Krampus (

2015

)

Is there anything more sophomoric than satirizing American holiday traditions? Krampus begin with an especially obnoxious exemplar of this showing us all the assorted woes and pains of the Christmas seasons against the backdrop of cheerful holiday music. I could point out how all the stress over buying gifts comes not from an empty capitalistic urge, but rather people wanting to do something nice for their loved-ones, but I hardly need to. Everyone knows that all the obnoxious, annoying, and occasionally cruel parts of Christmas are coming from a place of love, and that all the pain is just a result of living in an imperfect world. I could also point out that in everyplace I've ever attempted it Black Friday shopping is more busy mall than gladiatorial arena as the film depicts it but again it's hardly worth the effort to do so. It suffices to say that this view of the holidays is one that could only be held by a child, or an overgrown child anyway. Whenever anyone does this I can't help but imagine them as a thirteen year old, stuck in a long car ride en route to visit his relatives for the holidays. A petulant expression across their face as they imagine all the ways the season is full of hypocrites and liars because they have to spend 45 minutes in the car and then three hours with older family they don't particularly like. I know, family get togethers are often boring, and some relatives just rub you the wrong way, but this is the kind of thing people start to outgrow around the time they file their first tax-return. When your a kid you see your family (well at least your parents) all the time, and it doesn't make sense to spend all this extra effort to see a bunch of other relatives. But when you're out on your own, particularly in the first couple years, you get caught flat-footed by just how lonely and isolating life can be. Family reunions, whatever the occasion, start to become joyous events and Christmas with its gift giving and general good cheer is one of the best of all.

So, right out of the gate, Krampus has managed to annoy me and make me imagine its filmmakers as a collection of spoiled children. Not the most auspicious start, and there will be a great deal more obnoxious occurrences before the film is over. But tellingly, Krampus eventually managed to win its way back into my good graces. How can you stay mad at a film whose monster design is this gorgeous? Though I suspect that for those in the audience who weren't willing to sit through The She-Creature (1956) because of the awesome and ridiculous rubber suit the monster wears, the film may be a bit more grating.

The story centers around a rich Yuppie family living in generic suburban America (where is never really stated, just pick the Northern US city you like the best). We have father Tom, mother Sarah, teenage daughter Beth, and tweenage son Max. Tom's mother Omi also lives with the family. The old woman is a first generation immigrant and prefers to speak in German, even though she has full command of the English language. This would be fine if all the other characters just spoke to her in German (which the whole family is proficient in) and we got subtitles for the non-Teutonic folks in the audience. Instead everyone in the family except Omi speaks English to her and she speaks German back to them. This is not how bi-lingual people communicate, and I suspect that the filmmakers aren't really close with anyone fluent in more than one language. Switching between languages in the course of a conversation is a lot more difficult than just sticking to one language (as my wife will tell you when she tries to keep me looped into a conversation between her and her parents). Either everyone would be speaking German to Omi or she would be speaking English to them, switching back and forth on the fly would be exhausting for anyone who didn't work as a professional interpreter.

The Engles are being visited by Sarah's red-neck relations, consisting of Howard, Linda and their interminable brood of children. That they are all obnoxious stereotypes of middle America is to be expected, this is a film from 2015 after all, the early years of people despising the holidays because they might occasionally hear a dissenting political opinion. However, the filmmakers cannot even keep their stereotypes straight. Seriously, the gun-totting, doomsday-prepping, good-old-boy is probably the least likely to make fun of the boy scouts. The fact that he encourages his daughters to take up wrestling instead of something a bit more gender normative is another odd contradictions. It points to the possibility that the filmmakers have never spoken to anyone who owns a gun, works on a farm, votes Republican or lives more than fifty miles from the nearest urban center. While the first impression of the relations is loathsome, the narrative leaves open the chance for their redemption later on, monster attacks are capable of breaking down all sorts of social barriers. This seems to have been the filmmakers intention, but its poorly realized. There's a great scene, after the shit has hit the fan, where the two dads bond and Howard recognizes Tom's worth and ability as a man. The only problem is the corresponding scene, where Howard proves he's more than just an unfunny caricature of middle America, never happens.

