Holiday horror is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the early years of horror, what might be dubbed the “classical era” from approximately 1931–1970, only two examples spring to mind — a few scenes of the Val Lewton production Curse of the Cat People (1944) and a short sequence in the anthology Dead of Night (1945). Then in 1972, the proverbial floodgates opened for horror films set at the most wonderful time of the year with the flashpoint film, Black Christmas, appearing two years later. Frankenstein, however, with its focus on science gone awry and meddling with the laws of the natural world, did not seem to fit into the world of Yuletide horror. That is until the 1990s when all the rules began to be thrown out the window. Even then, only three major films to date[1] have combined the world’s greatest monster with the holiday season, representing the good, the bad, and the ugly of Frankenstein festivities.
What’s This?
The best of these by far features a Frankensteinian subplot while the primary focus of the film lies elsewhere. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) is without a doubt a classic of its kind, setting new standards for quirky storytelling and revolutionizing the stop-motion animated feature film. While Tim Burton was working at Disney in the early 1980s, he wrote a poem titled “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and created some concept art of the major characters to go with it.[2] After having huge successes as a director on Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), and Edward Scissorhands (1990), Burton returned to Disney to develop his concepts into a feature film with stop-motion visionary Henry Selick directing.
Unfortunately, Selick’s massive contribution to the film is often overshadowed by Burton’s more famous name. Though Selick himself says, “Tim very much developed the story. The concept is his, the main characters, the tone, the look,” it is the director and his team that were tasked with bringing all these elements to life from structuring the screenplay by Caroline Thompson from an adaptation by Michael McDowell, to the detailed storyboarding, designing and building the miniature sets, and painstakingly animating the characters over the course of three years. The Nightmare Before Christmas is without a doubt an unparalleled milestone of this form of animation, building upon the same techniques developed by Willis O’Brien for The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) and Ray Harryhausen for his numerous brilliant stop-motion extravaganzas. Selick would go on to top even himself with his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (1996) and his masterpiece Coraline (2009).
The main story of The Nightmare Before Christmas follows the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town Jack Skellington, voiced by Chris Sarandon while speaking and composer Danny Elfman while singing, as he discovers the world of Christmas and combines it with his own Halloween-immersed sensibilities. The Frankenstein element involves Dr. Finkelstein (William Hickey), and his female creation Sally, voiced by Catherine O’Hara,[3] who is deeply in love with Jack. Dr. Finkelstein is something of a Frankenstein creation himself, able to remove the top of his head and expose his brain at will. In true Frankenstein fashion, Sally is tormented by her creator and often slips deadly nightshade into his tea and soup, which makes him fall into a deep sleep so that Sally can sneak out of his laboratory tower, which is also her prison. In a magnificent visual moment, Sally throws herself from the tower window to escape and see Jack. Though her limbs break off in the fall, she simply sews herself back together and carries on with her mission.
Jack calls upon both Sally and the doctor to assist in his Christmas takeover. Finkelstein creates, using classic lightning imagery, a team of skeleton reindeer to pull Jack’s sleigh, and Sally sews his “Sandy Claws” suit. Sally also foresees that Jack’s holiday ambitions will be an unmitigated disaster. As Jack is about to head out in his coffin-shaped sleigh to deliver presents, Sally does everything she can, including creating a fog by pouring a potion into the Halloween Town well, to stop him from destroying Christmas. Later, Sally uses her detachable and independently animate limbs to rescue the real Santa Claus from the lair of Mr. Oogie Boogie (Ken Page), save Christmas from Jack, and Jack from himself. Unfortunately, she is captured as well, but Jack comes to their rescue, freeing both Sally and Santa, who tells Jack that he should listen to Sally as “the only one who makes any sense around this insane asylum” before magically flying off to set Christmas right. In the end, Jack finally realizes that he is in love with Sally and that they are “meant to be.” The Nightmare Before Christmas is filled with memorable characters and unforgettable images, but Sally is the heart of the movie, providing it with the emotional resonance that allows it to endure as a holiday classic as the years and decades pass.
