Festive Frights: A Trio of Must-See Horror Flicks

Festive Frights: A Trio of Must-See Horror Flicks

Introduction

The holiday season is often filled with joy, laughter, and cherished traditions, yet it also serves as a perfect backdrop for horror stories that evoke suspense and fear. In this review, Charlotte Bond sets her sights on three festive horror films, Krampus, Silent Night and A Christmas Story. That twist the familiar celebration elements into something dark and unsettling, reminding us that not everything is as it seems during this supposedly joyful time of year. Each film reimagines classic holiday themes, presenting an eerie exploration of what lurks beneath the surface of seasonal cheer, revealing the fragility of human emotions when faced with sinister forces. Encounter characters whose idyllic celebrations unravel into nightmarish experiences, drawing us into a world where laughter becomes hollow and dread takes hold. Join us as we unveil these chilling tales that transform merriment into terror, inviting viewers to confront the unsettling shadows that can hide within even the most cherished festivities.

Festive Frights: A Trio of Must-See Horror Flicks by Charlotte Bond

I love Christmas, with the darkness broken by shiny tinsel and twinkling lights. Christmas horror has always held a special place in my heart given that my first ever horror book was entitled Haunting Christmas Tales. God bless Scholastic, who published so many of the horror books that I read growing up.

While I still read Haunting Christmas Tales (and its follow up books Chilling Christmas Tales and Mysterious Christmas Tales) every year or so, I also can’t resist a good Christmas horror film if I see one.

This year, I treated myself and watched three of them, with mixed results.

Krampus

Being a fan of Christmas monsters and Toni Collette, this was an obvious movie for me to download. I’d seen it advertised a couple of Christmases ago and last year downloaded it to watch. I enjoyed it enough that I suggested my daughter and I watch it this year because she’s taking her first few tentative steps into the world of adult horror movies – plus her English teacher had shown them the trailer at school so she was already interested.

The opening scene was great fun, if a little over-the-top to be realistic. I did like how the chaos of the opening credits merged into the beginning of the actual story with the fight at the nativity show. We then proceed to what looks like a normal Christmas movie where people are getting ready to invite their extended dysfunctional family into their house. According to IMDb, the intention was indeed to have a normal family Christmas movie until the horror starts, and the normality and family bickering does indeed aid the set-up of the characters and it provides contrast to the darkness to come. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3850590/trivia/?item=tr5367541&ref_=ext_shr_lnk] 

I thought all the actors gave pretty decent performances.

But unfortunately the characters of the extended family felt so cliched that they came across as unbelievable: the gun-happy father who resorts to a weapon as soon as the going gets tough; the self-absorbed mother who thinks only of herself and her darling children; and the darling children who are actually little monsters. Oh, and the baby, who doesn’t really feature much in this. Which isn’t surprising given that apparently the studio told the production team repeatedly to cut back on how much the baby cries.

Still, this is a Christmas horror movie about a demon who loves to ruin the festive spirit, so unbelievable is pretty much par for the course. If you want a really relatable family in your Christmas horror then you want to opt for Silent Night (reviewed below). The main family characters of Tom, Sarah, Beth and Max (played by Adam Scott, Toni Collette, Stefania LaVie Owen, and Emjay Anthony) were pretty relatable and I was definitely rooting for them. And even though Krista Stadler’s character was a stereotypical grandmother/old-woman-who-knows-what’s-going-on, I still enjoyed watching her performance which added to the whole creepiness of the movie. 

The first half of this film has a good level of dread and suspense.

We don’t see much of Krampus or his minions, and that works really well. I found the deserted houses and snowstorm particularly eerie. However, once the terrorising begins in earnest and we start to see the Yule Lads and other mischief-makers that follow in the wake of Krampus, everything turns a little silly. No matter how bloody the scene, I’m just not going to find a load of gingerbread men attacking a grown man to be in any way scary. That said, the jack-in-the-box and it’s tender appetites was really very unsettling (and was the only bit of the film my daughter asked me to skip). The Krampus make-up and outfit was impressive, but it’s the old adage that once you’ve seen the monster, the monster is naturally less scary.