Speaking of shit hitting the fan, that happens when night falls and a massive blizzard engulfs the town. The whole block looses power and anyone trying to drive without a Jeep is shit out of luck. The storm is even bad enough to knock out all cell-phone service in the area, leaving all the families of the neighborhood effectively isolated from the rest of the world. Beth decides this is the best chance she's gonna get to duck out on the family reunion and visit her boyfriend four blocks away. Naturally, one the way there she becomes the first victim of Krampus and his demonic helpers. When she doesn't come back, Tom and Howard go out looking for her, packing a couple of guns that Howard had stashed in his truck. They find the neighborhood abandoned, the houses broken into and the people missing. Most curious is the strange crack near the chimney, as if something exploded inside. Obviously, the audience knows what's happening, so it comes as no surprise to us when the two dads are waylaid by a monster that hides in the snow on their way back home. They fight off the unseen creature and high-tail it back to the house to warn the others.

The only person who knows what's going on is grandma Omi, who by a quirk of fate is the sole survivor of a previous Krampus attack. She takes her damn time explaining to everyone the threat they're up against, waiting more than 24 hours after the initial attack to tell her story in a flashback that mirrors the old TV Christmas specials al la Santa's Slay (2005). The only difference is that Krampus actually has a pretty extravagant budget for a B-horror movie, so instead of looking deliberately crappy like the old stop-motion TV shows, the flashbacks are probably the most visually striking and beautiful part of the whole movie. Omi's flashback to her girlhood seems to be somewhere in central Europe during WWII, which is a pretty clever decision on the part of the filmmakers. If ever there was a time and place in living memory where an entire town could vanish without attracting too much attention it was then and there. Omi explains that whenever the Christmas spirit is completely extinguished in a population, Krampus will come in the place of Santa and wipe out the entire population, leaving only a lone survivor to warn others of the danger of disrespecting Christmas. Despite all the monsters and inexplicable events that they have seen, most of the adults are still unwilling to believe the old woman's tale. Too bad for them, Krampus and his band of helpers are only just getting started.

This is a film that is crying out to be made into a coming of age horror story along the lines of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) or It (2017) or Phenomena (1985). Max is the main character, the story centers on his character arch, hell the climactic sequence consists of him confronting Krampus alone in a desperate attempt to save his family. Despite that, for much of the film he is ignored and the action centers on the adults in his family. I know that getting a good performance out of a child actor is no small feat, just look at the child actors in Night of the Hunter (1955) for an example of this going wrong, but this is something that Hollywood has gotten considerably better at in the last half century. The script either should have been re-written to not hinge on Max's arch, or it should have permitted him to be the main character throughout. Trying to have it both ways just looks sloppy and diminishes the impact that the film could have had.

Despite the myriad flaws of Krampus, it does one thing completely right: Monster Design. Bad horror movies use to live and die on this stuff before the widespread adoption of CGI, but fortunately Krampus is an exception and nearly all its monsters are at least partially physical objects. The design of the central monster is downright elegant, resembling nothing so much as the older iterations of the Demon Prince Orcus from D&D dressed up in a yuletide outfit. There are touches of Santa Claus in his design, that only call out how grotesque the overall figure is. The real show stealers though are Krampus' helpers, a collection of mutant elves and toys from hell. Best of the bunch is a massive canvas snake wearing a doll's mask that conceals a mouth like a fucking sarlacc. Most of the monsters fit together very well in a coherent theme, all of them giving off a sort of grotesque Victorian era style, think a Christmas themed expansion pack of Bloodborne. However, a few just seem out of place like the robot that turns up for a single scene or the sentient gingerbread men that hang around way too much.