Herman Claus
The Munsters has gone through several iterations through the years,[4] but only rarely touched on the holiday season with three major exceptions. In “Lo-Cal Munster” the sixth episode of the first season of the original 1962 series, family patriarch and comic incarnation of the Frankenstein monster, Herman Munster (Fred Gwynn), goes on a crash diet to fit into his old Army uniform for a reunion. After starving himself for days, Herman goes on a rampage and crashes a neighboring family’s Thanksgiving feast. In the late 1980s, The Munsters was rebooted as The Munsters Today, and in an episode titled “It’s A Wonderful Afterlife,” Grandpa (Howard Morton) shows Herman (John Schuck) what the world would be like if he had never been built. The major Christmas-themed contribution from the show, however, was yet another iteration, a television movie called The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas originally aired on the Fox Network on December 17, 1996.
Featuring a completely new cast from any of the previous versions, including Here Come the Munsters (1995), a film intended as a pilot to a new series that never materialized, Scary Little Christmas finds Herman (Sam McMurray),[5] Lily (Ann Magnuson), Grandpa (Sandy Baron), and Cousin Marilyn (Elaine Hendrix) all very excited about the imminent Christmas festivities. Eddie (Bug Hall), on the other hand, due to a lack of new friends and an excess of school bullies, longs for the Transylvanian holidays of the past. Seeing his distress, his family makes it their mission to help Eddie enjoy Christmas again now that they have moved to Los Angeles. Herman’s plan involves getting him the best present — a Marquis de Sade dungeon playset, Marilyn suggests bringing in extended family from the old country for a big party, Lily enters herself and Eddie into a community decorating contest, and Grandpa plans to use his magic to make it snow. The rest of the movie chronicles the Munsters’ misadventures in seeing their tasks through.
Herman tries various ways of earning money for Eddie’s present including nude modeling for an art class, wrapping gifts at the mall, and donating blood. Eddie helps Lily create a rather macabre Christmas display that includes a snowman repeatedly being beheaded on a guillotine, a hanged witch, and the head of a giant rabid reindeer that vomits foam over visitors who come calling at their door. Marilyn mostly succeeds in her duty but catches the eye of a passing motorcyclist, Tom (Jeremy Callaghan), while mailing her letters. Most consequential of all, Grandpa’s experimentation teleports Santa Claus (Mark Mitchell) and his two elves from their sleigh into his laboratory. His snowmaking is put on hold while he figures out how to send the jolly old elf and his minions home.
The elves, Larry (Ed Gale) and Lefty (Arturo Gil) are quite mischievous and slip a sleeping potion into Santa’s figgy pudding to get out of work on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, they use the wrong potion and turn him into a fruitcake instead. Eventually, the Munsters discover that the giant fruitcake is Santa, but the lab has been trashed by the elves and Grandpa is unable to change him back right away. Lily tries several times, turning Santa into various festive objects, before finally succeeding. But by that time Santa believes it is too late to be able to complete his rounds. Soon the elves come to their senses and enlist the help of some bikers and, with an assist from Herman’s brain, finish making the toys to be delivered on time. In the end, Santa fulfills Herman’s lifelong dream of being Santa’s little helper by allowing him to ride on the sleigh, drawn by eight flying bikers, and help deliver toys. It’s crazy, it’s ridiculous, but it’s also very much in the spirit of The Munsters. The greatest strength of the series in every form it has taken has always been its huge heart, and The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas has that in spades.
It’s Alive…and Knows Whose Been Naughty and Nice
In my research and writing for this Faces of Frankenstein series I have come across some strange stuff, but nothing could prepare me for Benjamin Edelman and Manuel Camilion’s Santastein (2023). This feature-length film based on their 2018 short film of the same name begins as many killer Santa movies do — with a flashback. On Christmas Eve, six-year-old Max (Fletcher Hammond) sets up a trap for Santa Claus to get his picture but accidentally kills him in the process. After Santa’s death, the world more or less ceases to celebrate Christmas, and a dreary malaise falls over the world near the end of each December. Twelve years later, we find eighteen-year-old Max, now played by Jared Korotkin, stealing corpses from a local morgue to house the brain of Santa he has kept preserved in a jar. He and his friend Paige (Ophelia Rivera) have been experimenting with the reanimation of dead tissue, but unbeknownst to Paige, Max intends to use this knowledge to bring Santa back.
