Ho-Ho-Horror: A Brief History of Yuletide Terror
By Brian Keiper
These days, horror filmmakers churn out more holiday fare than the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime Network combined. 2022 alone gave us Violent Night, The Leech, Christmas Bloody Christmas, and “The Outside” episode of the Netflix series Cabinet of Curiosities, released within days of one another. As I write this, announced yuletide offerings hitting theaters and streaming in 2023 include It’s a Wonderful Knife, Sacrifice Game, Nightmare on 34th Street, an anthology called Night of the Missing, and the intriguingly titled Santastein (which you can bet I’ll be covering in an upcoming installment of my “Faces of Frankenstein” series here at Manor Vellum). It has already been revealed that the third installment of Damien Leone’s Terrifier series, to be released in 2024, will be a Christmas movie, with a teaser trailer and poster revealing new horror icon Art the Clown dressed as Santa Claus. But this endless smorgasbord of holiday horror was not always the case. For decades, there was an unspoken rule that Christmas and the surrounding holidays were off-limits for horror filmmakers with very few exceptions. Works of literature, specifically Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which is very obviously a ghost story, saw dozens of adaptations, but otherwise, before the 1970s, the holiday horror landscape was practically barren.
The two great exceptions to this were a sequence in the Val Lewton film Curse of the Cat People (1944) and a single story in the first great horror anthology film Dead of Night (1945). Curse of the Cat People is most often cited as an early Christmas horror film and the climax does indeed take place on a snowy holiday night. Technically speaking, however, the sequence takes place on Twelfth Night as the Christmas tree and other decorations are being taken down, though a brief scene does take place on the holiday proper. The story in Dead of Night, “The Christmas Party,” is very brief and centers around a game of sardines (somewhat akin to hide and seek) at a children’s Christmas party in an English mansion. One of the children happens upon a young, crying boy that she attempts to comfort. As it turns out, it is the ghost of a boy who died in the house. It is interesting that both these films involve children and ghosts, both of which had long been connected with the Christmas holiday thanks to Saint Nicholas and Charles Dickens along with a long-held tradition in England of telling ghost stories by the fire on Christmas Eve. This tradition was taken into modern times with the BBC series of broadcasts titled A Ghost Story for Christmas which ran for many years in the UK and has been revived from time to time in recent years.
The big shift in acceptability of horror stories related to Christmas came in 1972 with the release of three horror films that explicitly involve the holiday as a central element of the story. The Amicus anthology Tales from the Crypt begins with the classic EC Comics story “And All Through the House” in which Joan Collins plays a cheating wife who has just killed her husband on Christmas Eve. She is then terrorized by an escaped lunatic dressed as Santa Claus as she is trying to dispose of his body, all while making sure she does not wake her sleeping child.* Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? was an attempt by American International Pictures to capitalize on the string of films that have come to be known as “psycho-biddy horror,” or the far less flattering “hagsploitation,” that followed What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). It stars Shelley Winters as Mrs. Forrest, a rich woman known to a nearby orphanage as Auntie Roo, who throws an annual Christmas party for a few lucky children. Very much a riff on Hansel and Gretel, the film is surprisingly effective and, though it has fallen out of the general discussion of holiday horror, deserves to be rediscovered. The third film of 1972 to exploit the holiday was Silent Night, Bloody Night — similar titles will abound throughout upcoming years — an extremely low-budget shocker that doesn’t quite live up to its lurid title.
So why the sudden change? Why was holiday horror now acceptable and even craved beginning in the early seventies?
Beginning in the late 1960s, filmmaking went through a massive sea change and part of that was a turn toward breaking every taboo. The Hays code was gone, replaced by the flawed but far more freeing MPAA rating system. Movies like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969), and The Godfather (1972) kicked down the doors of what was acceptable to show in on-screen violence. In horror, Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Last House on the Left (1972), The Exorcist (1973), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) proved that truly terrifying movies that did not hold back could be financially viable. People craved movies that broke taboos, showed the horrors of the real world, and were unafraid to offend. Christmas was just another sacred cow to be slaughtered.
This kind of filmmaking philosophy paved the way to what may well be the greatest Christmas horror film ever made, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas in 1974. It’s a remarkably complex and nuanced film that begins with the prank caller trope, used so effectively in films like When a Stranger Calls (1979) and Scream (1996), but then interrogates many ongoing concerns including stalking and other forms of predation on college campuses, and reproductive rights. The film was a modest success in its native Canada but failed to ignite in the United States. Without a doubt, Black Christmas did eventually influence what would become the slasher subgenre. Though not the first to use the so-called Killer POV (variations on it were used in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1931 and Peeping Tom, 1960), it did use it in a way that would prefigure Italian gialli, John Carpenter’s use of it in Halloween, and the many slashers that would imitate that film to follow. Black Christmas has grown exponentially in esteem since its initial release, becoming one of the great cult films of all time, spawning two remakes in 2006 and 2019. Bob Clark went on to direct another Christmas cult classic, the decidedly more family-friendly A Christmas Story in 1983, but the hearts of horror lovers will always love him most for Billy, Jess, and Barb.
