Y'all know at this point I love a good theme month. I'm playing with snow and ice for December. Just try to stop me. The idea for this came from a video Criterion released last week. John Waters was brought in and asked about his favorite holiday movies. There was no hesitation. He named my favorite holiday movie Christmas Evil as the best.
And if John Waters recommends it, it can't be all that bad.
Christmas Evil, as Waters explains, concerns a man obsessed with Santa Claus. Writer/director Lewis Jackson crafts a sad and moving psychological portrait of a man who never really grew up.
Of course there's a traumatic encounter with Santa to start the story. He walks in on his mother kissing (and more) Santa Claus (really his father). This traps him in that moment, derived slightly from an approximation of an Oedipus complex. His mother is his alone, and if he wants her to love him, he must become Santa himself.
He grows up to be a lonely man. He lives in a rundown apartment by himself. He has no friends and no real contact with the outside world. He looks in the mirror one day and realizes that he could actually become Santa Claus. He gets a job at a toy factory. He starts creating a list of naughty and nice children (by staring into other peoples' windows).
On Christmas Eve, he sets his plan in motion. He takes toys from the factory and starts breaking into houses to deliver treats for all the good little boys and girls. The adults freak out because Santa isn't real, but the children are delighted. A fight at a Christmas party puts him the cross-hairs of the police. Fortunately for our wannabe Santa Claus, miracles can happen when children believe hard enough and our depressed everyman with an unexplored Oedipus complex transforms into Santa and flies off into the snowy night.
Christmas Evil is marketed as a trashy horror film. In some ways, it is. Jackson subverts everything pure and innocent about Christmas into a disturbing reflection of obsession and regret. The film is marketed still as a slasher when not one person dies. It's marketed as a psychopath story but comes nowhere near the depravity and mental breakdown of relatively tame films like May. Much of the reputation comes from "won't someone please think of the children" pearl clutching about corrupting a holiday icon.
But is it really corruption? Christmas Evil, to me, is one of the most honest and genuinely heartwarming films about the holidays. It's not saccharine. There is no grand social message about angels and giving and Christmas celebrations at the in-laws. It's the story of one man willing to do anything to make his holiday dream come true and the innocence of childhood beliefs.
If our young hero never saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, the next generation of children would never have had the opportunity to bring Santa to life on Christmas Eve. Childhood belief begets childhood belief, and dreams can come true if you believe hard enough.
There's a darker reading of the film, as well, that plays more into the tropes of the problematic mental illness horror genre. It's possible, and quite likely, that our wannabe Santa Claus was killed outside the town's holiday party on Christmas Eve. We're not seeing a clear vision of reality at all in the entire film. Why would Jackson suddenly declare that everything wrong with our hero's perception of reality is reality itself? We might witness the final fleeting thoughts of a man brought down before he could do actual harm to people on Christmas Eve. A man obsessed with Santa terrorizes a town and is sacrificed for the greater good of the holiday season.
Yes, with a title like Christmas Evil, this holiday horror is dead set on presenting itself as a dark and disturbing holiday film. It's an antidote to It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. In establishing an unlikely happily ever after for our hero, Jackson forces us to cheer for any holiday protagonist, no matter how off-putting or unwell. It's a surprising amount of depth for a low budget horror with taglines like "He'll sleigh you" and "Better watch out...Better not cry...Or you may DIE!"
