The Christmas Horror Film

Every December the same complaint surfaces: Christmas horror is a contradiction, a cynical bit of counter-programming, tinsel draped over a knife for the shock of the juxtaposition. The complaint has the history exactly backwards. Telling frightening stories in the last dark week of the year is one of the oldest habits the English-speaking world has, and the horror film arrived late to a party that had been running since Dickens. It fitted straight in.

The ghost story was a Christmas custom first

The Victorians formalised something older. Christmas fell at the solstice end of the agricultural year, the fire was the only warm place in the house, and the dark outside lasted sixteen hours. Ghost stories were what you did with the time. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 as a ghost story explicitly — three hauntings and a graveyard — and then kept the habit going, commissioning and writing supernatural tales for the Christmas numbers of his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round for the best part of two decades. Henry James opens The Turn of the Screw (1898) with a group gathered around a fire on Christmas Eve, trading apparitions, because that framing needed no explanation to a reader of 1898.

M.R. James, provost of King’s College Cambridge and the finest ghost-story writer in the language, wrote his tales to be read aloud to friends and students in his rooms at Christmas. That is their native form: candlelight, a small audience, a scholar’s dry voice describing something in a bed that should not be there. The BBC understood the inheritance and made it policy. Whistle and I’ll Come to You, Jonathan Miller’s 1968 adaptation with Michael Hordern, established the tone, and from 1971 the corporation ran A Ghost Story for Christmas almost annually, mostly directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and mostly drawn from James — The Stalls of Barchester, A Warning to the Curious, Lost Hearts. The strand ran to 1978, went dormant, and was revived in 2005; Mark Gatiss has been making them for years now. Millions of British households have therefore had state-broadcast horror served with the pudding for over half a century, and nobody has ever thought it odd.

The cinema caught up in 1945. Ealing’s Dead of Night is remembered for Michael Redgrave and the ventriloquist’s dummy, which is fair — it is the segment that founded a whole subgenre and it remains genuinely upsetting. But the film also contains a small, perfect Christmas ghost story, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, in which a girl at a party (Sally Ann Howes) wanders off during hide-and-seek and comforts a crying boy in an upstairs nursery. The segment is quiet, brief, and built entirely on the warmth of the house downstairs. Its power comes from the sound design: the party noise continues, muffled, through the floor, the whole time she is upstairs with the child. Cavalcanti pulled the story from a real killing — the 1860 Road Hill House murder, in which Constance Kent eventually confessed to cutting her half-brother’s throat — and the film gives the audience just enough to place it without ever slowing down to explain.

That is the template in miniature, thirty years before anyone gave it a name. The horror sits in the same house as the celebration, one floor up, and the celebration keeps going.

Black Christmas builds the machine

Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) is the film that turns the custom into an engine. A sorority house empties for the holidays; the girls who stay receive obscene phone calls; someone is already in the attic. It arrived four years before Halloween and set out most of the furniture the American slasher would use for the next decade — the killer’s point of view, the final girl, the calls coming from inside the house, the seasonal hook in the title.

Clark’s craft decisions are what make it hold. He shot the killer’s point of view live and handheld: operator Bert Dunk carried the rig on his shoulder and physically climbed the trellis into the attic, so that vision breathes and lurches in a way a dolly never would. The phone voice — the film’s most disturbing element by a wide margin — was assembled from several performers layered together, including Nick Mancuso and Clark himself, producing something that sounds like an argument between people who are all the same person. And Clark declines to explain Billy. No backstory, no motive, no unmasking. The film treats its killer as weather.

The lovely footnote is that Bob Clark went on to direct A Christmas Story (1983), the sweetest and most-broadcast Christmas film in America. One man made both ends of the December double bill.

Why it works: warm light in a cold house

The seasonal setting hands a horror director a set of tools that would otherwise take half an hour of screen time to build.

The production design is pre-loaded. A Christmas interior is saturated colour against black — fairy lights, a fire, red and gold — which gives a cinematographer enormous contrast for free. Every practical light in the room is motivated and warm, so the shadows they throw are deep and legible. Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) leans on this constantly: the Peltzer house is lit like a greetings card, and the creatures work because they are photographed in that light rather than in the blue murk a monster movie would default to.

Isolation arrives free of charge. The genre’s oldest structural problem is getting the victims alone. At Christmas, the campus empties, the office closes, the roads freeze, and the neighbours are away — no contrivance required. Black Christmas uses term-end; The Children (2008) uses a family gathering at an isolated house; Rare Exports (2010) uses the Finnish Lapland winter, where the sun does not rise.