In the end, this film was too bizarre and silly to be truly horrifying,

But it was still a fun ride. While the characters felt a little stale and predictable, the actors all carried them off well enough to be enjoyable. Not a film to be taken too seriously, and probably a right hoot if watched while drunk and with a good sense of humour. 

As an aside, I really loved the Christmas décor in the house, its jolly and bright nature proving a stark juxtaposition to the unpleasant things to come. After all those lights and tinsel the night before, when they wake up to a power cut and the house is grey and gloomy, that imagery really helps mark a turning point in the film. 

Score: 6/10 – it would have been higher except the characters were a little too predictable and the attack sequences didn’t quite know if they were comedy or horror, ending up being neither really.

Festive Frights: A Trio of Must-See Horror Flicks

A Christmas Horror Story

This one was free on Amazon, and I thought: Well, why the hell not? I’ve already watched Krampus twice. And look – it has William Shatner! That alone made it worth checking out.

Well, reader, William Shatner sitting in a radio booth, drinking eggnog and trying to maintain some Christmas spirit amid grouches and murderous news updates was really the best thing about this dreadful mishmash of a film. 

There is no central plotline to the movie. Instead, we follow five scenarios playing out in separate strands. 

Strand one involves three teenagers breaking into a school where two other teenagers died terribly in the recent past on Christmas Eve.

This pair of boys and a girl hope to film the ghosts if possible, but at the very least to get some spooky shots of the murder scene for their online show. When they get stuck in the basement, things start to go from bad to worse. 

Strand two involves another teenage girl who is unable to join the three in the old school because her father is taking the whole family to see wealthy Aunt Edda and play happy families in an effort to get her to invest in the father’s business. However, bad behaviour by the son (breaking a model of Krampus) results in the family being kicked out. Driving back despondently to their house, the car breaks down and the four of them are forced to try and walk back through the woods. Except something is hunting them.

Strand three sees a family of mother, father, and son going into the woods to fetch themselves a Christmas tree.

The son wanders off and while losing him seems like the worst thing that could happen, it’s when they find him that the terrible things really start happening. The son becomes cold, aloof, and finally violent, leading the mother to suspect that it’s not her child at all.

Strand four is perhaps the most bizarre of the lot and has Santa Claus in his workshop at the North Pole suddenly being overrun with killer zombie elves.

There is absolutely no attempt at realism and, to be frank, I found the scenes in Family Guy’s Road to the North Pole to be more disturbing (especially when the feral reindeer eat the elves). This strand of the film wasn’t scary and there wasn’t enough plot or character development to make it funny; it was just a relentless assault on Santa by his helpers, with very little explanation as to why this was going on. 

Finally, strand five is William Shatner as a DJ doing the Christmas Eve shift. It’s almost tempting not to categorise these scenes as a strand at all but more a series of vignettes because there’s no plot, just Shatner being Shatner and steadily working his way through a bottle of eggnog and rum. His role seems to be to tie up the other strands a little, with some mentions of dead teenagers and hostages, but these attempts at cohesion are so half-hearted that they’re pretty much pointless. 

Splitting the film into five different strands might have worked better if the strands interlocked at any point, but apart from the odd reference here and there, they really were completely unrelated. The disadvantage of this is that with so many stories going on, no character is on screen long enough for you to really care about them. This isn’t like the marvellous Ghost Stories where Andy Nyman’s character links all the story strands together while offering an overarching tale of its own. 

Perhaps the most satisfying story for me was strand three.

With the two parents and the strange child. When the final reveal came, I liked how the monsters were portrayed and also how it was ambiguous as to whether they were evil, mischievous, or just oblivious to the hurt they caused. The glimpse of the little boy in his true form in his window reflection at one point was very creepy and well done. However, this strand also contained a scene I found was too unsettling and downright crass, which was where the little boy crawls into his mother’s bed. I did not like that scene at all, even if there was ambiguity about whether it was a dream or not. 

The Santa Claus strand was most disappointing because the only relevance to it seemed to be “let’s have a bloodbath at Santa’s Workshop” with virtually no build-up, zero character development, and no real sense of threat or intrigue. I did like how Santa used his crozier as a weapon (a nod to the original Saint Nicholas) but there really was nothing to engage the mind beyond violence. The final scene has a twist that genuinely surprised me, and I almost gasped out loud at the revelation. However, it certainly wasn’t worth sitting through the previous 1 hour and 38 minutes just to see that.

