A Dark and Merry Christmas to You All
A horror history of Bad Santas, and giving over to darkness on the longest night of the year.
Is it just me, or has this year passed at a breakneck blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed? A part of me is still caught in 2020, processing everything from that year. All the same, time ticks forward, and here we are with just a few weeks left before 2023 dawns on us all.
I have a Christmas treat for you as we descend on these long, dark winter nights. But before we get into it, I want to take a moment to thank you all for sticking with me and reading so far, and express a warm welcome to all you new readers. If you can think of anyone in your life who might appreciate what I do here, please share this newsletter with them. Word of mouth is everything in this business, and it would mean so, so much to me if I could reach more readers with your help.
The tenor of online discussion in the writing community lately has been a bit apocalyptic of late, and I can certainly understand why. Between the Twitter slow-fall, the emergence (and in some cases, immediate implosion) of alternative social media, and the frighteningly lightning-speed growth of AI text and image generation, there’s a lot of high-tech doom-and-gloom going around.
But in the spirit of the season, let’s spread a bit of cheer instead.
This month’s writing guide is a quick-start guide for setting up and executing a book launch, aimed at indie writers and those just starting out. Learn about making a media kit, how to get reviewers, and more: https://tlbodine.gumroad.com/l/dyzeb
Harper Collins workers continue to strike. This entire situation is big news to keep an eye on for the future of the publishing business. Here’s how you can support them: https://bookriot.com/support-the-harpercollins-union/
For the first time in a decade, Raw Dog Screaming Press is opening up submissions for novellas. Scope out the details on their site, and get your story ready because the window will only be open for a little while: https://rawdogscreaming.com/rdsp-to-open-for-novella-submissions-in-january/
Incidentally, there are so many great authors showing up on Substack lately. If you’re not following them yet, might I suggest:
Do you have author news? I’d love to shout it out for you. Drop me a comment and tell me about what you’ve got coming up!
This is a big year for Christmas horror. There’s Violent Night, starring David Harbour as a grizzled Santa intervening to disassemble a crew of mercenaries. Then there’s The Mean One, a dark slasher-tinged remake of the classic Grinch story. And to round it out, Christmas Bloody Christmas, which features a robotic killer Santa, hot on the heels of a string of FNAF-inspired animatronic horrors.
Christmas horror is nothing new, of course, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a time in history when there were three holiday horrors in theaters at one time. We are truly spoiled for options in this new golden age of horror cinema.
But what’s the deal with Christmas slashers? Where did they come from, why are they so prevalent…and what does it say about us that we keep eating them up?
The Appeal of Holiday Horror
Ghost stories are a Yule-time tradition that likely pre-dates Christmas itself, but certainly became a well-worn part of English Christmastime. On long winter nights huddled around the fire, trading spooky tales of the supernatural was as good a way to pass the time as any.
We see this referenced in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and, of course, Charles Dickens’ quintessential Christmas ghost story A Christmas Carol. And let’s not forget the Appalachian tradition of Old Christmas, the even of Epiphany when animals would kneel to pray in their mangers and the dead would sometimes roam the earth.
But the Christmas horror movie is something different. It’s less to do with an earnest belief in the supernatural power of the long winter and more to do with a counter-protest to the Christmas Movie as a genre — its family-friendly sentimentality, the feel-good sheen overlaying commercial interests. For many people, Christmas is not the most wonderful time of the year, and even people who enjoy the holiday can find holiday films an eyeroll-inducing experience.
Dark-horse contenders for Christmas movies have become a staple of the season ever since people laid claim to Die Hard’s position in the canon. So against the backdrop of Hallmark-flavored glurge, it’s not surprising that horror would be popular this time of year.
But of all the stories to tell on a long winter night…why Santa Claus, specifically?
The Origins of Bad Santa
Central and Eastern Europe as a region is home to a whole cast of colorful Christmas characters, many of them horrifying in concept, from the witch who disembowels naughty children to the giant cat who eats kids who are caught wearing last year’s clothes.
Then there’s Krampus, of course, the goat-legged figure who stalks around with chains and switches to punish naughty children. He’s recently captured the attention of America, spawning a bit of a film culture moment in his own right — to my count, we’ve produced nine Krampus films in nine years — but he’s not the subject of today’s discussion.
No, when I talk about Bad Santas, I mean the iconic jolly old man, with his red-and-white fuzzy costume and curly white beard, that figure who winks reassuringly from Coca-Cola ads. I could spend paragraphs detailing his convoluted origin story and speculating on the significance of his natural as dual figurehead of Christian and capitalist interests — but I think you already know the broad strokes. I’m more interested in what happens when you hand that fellow an axe.
The first horror vision of Santa Claus I can identify is the 1959 Mexican film Santa Claus, an obscure title known mostly for its MST3K fame. The story is a technicolor fever dream involving Santa Claus on a space station (to better surveil the children of the earth, of course) locked in battle with a demon sent by Lucifer to make all the kids on earth commit evil. Oh, yeah, and Santa’s assistant is Merlin the wizard, for reasons.
But although this film is horrifying in many ways, I’m not sure it was intended to be — and Santa here is an angel on the side of good. To catch a glimpse of a proper Psycho Santa, we’ll need to fast forward to 1972’s Tales From the Crypt episode, And All Through the House.
Here we’re introduced to a twisted little tale, in Cryptkeeper fashion: A woman murders her husband for the insurance money, only to be terrorized in her home by a Santa-Suit-Wearing escaped mental patient. She can’t very well call the police for help with the still-warm corpse of hubby, though, can she?
