A Christmas Horror Story: (2015. dir: Steve Hoban, Grant Harvey, Brett Sullivan) Revisiting the classic "anthology" format, here's a foursome of holiday chillers bound together by a shared locale and a drunken DJ playing a Christmas music marathon as all hell breaks loose outside. William Shatner is wonderfully droll as the the DJ, and the performance values are high all around. There's a troll changeling, wickedly funny zombie-elves, the ghost of a mistreated convent girl, and it all culminates in a showdown between Santa Claus and Krampus. Or does it?
Krampus: (2015. dir: Michael Dougherty) Viewing this before and after the election are two very different experiences. When it came out, Krampus was a well-executed, twisted moral-fable fashioned from the darkest humor and exaggerated versions of every American's modern experience of the holiday. Mobs draw blood and show no mercy for the privilege of paying too much for products which will be stuffed into a closet and forgotten the day after Christmas. People you dislike crowd into your home and criticize your way of living, and you let them do it, because they're "family". The cynical and ruthless bully those dreamers who have not given up hope, and once the bullies have won, once we have all given into ennui and despair, that's the invitation to Krampus, and Santa Claus stays home that year. Toys turn into monsters: teddy bears grow jagged teeth, tree-top angels morph into translucent harpies, gingerbread men lure children onto hooks and into chains, and you don't even want to know about the jack-in-the-box.
Now, post-election, this movie leaves a newfound chill, a hideous reminder of how hellishly low we have sunk. It is, believe me, exactly the Christmas movie deserved by a people so fucked up and cynical they'll elect the embodiment of self-serving, capitalist pig-dog evil into the highest seat of power.
Keep the fire burning hot in the hearth, kids. Krampus is coming.
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