Strand one was pretty dull, full of clichés and jump scares that were so familiar they no longer made you jumpy.

It was standard, uninteresting fare, although I did think Zoé De Grand Maison showed a decent amount of range as Molly. But to be fair to the actors playing opposite her, they didn’t get to do anything particularly interesting beyond being snarky or afraid. Strand two was okay and might actually have made a halfway decent film if it had been the main focus on the film. But it was rushed, it was familiar, and while the characters here had the most development and there was an attempt at a redemption arc, it still remained unsatisfying and therefore dull.

Score: 4/10 – this might have been decent enough if it had picked one story and stuck with it, really drawn out the characters and the suspense, but with five different stories it didn’t work. Shatner and the twist at the end bumped it up from a measly 3 to a 4, but I shall get my Shatner-fix from other films in the future.

Festive Frights: A Trio of Must-See Horror Flicks

Silent Night

I saw this advertised on Netflix and thought it looked intriguing. While I watched the other horror films and moved on almost instantly, the ending of this film and the performances really stuck with me for several days afterwards. 

The tagline gives away the crux of the plot: “Nell, Simon, and their 3 sons are ready to welcome friends and family for what promises to be a perfect Christmas gathering. Perfect except for one thing: everyone is going to die.”

The premise is that a family gets together on Christmas Eve for one final night together because in the morning, poisonous clouds are going to sweep across the country and kill everyone in a terrible, agonizing way. However, the government has prepared everyone for this by issuing them with “exit tablets” – take them and you can be sure of a swift, painless death. Don’t take them, and the gas will poison you in the most horrible way imaginable.

I really liked this film while also being incredibly unsettled by it.

Since the pandemic, I’ve really struggled to watch any films about global viruses or the apocalypse, but I was intrigued enough by the trailer to give it a go. From the start, Keira Knightly does an amazing job of a mother on the edge. We see her doing all the usual festive jobs of prepping the food, making the beds, hiding the dirty sheets in a chest, and welcoming her guests. But every now and then, tension breaks through her smiles and through some fantastically subtle body language, you see that everything is really, really not alright.

I couldn’t fault any of the actors in this film as they all gave great performances. I thought the whole of Nell’s family did a really good job of a family at Christmas just trying to get along with relatives winding them up while at the same time dealing with the dark themes of impending death. Tony and Sandra (Rufus Jones and Annabelle Wallis) and their daughter Kitty (Davida McKenzie) were perhaps the least believable and felt like their characters were too over the top. Sandra was too obnoxious, Kitty too spoiled, and Tony too hen-pecked. That said, they still had their moments of poignancy, and Tony’s plea of “Have I always been boring?” was as heart-rending as Sandra’s request for a hug from her daughter before it was too late. 

While I particularly loved Kiera Knightley’s and Matthew Goode’s portrayal of Nell and Simon, two parents struggling to hold it all together for the sake of the children and others, I also thought there were some brilliant turns by other actors.

Lucy Punch’s turn as Bella was rather different from the roles I normally see her in.

Often she’s loud, brash, and the centre of attention, sometimes goofy. And while she was certainly attention-stealing and plain-talking in this film, it was far more low-key and blended well with those performances around her. She felt real rather than exaggerated. Pairing her with Kirby Howell-Baptiste as her girlfriend Alex was a stroke of genius as they contrast so well, and you are left wondering about where the balance of power lies in their relationship and whether it’s healthy at all – and then, at the end, the true face of their love is revealed. 

Lily-Rose Depp and Sopé Dìrísù as Sophie and James gave us a different, more nuanced and more caring look at how people might act in such a situation, providing a welcome contrast to the “stiff upper lip” attitude of the other attendees. The film would have been incredibly depressing if these characters were the main ones, as they had a realistic and calm attitude to it all, but their pragmatism and Sophie’s disapproval of how the kids were being treated made a striking counterpoint to the attitudes of the parents.

