The Ghastly Horrors of Christmas
Where I take a break from my Paul Naschy series to talk Santa Slashers
I won’t be celebrating Christmas this year. I haven’t celebrated Christmas since my life got blasted to pieces in 2020. Most of us will remember it as the first year of the Covid Lockdown, but for me it will always be the year that I lost my brother, my father, my mother, and Figaro, my feline better-half, in the space of 8 months. The year I had to quit my job as a Certified Peer Support Specialist (a fancy term for a guy you can talk to who isn’t a shrink) in order to care for my mother when she was stricken with Alzheimer’s.
Currently I live in the home Mom left me, bankrupt and buried in debt, unable to sell the place, my life stuck in legal limbo (which I knew was a thing, but never realized was also a place). Most of my friends have moved to other states or even other countries. And Christmas, well, it just ain’t Christmas without friends and family.
I think the dark side of Christmas comes, for many of us, because it’s a time of year when we feel obliged to be happy. And if we aren’t, we feel like there is something defective with us, like a broken toy. For me, Christmas Horror has always comforted me with the thought that it’s okay to be depressed on Christmas. But then, to quote the great Roky Erickson, “I’ve always felt at home with Horror.”
Christmas, like Christianity itself – and I say this as a guy who loves him some Jesus - has a dark side. Examine the English tradition of sitting around the fireplace and telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. It’s easy to forget “A Christmas Carol” is one such story... at least until Jacob Marley shows up rattling his chains. The BBC has sporadically produced short films under the banner A Ghost Story for Christmas, adapting the stories of the great M.R. James. (These are readily available on YouTube and I highly recommend you check them out!)
Krampus, the Teutonic demon who comes to punish misbehaving children on Christmas Eve, is the current undisputed champ of the Yule Horror sub-genre. A casual search of the Internet Movie Database brought up an astounding fifty-two films, the vast majority of them features made in the last ten years. It’s as if the world discovered Krampus and, finding him irresistible, just can’t bring themselves to put him back into the sack of German Folklore they found him in! It remains to be seen how his popularity peaks and wanes over the coming decades, but one thing is clear: Krampus is here to stay.
I can still remember the kerfuffle over Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). It was the 80’s and following the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween holiday-themed Slasher films were all the rage. So too was the Satanic Panic. This was in Reagan’s America, after all, and the only thing almost as popular as VHS porn, Slasher movies and Heavy Metal records were the efforts by Republicans (and the wife of one Democratic senator, Tipper Gore) to ban them.
Not that there hadn’t been Christmas-themed Horror movies before – one of my favorites, as a monster-magazine-reading, Aurora monster-model-building kid - was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1975), about a group of female co-eds stalked by a maniac who has taken residence in the attic of their sorority house. Mind you, this is the same Bob Clark who went on to make A Christmas Story, America’s second favorite Christmas movie after It’s a Wonderful Life!
Psycho Santas also were nothing new: there’s the classic EC Comics story that was adapted for both the feature film and TV versions of Tales From The Crypt. But it Morning in America, and such things could no longer be tolerated. I think it was that poster of an axe-wielding Santa going down the chimney that really rattled the cages of some Conservatives. The excellent Canadian film Christmas Evil had come out just four years prior, although it flew under the popular radar.
The main takeaway from the moral outrages of the 80’s is that there was an “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” aspect to them. Televangelists raised millions of dollars getting their audiences into a tizzy, in turn giving the objects of their ire millions of dollars worth of free publicity. Forbidden fruit, after all, tastes the sweetest.
But the Citizen Kane of Psycho Santa movies is a little known French movie from 1989 called 36.15 code Père Noëlor or, here in the States, Deadly Games. In recent years it has become my go-to Christmas Horror film.
Nine year-old Thomas (played by an adorably precocious Alain Lalanne) is about as lucky as a kid can get: his mother is the CEO of a toy store and he lives in a castle-like mansion where he sets clever traps to “capture” his dog and nearly blind grandfather. When his mother fires a twitchy store Santa for behaving irritably with some of the children, he decides to pay her home a little visit. Meanwhile little Thomas has set his most elaborate trap yet, determined to find out if Santa is fact or fiction.
The little boy hides under a table, his face lit with the magic of Christmas, watching as Santa comes down the chimney... and promptly kills his dog with a pate’ knife.
Far from mean-spirited, 36.15 code Père Noëlor is something of a miracle: a Christmas Horror with both balls and heart. It’s a brilliant balancing act of home-invasion Horror movie and Precocious Kid movie. Thomas’ relationship with his grandfather (played with great charm by Louis Ducreux), who dutifully puts up with his antics without complaint, is touching. And it raises the stakes: this movie might not be mean enough to kill the kid, but if the dog got killed then the grandfather is fair game. And besides, little Thomas has things to lose other than his life.
36.15 code Père Noëlor is about the end of childhood innocence, that moment when you realize that the world your parents and other grown-ups have sold you is a lie. It reminds us, as all Horror films do, that our lives can be plunged into living nightmare in a heartbeat, seasons be damned.
It’s often cited as the inspiration for the far more famous Home Alone, but seeing as how that film came out the very next year I suspect the similarities, although they are stark, to be coincidental. It’s currently available on Shudder and Google Play. Check it out if you get the chance, because it is absolutely brilliant.
So I won’t be putting up a tree this year. No festive decorations, no presents, no cookies shaped liked stars with little red sprinkles on them. And that’s fine. I have the most precious gift of all and that is LIFE. And where there is life, there is HOPE. When people lose everything they either surrender to despair or they gain a renewed appreciation for the most basic treasures that have been under our nose the whole time. I have been blessed to find myself in the latter category.
And besides, how can you be depressed watching Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2? That movie’s a pisser!