Of course, the bread and butter of holiday horror is the Killer Santa, a trope that has produced films that run the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime. Antecedents to the sinister Santa Claus can be found in the lore of the character itself, with the vengeful Krampus and the switch-toting Kris Kringles of bygone days simmering just below the surface of the modern Jolly Old St. Nick with his rosy cheeks and belly like a bowl full of jelly. In the film and television world, perhaps the seeds of a slightly frightening Santa come from photographs of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the greatest horror icons of their day, dressing as Santa and spreading holiday cheer with just a pinch of salt. Karloff was known to anonymously dress as Santa around the holidays bringing gifts to sick children in hospitals, but never publicized it, feeling that charity should be performed in secret. Also related to Karloff is the iconic character of the Grinch, created of course by Dr. Suess, and voiced by Karloff in the 1966 holiday television special. But it was the flashpoint year of 1972 that brought the truly homicidal Santa to the screen in the previously discussed “And All Through the House” segment of Tales from the Crypt.
The first great movie centered around the killer Santa is the brilliant and still underseen Christmas Evil (1980), an exquisite and intelligent exploitation film that used a Travis Bickle-like character, Harry Stadling (Brandon Maggart), to cut to the heart of Christmas commercialism, greed, and consumerism. In 1984, the most notorious killer Santa film of all, Silent Night, Deadly Night, brought the wrath of the PTA, Siskel and Ebert, and Mickey Rooney for its trailer alone. The film was pulled from theaters a week after its November 9th release, but by that point it had already turned a profit as the protests only fueled its box office. Still, it essentially killed the first wave of slashers. Little harm was done as the subgenre was resurrected with another film released the same day, A Nightmare on Elm Street, which would take slashers, including sequels to Silent Night, Deadly Night, in new, more supernatural, directions. To date, the homicidal Billy Chapman (Robert Brian Wilson) would inspire four sequels and a remake, with the possibility of another reboot on the horizon. Another excellent film in this vein is the bonkers French film Dial Code Santa (aka. 36.15.code Père Noël aka. Deadly Games, aka. Game Over — 1989) a movie that plays like a dark and twisted Home Alone, which would premiere the following year.
More often than not, killer Santas are troubled men impersonating the Jolly Old Elf, but in recent years there has been a move toward the actual Santa, or sometimes his alter ego Krampus, being on the crazy side. Perhaps the best of these is the Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale from 2010, written and directed by Jalmari Helander. The film is in part an examination of the ways that we water down our legends to make them palatable, but how they perhaps still have their teeth and could turn on us at any moment. It’s also one hell of a ride, a rousing adventure with a moving father-son story at its heart. Another recent favorite is Michael Dougherty’s Krampus (2015), featuring an all-star cast as they face the many domestic terrors of the holidays before encountering Santa’s titular dark doppelganger. Most recently, Violent Night (2022) features the real Santa (David Harbour) finding his inner John McClane and going Die Hard on a group of thieves threatening the residents of a house where he is making his deliveries. Though its politics are a bit convoluted, its heart is in the right place. Plus, there are lots of explosions, stabbings, and various maimings that make for a festive good time. Every one of these killer Santa releases (which are far too numerous to mention) feels like a giant “fuck you” to all those protesters outside theaters playing Silent Night, Deadly Night back in 1984. As for Mickey Rooney, he played a killer Santa in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker for his sins — but this direct-to-video sequel happens to be one of the high points of that particular series.
In addition to the killer Santa, there have been any number of creepy creatures invading the season over the past few decades, the most famous being those cute little furry guys that turn into those mischievous scaly green guys when you feed them after midnight. Joe Dante’s Gremlins remains the high-water mark for Christmas creature features and was ironically released at the beginning of the summer movie season, June 8th of 1984 (the same day as one of the other great gateway horrors — Ghostbusters). Others have come since, like Elves (1989) and 1997’s Jack Frost about a killer snowman (not to be confused with the family film starring Michael Keaton from the following year), but none have been able to reach the heights of success that Gremlins achieved.
The number of Christmas and holiday season horror films has ballooned in recent years ranging from tongue-in-cheek horror comedies like Charles Band’s The Gingerdead Man (2005), to tense thrillers like the excellent and underrated P2 (2007), to anthologies like All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018), to dark slow-building terrors like The Lodge (2019), and even a blood-soaked zombie musical — the delightfully infectious Anna and the Apocalypse (2017). The list goes on and continues to grow. It used to be that horror fans only had October to let their freak flag fly with horror releases piled into that single month for quite some time. Well, just like Jason and the Muppets both took Manhattan, George Bailey and Ralphie Parker need to make room for Art the Clown and Ricky Caldwell’s eyebrows (that’s for all you SNDN, Part 2 stans) because we have taken over the whole end of the year. So let me exclaim as I drive out of sight — bloody Christmas to all and to all a fright night. 🩸
Footnotes
* I wrote a full article about the history and various interpretations of this story for Manor Vellum in 2021: “The Gift that Keeps on Giving: The Incarnations of ‘And All Through the House’”
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.
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