to him. In a fit of pique, Max tears up the letter he’d written to Santa and throws it out the window only to see the pieces float away into the sky. The next day, a blizzard descends upon his neighborhood, the power cuts out, and strange snowmen appear in the front lawn, harbingers of the monsters yet to come.
Krampus is an odd duck. It’s a big-budget holiday horror film, which is rare enough, and it draws upon the ironic, hipster-ish Christmas icon, Krampus. Of course there’s a real Krampus tradition and folklore, but that’s not the role it has in English-speaking holiday celebrations. It’s moreso the icon of the anti-Christmas brigade: those exhausted by the holiday’s insistence upon itself and who fail to identify with the Grinch or Scrooge since they both succumb to that all-consuming spirit. So me and similar jackasses who look for movies where Santa is as likely to be the purveyor of presents as a purveyor of fear.
Krampus approaches Christmas with the right attitude: the holiday sucks and it’s a burden we all endure for inexplicable reasons. We open with a slowed sequence of people being awful in a store. This sequence is what Black Friday needed, but never had: customers are yelling at each other, abusing staff, and getting tased. The sequence, and credits, end with Max, our hero, in the midst of a fight during the nativity play. At home, he’s chastised by his parents for getting into a fight and we learn that the mother’s sister and her family are coming for the holidays—something no one is happy about.
And here’s where the movie starts to fall apart. I mentioned in regards to Dead End that we need to start from a place of joy, or at least be able to see what that joy could be, to have hope in a horror movie. To put it another way, the bad thing needs to be the monster, not the life we’re looking to return to.
Krampus, however, starts with Christmas being miserable, Max’s family being indifferent—when not irritable—to each other, and then the extended family arrives—loud, boorish, and engaged in general assholery. It feels like the movie is trying to do a upper-middle-class liberal vs working-class conservative family thing—the visiting family arrives in a Hummer loaded with ammunition while Max’s family lives in a house that “looks like Martha Stewart threw up”—but to no real purpose. All it gives us is people being shitty to each other in unentertaining ways (except for Aunt Dorothy played by Conchata Ferrell whose every line is a delight).
The characters have some moments of redemption, but they come at the wrong time or don’t pay off. For example, Max writes a letter to Santa Claus. He’s too old to believe in Santa, but it’s something done as a ritual. Like getting eggnog or watching Miracle on 34th Street, this is what Max does to center himself and focus on what’s important in the holiday season. He asks Santa to, basically, make things like they were: let him be friends with his sister again, let his parents fall in love again, make things less desperate for his aunt and uncle. In these stories, the revelation of the letter’s contents is supposed to come somewhere in the late second/early third act as it inspires the characters to become their better selves. Here, it gets stolen and read out loud during the first dinner after the aunt and uncle have arrived so it doesn’t inspire anything. Instead, it’s the letter that Max rips up which then travels to Krampus. Sure, him destroying the letter represents his abandonment of those hopes and is the inciting incident, but I just don’t feel it.
Another issue is that Max is supposed to be the main character, but we generally leave him alone after he tears up the letter. His dad and uncle really take center stage and they’re the ones who have to face down the monsters that serve Krampus.
The monsters, by the way, are fantastic. The design, not just of them, but of everything is really well done. I remember seeing this in theaters and being struck by the sound design. Granted, you’re not supposed to notice the sound design. Like editing, when it’s done right, you don’t notice it at all. However, I was aware at how much I felt immersed in this wintry nightmare the first time I saw it. I felt literally cold.
I just wish it didn’t leave me feeling metaphorically cold.
The easy comparison is to Gremlins: it’s a Christmas movie with small cute monsters murdering people. So it’s disappointing that we get, comparatively, so little of the monsters and so few setpieces as notable as the ones in Gremlins. Instead there’s a lot of mood—dread, darkness, and waiting—without payoff. Something burrows through the snow and tries to drag the uncle away until dad shoots it. They have to keep the fire hot to prevent anything from coming down the chimney. Writing that makes this sound like a Christmas twist on Tremors (which is now all I want for Christmas).
So much of the movie is about the downtime. As these characters interact, and you’d expect them to resolve their differences and grow as people, which they do. A little. We get to see mom and dad have a nice, albeit brief, conversation that suggests things are getting better between them, and the dad and uncle come to have a kind of grudging respect for each other, but I never buy into it and neither does the movie. That’s not what the movie’s interested in. It’s interested in Krampus and his cadre of monsters, but never gives us enough time with them.
It’s so strange to discuss the movie this way because it’s never bad, on any level, but it never quite hits the mark either. It’s worth watching as part of a holiday horror marathon or just on its own, but it also feels like a one-and-done. I don’t think I’ll be returning to this in the future.
3/5 chimney-dangling kinder-snatching Krampus chains
Krampus is available for purchase or rental from various online services.
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