This is billed as a black comedy, but really there’s not much to laugh about here.

I prefer one reviewer’s comment that this is more “snarky horror.” There are some wonderfully witty lines in this film, such as Kitty shouting at Sandra: “You’re wearing my education on your feet!” in reference to the fact that since the world is going to end, Sandra had spent Kitty’s college fund on new shoes for the last night. “Don’t approach anything without prosecco,” was also another favourite. 

The information about what is going on and the general backstory is revealed in a sort of drip-feed manner that is very effective. Little snippets of government videos on how to take the pill and what it will do to you with frighteningly bland illustrations; wrapping paper that is actually newspapers showing headlines of what has already occurred; comments from one character to another, delivered without feeling like it’s exposition or an info dump. 

Despite all of the action taking place in a single location

The film still manages to ramp up the tension slowly but effectively by various means as we draw towards the end. There’s only so long you can watch the isolated world of this family Christmas before their tantrums and terrors start to seem a little trite, so to stop that happening, we have various moments of shock and horror that help build towards the climax. This includes the snatches of news we see, the death of a distant family member, and then the much closer death of a family of strangers. All of these help to reinforce the reality of “this is definitely going to happen” and puts a final, devastating pressure on the characters as we reach the climax. 

I particularly enjoyed watching all the different attitudes on display, both to how the world has got to where it is and what will happen next. While young Art (Roman Griffin Davis) wants to know what’s going on and has been banned from his parents from watching the news (although he does so sneakily anyway), you have a conversation between Sandra and Bella where Sandra asks: “Do you believe the government?” and Bella replies: “God, no – they killed Diana.” Through the characters’ reactions to their situation, we are invited to wonder whether the government has really chosen the right course and decide for ourselves the wisdom of taking the exit pill – and offering it to loved ones. Does it count as killing your kids or saving them from an excruciating experience?

While the characters have moments where they are grappling with the terrifying fate awaiting them.

Mostly they are just trying to get along at Christmas. The rule for the gathering seems to be honesty and love – truly good values for the end of the world. But honesty is either in short supply as people lie to themselves or each other to keep the festive spirit going, or it comes out in destructive revelations. And while various characters do show love and affection to those around them, it feels like the usual emotions we feel at Christmas: somewhat forced. Plus there’s a huge amount of inequality on display.

While Simon and Tony are sent out to break into the local Tesco to steal sticky toffee puddings so that Kitty can have the pudding she insists upon, Alex is given Fanta when she asks first for first water then sparkling water. It seems that some get everything they want while others are sidelined, sending the message that the end of the world is pretty much the same as how it works most of the time. 

However, right at the very end, love really does define how everyone acts and the final scenes are poignant and heartbreaking as the choices people have made play out.

It would defeat the whole point of the movie if I mentioned in the review whether there’s a reprieve at the end, whether everyone dies, or who does or doesn’t take the pill. But I will say that it was the ending that affected me greatly. The very final few seconds honestly sent a chill through me, and I feel like that ending posed far more questions than it answered. I definitely want to go back and watch it again, knowing what I know now and seeing if it makes any difference. I think it will just make me feel everything I felt before but with more intensity. But I’m going to have to take some time to let the dread it left inside me the first time slip away.

IMDb mentions that other dark comedies have explored the concept of the world ending while a set of characters have a house party, such as This is the End (2013) and It’s a Disaster (2012). It’s clear from the trailers that This is the End is more madcap that serious and while It’s a Disaster looks like a closer comparison, it still feels a little overacted. Silent Night is subtle, understated, and swings from snarky British comedy to poignant moments that really tug at your heartstrings.

How would you, as a parent, react to the options of killing your children yourself or letting them die in agony?

If you were a doctor, how do you reconcile your desire to save people with the need to kill the ones closest to you?  Yet the darkness isn’t absolute, and the usual family Christmas tantrums add some much-needed levity, even if they are tinged with tragedy.

Score: 8/10 – it’ll be a while before I can rewatch this as I found it generally unsettling but it is a brilliant portrayal of humanity and, most importantly family, in the face of impending doom. If we were given the same fate, would we act any differently? 

Festive Frights: A Trio of Must-See Horror Flicks