The score can hide in the room. Carols are diegetic. A director can lay menace over a familiar tune the audience has known since infancy, and it plays as a radio in the kitchen rather than as a music cue. It is the cheapest irony in cinema and it still works, because the tune is doing the emotional labour and the images are free to contradict it.

And the intruder is already part of the mythology. Consider what children are actually told: a large bearded stranger enters the house at night through a hole in the wall while you sleep, he keeps a list of your behaviour, and he sees you when you are sleeping. The Santa slasher inherited every one of those details from the nursery. Its only innovation was declining to soften them.

The man in the red suit, and the parents who panicked

Amicus got there first. Tales from the Crypt (1972) opens with “…And All Through the House”, directed by Freddie Francis, in which Joan Collins — having just murdered her husband — cannot call the police because an escaped maniac in a Santa suit is at the window. It is a fifteen-minute machine with no fat on it, and Robert Zemeckis remade it note-perfect for the HBO series in 1989.

Then came the panic. Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) put a killer Santa on the poster and the trailer ran during family programming; parents picketed cinemas, the critics Siskel and Ebert read the crew’s names aloud on air and said “shame on you” after each one, and TriStar pulled the film within two weeks despite it out-grossing A Nightmare on Elm Street on its opening weekend. The film itself is crude and poorly made. The panic it caused remains the interesting part, and it confirmed that the image retained real transgressive charge.

The genuinely good one from that cycle is Christmas Evil (1980, also released as You Better Watch Out), Lewis Jackson’s study of a toy-factory worker whose identification with Santa curdles into psychosis. It is sad rather than nasty, closer to Taxi Driver than to a body count, and John Waters has spent forty years calling it the greatest Christmas film ever made. He is overselling it, though his reasoning holds up: the film takes the delusion seriously, and follows a man who genuinely believes he is doing good.

The home-invasion problem

There is a structural reason the Santa slasher curdled so fast, and it is worth naming, because it explains why the good Christmas horror mostly avoids the red suit.

A killer Santa is a costume, and a costume is an answer rather than a question. The moment the film puts the beard on, the audience knows the shape of everything to come: a man in a suit, a set of murders themed to presents, and a psychology the script will explain in a flashback about a traumatic Christmas. Silent Night, Deadly Night delivers precisely that, flashback included, and the concept exhausts itself before the second reel.

The films that last do the reverse and keep Christmas as the setting while the threat stays unexplained. Billy in Black Christmas has no costume, no motive and no face. René Manzor’s Deadly Games (1989) — released in France as 3615 Code Père Noël, and worth finding for how startlingly it anticipates Home Alone a year early — puts a booby-trapping boy against an intruder in a Santa suit, and gets its charge from the child’s belief that this might genuinely be Father Christmas. The suit is the boy’s problem rather than the film’s gimmick.

Joe Dante’s craft in Gremlins is the cleanest illustration. He never dresses a monster as Santa. He lets Phoebe Cates deliver a long, quiet, straight-faced monologue about why she hates Christmas — a story involving her father, a chimney and a broken neck — while the film holds on her face and declines to cut away or undercut it. The studio wanted the scene removed. Dante fought for it, and it is the reason a creature comedy has any weight at all: for ninety seconds the film admits that the holiday is, for some people, the worst week of the year. That admission is what all of this material is actually about, and no amount of blood-spattered tinsel gets near it.

Where the tradition stands

The subgenre is in decent health and has quietly gone international. Rare Exports (2010) reconstructs Santa as a horned Lapland predator excavated from a mountain, with Jalmari Helander playing the folklore straight. Krampus (2015) — from Michael Dougherty, who made Trick ‘r Treat — resurrects the Alpine punishment demon who has walked beside St Nicholas in Austrian and Bavarian processions for centuries, and whose real costumed parades are more frightening than most of the film. Better Watch Out (2016) executes a structural swerve I will not describe. Anna and the Apocalypse (2017) is a Scottish Christmas zombie musical and is much better than that sentence suggests.

The through-line across eighty years is consistent: these films work when they respect the holiday rather than mocking it. The ones that fail are the ones that treat the tinsel as a punchline, arriving with a wink and a Santa hat and nothing underneath. The ones that last understand that the fire, the closed door and the long dark outside were the point of the custom all along. M.R. James read to his friends at Christmas because Christmas is when the story lands hardest. The film-makers who remember that are the ones still worth watching in December.

For the winter noir adjacent to all this, Blast of Silence spends its Christmas in a colder place than any of them, with no ghost in it at all.