Dec 23 2008
John Waters Loves Christmas Evil
Christmas Evil is a little known cult classic I discovered recently while searching for Christmas horror movies. Besides Black Christmas it is the best holiday horror film I’ve seen. John Waters agrees with me–or rather I agree with John Waters, let not my ego supersede his. According to Wiki, John Waters believes Christmas Evil is the “greatest Christmas movie ever made.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but Christmas Evil is surprisingly well done for a low budget holiday exploitation flick. It was released in 1980 and I find that seventies to early eighties horror films are all creepy just by the nature of them being filmed in that time period. That of course is when I was a kid growing up and my whole neighborhood seemed creepy in rainy Oregon.
If you’ve seen the other Santa cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night about a Santa with uncontrollable gas–I kid, it’s about a slasher Santa–you might think Christmas Evil is more of the same. Not true. Christmas Evil, despite some descriptions is not a slasher flick.
It’s about an emotionally disturbed child named Harry who grows up to embrace the idealism of Santa while in reality everything around him protests against the warmth of the Christmas spirit: his job is crap, co-workers are jerks, he’s single, no friends, and his future looks dim.
It is this dark reality that begins to cause Harry to lose himself in the Santa mystique until he “becomes Santa.” That’s when everything goes wrong and people start to die.
There’s nothing typical about the storyline except for the beginning scene with the traumatized child. We’ve seen that before in several horror movies. And Christmas Evil is filled with some rather funny to hilarious moments if you have a dark sense of humor. In some ways I’d almost call it an “office” horror/humor film because of his job situation and the scenes of the employee Christmas party which seem so drearily familiar.
I’m not sure I’d share Christmas Evil with your family on Christmas Eve, but if you’re having your geek friends over on Christmas Day then pop it in so everyone can cheer on Santa Harry in his quest to find out who’s naughty or nice.
BTW: On the special edition DVD of Christmas Evil, John Waters is on the audio commentary. How cool is that?!
Wow. I’ve never heard of this before, but now I’ve got to see it. Speaking of John Waters and Christmas movies, one of my favorite scenes ever is in Female Trouble when Divine doesn’t get the go-go boots she wanted for Christmas and she tears down the tree and tells her parents that she hates them.
Yeah, the older John Waters films had some horrific but humorous moments. When I was a kid I got ahold of some of them and I didn’t understand what the hell was going on but I couldn’t stop watching them.
I remember when Divine gave birth and detached the umbilical cord herself using her teeth. Man that would make for a great retelling of the christmas story if she had played Mother Mary.