After the pair revive a dead rat in front of their science class on Christmas Eve (schools no longer have Christmas Vacation), Max uses the tried-and-true elevated platform plus lightning technique to reanimate his Santa-brained cadaver. Already decked out in Santa gear, his creation (Michael Vitovich) escapes and goes on a violent rampage, tearing through a police station, a convenience store, and ultimately a house party hosted by Paige’s friend Mikayla (Kaylie Heyner). Santastein features plenty of festive yuletide-themed carnage including a head twisting, a disemboweling, stabbings, bludgeonings, a tongue stuck to a frozen pole (a la Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story, 1983) ripped out at the roots, and a gift-wrapped corpse under the tree. Trying to evade rookie cop Edgar (Damien Edwards), who thinks he is responsible for the killings, Max pursues the Monster through the night as it magically transforms into a winter wonderland as it approaches Christmas and Santastein grows stronger. Meanwhile, Paige enlists the help of her grandmother (Clair Veater), who inexplicably knows an awful lot about Santastein’s powers, to help her bake exploding cookies laced with some homemade nitroglycerin — yes really, I promise I am not making this up.
I won’t spoil where this all goes for the morbidly curious, as the film is readily available on various streaming platforms. As zero-budget and silly as the film is, it does have a certain Ed Wood-like charm to it. Or perhaps it would be more akin to the more recent crop of tongue-in-cheek disasterpiece horror films like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) or the Grinch riff The Mean One (2022). It never takes itself too seriously and neither should those who watch it. The film was picked up by Cinedigm[6]/Bloody Disgusting/Screambox and they know exactly what kind of movie it is — silly, fun, gory, extremely low-budget, and therefore usually profitable. It’s a smart pick-up in the vein of the kinds of films made and released in the past by Roger Corman, Charles Band’s Full Moon Features, and Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma company. Okay, so it’s probably better than most Troma movies. There’s plenty of jolly fun to be had with Santastein and killer Santa movies can be a welcome holiday diversion for many horror fans. It even gives a nod to the “naughty” aspect of the king of all killer Santa movies Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). The Frankenstein twist gives this classic trope the “something extra” that it may or may not need, but I for one am glad it’s out there.
Though the number of Frankenstein holiday features remains relatively few to date, I believe this will change over time. There has been a veritable explosion of two subgenres over the past few years: Yuletide horror and Frankenstein movies. I imagine it is only a matter of time before a group of enterprising filmmakers begin stitching the two together. Ho-Ho-Grrrrrr! 🩸
Footnotes
[1] I did consider adding Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! to this piece, but despite Bill Moseley sporting an exposed brain beneath a glass dome on his head throughout the film, his character Ricky was never actually dead and reanimated. Therefore I ruled it out as a Frankenstein feature.
[2] The original poem was made into an animated short film in 2008 featuring narration by Christopher Lee. It is available as a bonus feature on the Nightmare Before Christmas blu-ray.
[3] Catherine O’Hara’s holiday credibility was well established by this point as family matriarch Kate McCallister in Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).
[4] A more thorough examination of The Munsters will be covered in a later installment of this series.
[5] McMurray also appeared in a much more renowned Christmas classic, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), as Clark Griswold’s (Chevy Chase) coworker Bill. Incidentally, William Hickey who voiced Dr. Finklestein in The Nightmare Before Christmas also appeared in this film as Uncle Lewis.
[6] Now Cineverse.
About
Brian Keiper is a featured writer for Manor Vellum. Brian’s also written for Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, F This Movie!, Ghastly Grinning, and others. Follow him on Instagram @brianwaves42, Threads @brianwaves42, and/or X @Brianwaves42.
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