The Santa figure here is disheveled, old and grubby, and the short film — first 10 minutes for the anthology and later expanded to a 30-minute episode in a 1980s reboot — mostly relies on the novelty of its premise rather than digging too deep into the characters.
It would take until the 80s for the killer Santa motif to really take off. Oh, sure, there had been a few Christmas killers in the intervening years — Black Christmas being the best of the lot — but the holiday was more window dressing than anything. But perverted Christmas cheer is front-and-center in the 80s: There’s the 1980 To All a Goodnight, where a Santa-suited killer stalks and kills sorority boyfriends, and Christmas Evil that same year.
Nothing tops the 1984 Silent Night, Deadly Night though, in terms of reach. There’s a film that both shocked and appalled critics (and civilians) at the time while garnering a robust cult following (and multiple direct-to-video sequels).
We’ll talk all about the Silent Night series in a moment, but let’s keep going. That same year amusingly turned the trope on its head with Don’t Open Till Christmas, where the victims are Santa Clauses. In 1989, there’s Deadly Games (a personal favorite of mine) where a resourceful kid must defend himself and an ailing grandpa against a Santa-clad home intruder. The 1996 Santa Claws features a deranged fan stalking an actress while wearing a Santa suit.
Santa’s Slay (2005) does something different by making Santa a demonic entity who got stuck with the job after losing a bet with an angel. Rare Exports (2010) is an innovative Finnish movie where Santa Clauses are sub-human feral animals that are captured and, well, you can guess the rest from the title. Also in 2010, Sint takes a totally different tactic with a dark alternate history of the historical St. Nicholas tale.
But by 2012, the market had returned to form with a Silent Night reboot, proving just how enduring that particular formula really is.
So what is that formula? And, if you scratch away at its grubby surface, what exactly lies beneath?
A Psycho-Sexual Read on Santa Claus
Okay. I promised I’d get back to the Silent Night franchise, so let’s dig in.
The first film is about Billy, a boy who witnesses his father’s murder and mother’s sexual assault-and-murder at the hands of a man dressed like Santa. He grows up in an orphanage and is subjected to a great deal of torment and sexual repression at the hands of a cruel Mother Superior. When his first grown-up job requires him to dress in a Santa suit, it unlocks all of the repressed trauma and sends him on a murderous rampage.
Curiously enough, the backstory for the Santa slayers in Christmas Evil and Santa Claws are fundamentally similar. In the first, the would-be killer witnesses a sexual encounter between his mother and “Santa”, leading to an unhealthy and ultimately murderous obsession with the Christmas king. In the latter, the killer…witnesses his mother…having sex with Santa…and develops an obsession…are we seeing a pattern here?
Follow me around the bend here, because this sounds bonkers, but I’d like to propose a theory.
Here we have a character archetype who is:
Childish and/or emasculated in some way
Wearing a costume with an implicit double identity
Assuming the guise of a nurturing, child-friendly entity while being a predator
Forged by sexual trauma tied up to mommy issues and a deviant, fetishistic kink
Where else do we see those same tropes play out, in the same period of film history? In movies like Dressed to Kill and Silence of the Lambs.
That’s right. I think the killer Santa trope is — whether consciously or not — an extension of the “gay panic” trope in Hollywood. That deep-seated homophobic terror that if you are exposed to something, it might awaken in you a terrible part of your identity, something sleazy and deviant that cannot be controlled.
It feels gross to think about it in these terms in 2022, but the more I look at these movies and their antiquated assumptions — about mental illness, about sex — the more the puzzle piece seems to fit.
Where Silent Night and its ilk get interesting for me is the way the metaphors layer onto a single symbol. Because donning the red suit is not just a way for Billy, or Christmas Evil’s Harry, to re-enact their psychosexual trauma. It’s also a way for them to dole out punishment and make judgments as to who is “naughty” and “nice.” And it’s that specific recipe — the under-wraps sexual deviancy hand-in-hand with Puritanical moralizing, all neatly gift-wrapped with the trappings of capitalism — that makes these films so intriguing…and so quintessentially 80s.
The Puritanical Fascination with Naughty and Nice
As a cultural symbol, Santa Claus functions as a sort of simplified intro-to-Christian-theology. He watches you all the time, judges you for your actions, and doles out rewards or punishments accordingly.
He is also, to a very real extent, a symbol of the religion of capitalism. An icon invented as corporate branding, synonymous with material gifting, key winter attraction at shopping malls everywhere.
Whether intentional or not, I don’t think it’s coincidental that our Santa slayers keep being the products of traumatic sexual repression, that their descent into madness is triggered by forces applied at their jobs, or that they would assume the God-like role of meting out punishment and death.
That Silent Night’s Billy is shot dead in the first film, only for his death to become the traumatic event that causes his brother to assume the mantle in the sequel like some kind of avenging antihero, seems significant as well. Billy’s story is all about cycles of trauma — from witnessing his parent’s murder to his abuse at the hands of Mother Superior — and his death does nothing to resolve that trauma, only to pay it forward.
So in sum…I think we keep returning to this character type, and this storyline, because it resonates on multiple levels with our identity. I think the killer Santa is an embodiment of the messy forces that defined 1980s America and continue to poison the well of our human existence: a grotesque fear of human sexuality and the certainty that allowing a taste of deviancy would result in boundless hedonism; a beholden slavery to the forces of capitalism; a religious preoccupation with sin and punishment.
Bad Santa cannot help to captivate us, because he is us. And there is nothing more engaging than meeting our gaze in the reflection of the funhouse mirror.
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this month’s dive, and I wish you a happy holiday season if you celebrate, and wonderfully cozy winter (or relaxing summer, you lucky devil southern hemisphere dwellers).
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