There are horror films for almost every holiday—Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Halloween (of course)—even Independence Day (William Lustig's Uncle Sam). With Christmas just around the corner, it got me thinking about Yuletide-themed movies, and I came to the conclusion that most of them are pretty lame. Here's a select list...

Man, is it cheap. Some of the sets are so small it looks like the actors are crouching to fit into the frame. And despite its '80s vintage, it has a distinctly sleazy '70s vibe, especially in its depiction of the Piccadilly Circus/nightclub milieu. Even cult vixen Caroline (Maniac) Munro, no stranger to sleaze herself, shows up to chirp a Eurotrash disco song.
And instead of being horrified by the murders, the obviously underdirected extras react with expressions of nausea or vague disappointment. It's probably the best of the bad Christmas horror films, because it delivers the gore with a thick slice of cheese.
Father Christmases are offed in a variety of amusing ways—burning, bludgeoning—even exsanguination via castration. Of course none of it is convincing, but that only adds to the fun. You have to wonder what Purdom was thinking as he was performing double duty here. "At last! An opportunity to stretch my talent" or "God, I need the money"? And the VHS sleeve (pictured here) was classic. How could you resist renting it with packaging like this?
2. The "And All Through the House" segment from Tales from the Crypt (1972). Joan Collins! Chloe Franks (Whoever Slew Auntie Roo, The House That Dripped Blood)! Sicko Santa! The first adaptation of the classic 1950s comic book series is by far the best. I remember seeing it at the State Theater in South Bend, Indiana, on a double bill with another Amicus anthology, From Beyond the Grave. I didn't dig Grave so much (insert groan here) but Tales was great. It's amazing that it got a PG rating back in the day, because it's quite tense and bloody (even though the blood is pink).
Joan was in the horror/trash phase of her career at this point. She'd already done Inn of the Frightened People, and I Don't Want to Be Born, in which she gives birth to a baby possessed by a circus dwarf—I'm not kidding—still lay ahead. Here, she plays a wife who decides to snuff her husband on Christmas Eve while her daughter is asleep upstairs. Bashing his brains in with a fireplace poker, she throws his body down the basement steps to make it look as if he'd fallen. Unfortunately, a news report interrupts the nonstop Christmas music on the wireless to warn citizens to be on the lookout for a deranged Santa who had just escaped from the mental hospital.

Joan rushes to the fireplace, presumably to grab her old reliable poker, but Santa has his hands wrapped around her throat. Oliver MacGreevy, who plays the jolly old elf, should've won some sort of award for his performance. He effectively projected a perverted insanity that really creeped out my 13-year-old self and still does today. I mean, after he killed Mommy, what do you think he did with the kid?
The story was redone for the HBO series of the same name, and although it ups the ante in the gore department, the original is still tops in my book. You can see it here.
3. Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). A triumph of marketing, this ultra-low-budget slasher was promoted with incredibly morbid television spots during the holiday season, causing parents' groups to go ballistic and get it pulled from theaters. It delivers on the gore and there are lots of silly breast shots—the ever-topless Linnea (Return of the Living Dead) Quigley is on board, and a girl even opens her front door to let out her cat, dressed only in tiny shorts.
It spawned an outrageous number of direct-to-video sequels that diverted from the original story (psycho Santa, of course). Mickey Rooney showed up for number five as a looney toymaker named Joe Petto (insert second groan here), even though he'd written a letter to the producers of the original complaining about the film back in '84! Guess he couldn't resist that check for $2.95 the filmmakers were waving in front of his nose.
4. Christmas Evil (1980). John Waters is among the fans of this killer holiday flick, which stars Tony nominee Brandon Maggart as a schmuck who sees Santa performing an intimate act on his mother as a child. Instead of loathing the guy, he becomes his number one fan, keeping his apartment decorated year-round and sleeping in a Santa robe. But when too many people diss Christmas, he snaps and decides to become Kris Kringle himself—well, a murderous Kris Kringle.
All of this takes a lo-o-o-ong time. With apologies to Mr. Waters, I found this this to be a really boring movie. At 100 minutes, it moves at a snail's pace and the killings don't start until the final 40 minutes. And there's weird, senseless stuff, too. He goes to the home of a bad boy who'd been looking at dirty magazines, but instead of killing him, he just covers his hands and face in mud and leaves impressions on the side of the house. Huh? And just when you think the killings are going to start in earnest (beginning with a pretty good eye impalement), the action stops dead again for an office party dance sequence.

The cast is interesting. Along with the aforementioned Kidder, who's fun as the drunk, chain-smoking Barb, there's also Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet), Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Andrea Martin (SCTV). Although the killings aren't really splattery, it does anticipate the slasher film boom of the 1980s, and the notion that the killer has been in the house the entire time dramatized a popular urban legend and gave birth to at least another film's plot (When a Stranger Calls). It's also very grim and nasty, with the killer's phone calls being particularly graphic and obscenity-laden.
The film was remade in 2006. Of course, the sleaze and gore stakes were raised considerably, and Martin came back, this time playing the house mother rather than a student. Otherwise, it's pretty routine.
6. Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974). This is one of those movies you just wish would be a lot better. Directed by Theodore (Sugar Cookies) Gershuny, it stars Mary Woronov, his spouse at the time, and horror vet John Carradine, with appearances by Warhol superstars Candy Darling and Ondine. With a cast like this, one really wishes it would have taken off into Morrissey/Warhol territory, but it's awkward, dark and slow-moving. It has its enthusiastic adherents, but to me it just seems like a horror film made by experimental filmmakers with no affinity for the genre—and that's why I especially wish they'd just gone ahead and made it really strange.
7. TV Christmas Episodes. Okay, they're not horror films, but there are a few Christmas-themed TV episodes worth mentioning. Oftentimes, Christmas has to be shoehorned into the plot of shows that don't naturally lend themselves to holiday whimsy. I'm reminded of the Yuletide-themed Dragnet in which Gannon and Friday work to find a Baby Jesus statue and return it to its creche in a Mexican-American church in time for Christmas mass. Wanted: Dead or Alive, starring Steve McQueen, had a cheesy episode in which a kid gives him eight cents to find Santa Claus.
Far more successful were the comedies. Who could forget the Mary Tyler Moore episode in which Mary is scheduled to work alone at the news desk on Christmas Eve, thinks there's an intruder in the building, and is surprised by her coworkers with an impromptu party?


And to all a goodnight!
2 comments:
I have seven hundred nominees for worst holiday TV episode. Seems everyone had to do some variation of "It's a Wonderful Life." "The Munsters Today" (now there's a horror!) even did one called "It's a Wonderful Afterlife." Jesus wasn't the only one who wept.
"the biggest horror of them all, the 1978 Star Wars holiday special." -- Yes, I have to agree that was the most deeply unsettling piece of christmas entertainment I've ever seen.
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