Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas
For this year’s fourth entry, we have a story about a child destined to be born on Christmas Eve, and the priest who sells his soul to Satan in hopes of killing it: El Día de la Bestia, aka The Day of the Beast.
A theologian has cracked the code of the book of Revelations and learned that it reveals the exact date the antichrist will be born: Christmas Eve! He has a very short time to commit as many sins as he can and sell his soul to the Devil in hopes of learning the location of the birth and preventing the forthcoming apocalypse. The only ones who can help him are a good-hearted Satanic metalhead and the sceptical host of an occult call-in show.
I first saw this movie back in 1999 thanks to the film programmers at the University of Iowa. They booked the most eclectic selection of films for the student theater and this one stood out. The following summer, when I was back home with my family, we rented it on VHS so I could share this dark delight with them, only I’d seen the subtitled version and the tape was the dubbed version.
Ladies, blokes, and non-binary folks, I am subs over dubs all day long, but the dubbed version of this adds a layer of comedy that I did not know the film could have and it is a tragedy that you cannot watch that version.
The theologian at the center of the film, Father Berriartúa, is a small, slightly nervous, unassuming man. Imagine Mr. Bean without the physical presence. Much of the humor of the film comes from this little guy doing all sorts of unexpected and inappropriate things: pushing a mime into a subway stairwell, trying to drag a woman larger than himself up the stairs, walking away with someone’s luggage while they hail a cab. The people in charge of the English translation decided that this small, nervous man should sound like a very angry Sylvester Stallone, and, oh my goodness, it adds a whole 'nother layer of camp to the experience.
And this flick is a dark, campy delight, with the emphasis on “dark.” In the first five minutes, Father Berriartúa reveals his plan to sin as much as he possibly can to one of his fellow priests. His colleague is shocked and Berriartúa whispers his reasons into his colleague’s ear—whispers for fear that the Devil might overhear and intervene. His colleague agrees to help, and, as they walk away from the altar, the massive, straight-out-of-German-Expressionism cross falls forward and crushes the colleague, obliterating him.
That tells you the nature of the humor. It’s very dry, very direct, and very heightened. Frankly, the whole thing is very silly but done with a serious, earnest tone which makes all of the humor land that much more surely.
The movie does have a layer of seriousness at its core. It’s been twenty-ish years since I’d seen it so I’d forgotten that there was a band of neo-Nazi yuppies wandering the city setting homeless people on fire or that references to them are peppered throughout the movie. If the movie has something to say, it’s about the banality of evil. Berriartúa is trying to hunt down the antichrist so that he may kill the child—his ambition is to murder the baby at the moment of its birth. Admittedly, it’s to prevent the arrival of true evil in the form of the Devil. In his search for the child, though, he hears about the neo-Nazis trying to “clean up Madrid,” about abandoned children, even witnesses the cops descend upon and start beating a group of people walking along the street. While Berriartúa uses these incidents as evidence for his belief that the Devil will choose Madrid, there’s also the suggestion that the evil is already here, already within us, and that his pursuit is misguided even on that level—he shouldn’t be seeking the literal Devil but confronting the cultural devil that abides such evils.
That ambivalence, that doubt in whether he’s actually helping or doing something good persists right through the end of the movie. I was confused by the conclusion the first two times I watched this, and I’ll try to talk around the ending so as to avoid spoilers. In those early viewings, it wasn’t clear to me that the conclusion of his quest required his presence, but this time around it felt more like his presence is what causes things to go as they do. Had he not been on that quest, had he not done the things he’d done, the parties that come together for the conclusion wouldn’t have and thus their actions wouldn’t have the consequences that they do.
This is a really entertaining movie that even provides the opportunity for deeper reflection, which is pretty rare for these holiday horror flicks. I will say that it doesn’t feel particularly Christmasy. Yes, it takes place literally on Christmas Eve, but that feels incidental to the plot. Christmas doesn’t feel present here, so while I’d recommend it in general, and I do, I don’t know that I’d recommend including it on a holiday horror playlist unless you wanted to include a movie that would both be a surprise and actually good.
4.5/5 priests pursuing that pernicious pitch-pusher
El Día de la Bestia is currently available to stream on Shudder.
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