I’m doing Christmas early this year, so there might be more to discover, but for now I’ve found six for the season to add to the complete holiday horror page. Unfortunately, most of them were Prime rentals…and not many of them were worth the cost. Let’s take a look.
DOWN THE CHIMNEY WITH A SHOTGUN (2022)
In this 72-minute Christmas horror anthology, an escaped mental patient in a Santa suit abducts a woman and starts to tell her terror tales…sort of. Each story is introduced by a very enticing, narrated folklore presented with animated art stills.
Those intros are more compelling than the short films they accompany. Each one is set in the modern day and feels disjointed and confusing with no clear story arc. Most of the time I had no idea what was actually going on. I tried to identify plots, but it wasn’t easy. Not to mention, most of the stories didn’t feel very Christmasy, and a few even had Halloween visuals in them.
One segment is about a killer scarecrow. I believe a woman kills her abusive man while dressed as Santa, then drags him to a cornfield, where the scarecrow gets her. She also sees a burning jack-‘o-lantern, which leads into the next segment, with a dude roaming around property decorated for Halloween.
There are two segments featuring creepy little Santa or elf dolls, there’s a story of a cannibal butcher that eats naughty boys and girls, and finally, I think the wraparound mental patient faces off against Krampus in the end. It shouldn’t be this challenging to watch an indie Christmas horror anthology. At least there were some good horror visual and nasty effects.
CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS (2024)
Director Alice Maio Mackay has been bringing us plenty of trans horror flicks in the past few years, and Carnage for Christmas continues that trend. However, this 69-minute movie almost feels more like a pilot for a trans investigator TV show, with someone even referring to the main character as Nancy Drew and someone asking her to solve another case in the film’s final moment.
This flick uses great, practical effects that feel like something from a sleazy, gory, early 80s slasher, but overall, it unfolds much more like a murder mystery. I’m sure budget constraints may have resulted in the short runtime, but I would have loved it if the film had been a 90-minute feature with more of the great death and chase scenes.
Our main character is a trans woman with a true crime podcast. She tells an awesome urban legend of “The Toymaker”, his murderous actions, and how it’s possible to conjure him, but sadly, that lore doesn’t quite become the main focus of the slasher part.
Instead, she returns to her hometown and starts to investigate when a series of murders leads to her being one of the suspects. There are a lot of sleuthing scenes, with the kills sprinkled in here and there. The Santa is freaky looking as well, and the death scenes are grisly, but I did feel the vibe otherwise was more cozy mystery rather than tension-building horror. Like I said, I could definitely see this becoming a mystery series.
SILENT BITE (2024)
I was excited to see another Christmas flick starring horror daddy Simon Phillips of Once Upon a Time at Christmas and its sequel The Nights Before Christmas. Whereas he played a psycho in a Santa suit in those films, here he’s the leader of a group of thieves dressed in Santa suits and on the run after a botched robbery.
They take refuge in a hotel, which happens to be home to a horde of female vampires.
It’s a fun if not familiar premise (criminals discover something sinister lurks in their hideout), but this is a surprisingly low energy horror effort. There was so much opportunity here to have the female vamps go crazy on these guys to spawn more vamps, but nothing of the sort happens. And considering there are a bunch of sexy female vamps, I don’t understand why they passed on the opportunity for seduction and sex scenes!
When you’re going to make a film with a premise similar to that of Abigail, you really need to bring it, and this one doesn’t at all. There are no scares, no suspense, and little blood, making for a really bland Christmas horror experience. Hell, the first vamp attack doesn’t even occur until 52 minutes in.
A VERY FLATTENED CHRISTMAS (2024)
I don’t quite understand the origin of this movie. It’s a horror comedy that, based on the director’s filmography on IMDb, is actually a follow-up to a comedy series called Flattened (I assume a web series?), but I’m not sure if that was ever even released. Either way, this is a standalone movie, so it doesn’t matter. However, you do kind of get the sense that the characters may have been better introduced before, because there’s not much here allowing us to get to know them.
Also distracting is the audio track. It almost feels as if the dialogue was dubbed in later. The voices are so far up in the mix that it doesn’t actually seem like they’re coming from the actors on screen. Weird.
The unfolding of events is kind of chaotic, with scenes often feeling like they don’t have any relevance to anything else. Also, the comedic moments go from being just annoying to being quite clever, so the tone is very inconsistent.
The story is basically about a roadkill cleanup business (Hence the “flattened” in the title—tee hee) trying to celebrate the holidays while members of their team keep getting killed off by someone in a reindeer costume. One of the guys who used to work there becomes a suspect, and he’s presumably the main guy and must prove his innocence. However, that plot point doesn’t quite come together.
It’s a sloppy narrative, and what’s unfortunate is that there’s a hell of a good grindhouse Christmas slasher just waiting to break free from the nonsense. The kill scenes are atmospheric, creepy, bloody, and perfectly lit for a Christmas horror flick, and the rustic deer mask is very backwoods eerie. The horror elements just so deserved to be in a movie with a better script.
There are even seeds of a whole subplot about an underground lair of cannibal sex slaves, but that aspect is not fully explored or explained and also feels like it belonged in a different movie. Just a strange production all around.
HE SEES YOU WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPING (2024)
Charlie Steeds, one of my fave indie horror directors these days, brings us a satisfying throwback to 80s killer Santa movies.
It begins in familiar fashion. It’s 1963, and an escaped mental patient shows up at a house dressed and Santa and kills a kid’s parents, but the kid gets away.
Flash forward to 1980. The kid is now an adult, has let his extended family move into the house, and is going there for the holidays. What could go wrong?
Oddly, despite it being 1980, he seems to be driving there in The Pink Ladies’ car. It also looks like it is autumn, not late December.
Anyway, the house has that wood-walled, Black Christmas vibe (awesome), and the family is a bunch of backstabbers, headed by matriarch (and 80s scream queen) Caroline Williams. It would immediately seem that someone is plotting to make our main guy insane for an inheritance.
The killing starts, with people getting hacked up by a psycho Santa, our main guy thinks he’s losing it as he has flashbacks of seeing his parents killed, and the family is at each other’s throats (before they’re slit by the psycho Santa).
The pacing is perfect, the kills are just the right intensity for an 80s-style slasher, there’s a playful level of camp that gives off Clue vibes, plus a frantic final act, even if the killer reveal isn’t the most shocking you’ll ever see. This is definitely one of the winners for me this season.
‘TWAS THE NIGHT (2023)
I really like the polished look and feel of this anthology film, as well as the Christmas vibe, but the “stories” are lifeless with little meat to them, and also tell the same essential story over and over.
In the wraparound, a young woman takes three people hostage for reasons that aren’t made clear, then begins to tell them tales. In between each tale, she kills another captive.
1st tale – Santa’s little helper (basically Elf On The Shelf) breaks into a house and tells the kids they’ve been bad and must be punished. That’s it. That’s the story. No payoff whatsoever.
2nd tale – a young woman bows out of celebrating Christmas with her family, so a demonic Jack Frost dude appears and punishes her with an icicle.
3rd tale – a dude being held in the lair of a creep that looks like a demented Oogie Boogie from A Nightmare Before Christmas is told he must be punished for not celebrating Christmas.
In the end, all those who died in the stories and the wraparound are brought down to purgatory to meet Krampus.
I guess the positive aspect of this movie is that Krampus looks cool. The downside is that it’s not a scary film and feels like a Christian propaganda flick about people being punished and sent to hell simply for not wanting to participate in Christmas festivities.
