Scary Little Christmas

Thoughts on Seasonal Horror and Freaky Festivities

On the heels of Krampusnacht (“Krampus Night”, usually observed December 5th), I could not pass up the opportunity to kick off December with a Wednesday post on Yuletide horror. Although most traditional Americans wouldn’t associate Christmas with horror, but pop culture enthusiasts and movie buffs will be at least familiar with holiday-themed horror movies such as the Spielberg classic Gremlins (1984), Krampus (2015), and especially keen cinephiles will know Black Christmas (1974). However, even traditionalists need not look too deep in their Christmas film catalogue to find the countless adaptations of Charles Dickens’ immortal tale A Christmas Carol. This story features four famous ghosts that are embedded in the popular memory of the Anglosphere, and indeed ghost stories were commonly told during winter—specifically Christmas—in Victorian England. Michael J. Hallowell in the introduction to his collection of Christmas Ghost Stories, writes,

[W]hy does the telling of ghost stories at Christmas seem more natural than at any other time of the year?…

There is, of course, there spiritual dimension. Those who celebrate Christmas know that they are engaging in a festivity that stretches back for millennia. The veil between the past and present seems almost paper thin, and the spirits of Christmases Past — to borrow loosely from Dickens — reach out to us in a mystical way.

But then there’s the matter of context. Think about it; where would you rather hear a good ghost story — on a beach in Marbella, or sitting in front of a roaring log fire, with a glass of whisky and the lights dimmed, at Christmas? When it comes to the telling of ghost tales, ambience is everything.¹

As I also mentioned in my post on the gloom of November a few weeks ago, winter was the primary time for telling stories; the advent of Samhain ringing in the convergence of the “other side” with our mortal world and the general atmosphere of gloom and darkness create the perfect environment for telling tales. It should be no surprise, therefore, that there is an underlying eeriness that comes with the territory of the holiday season, no matter how much commercialism and sanitized post-World War 2 sensibilities try to heap on mounds of sugar to keep an overly cheerful demeanor about Christmas.

As I mentioned in the opening lines of this post, this comes the day after Krampusnacht, which is an Austrian holiday that shares a date with the Feast of St. Nicholas. In Alpine folklore, the Krampus is a creature that thrashes, kidnaps, or outright murders naughty children, tailing St. Nicholas as he rewards the good children. Aside from Christmas Carol, Krampus was probably my first exposure to folkloric Christmastime horror. I first heard about it from my high school science teacher (we’ll call Mr. D) whose wife was Austrian (we’ll call her Mrs. D). Around December, Mr. D told us about a tradition young Austrian men in Mrs. D’s town would engage in on Krampusnacht, which involved them dressing up in Krampus costumes and using ladders to scale into open windows at night to frighten occupants and make general mischief. Mrs. D, a teenager at the time, was awoken when one of these ladders clattered against her windowsill. She came out of bed and went over to the window to find a Krampus scaling the ladder. So, Mrs. D pushed the ladder before the thing reached her window, sending it reeling to the ground. She was left undisturbed for the rest of the night.

Photo by Alessio Zaccaria on Unsplash

While the story was comedic at the time, I dug a little deeper into the lore and discovered some of the darker aspects of the tradition of Krampus. The story Mr. D told us as well, in hindsight, relays a quite terrifying situation—with or without the context of the Krampus disguise. As with a lot of folkloric traditions and figures, there’s likely a pre-Christian element to Krampus, just as how the holiday of Christmas itself was imposed onto the older Norse festival of Jól (pronounced yohl; also Yule) and the Classical Saturnalia. As Hallowell stated in the quote above, the celebration of Christmas is merely one variant of a far older observance in this dark period of the year, one that may have origins older than the scarce few things we know about pagan midwinter celebrations. It makes one wonder about the superstitions and rites believed and practiced by our earliest ancestors around this season; what did the prehistoric inhabitants of the Alps encounter that embedded Krampus into the folk memory of modern day Austrians? What spirits did the Britons encounter wandering the moors and standing stones that continue to haunt our seasonal ghost stories? Whatever the historic roots may be, the time for ghost stories doesn’t end with Halloween.

One of my favorite writers likely knew this and, considering he favored Victorian English literature, was aware of the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Festival” takes place at Christmas, and he too acknowledges the holiday’s ancient origins:

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten.²

This story features a creature popular in some earlier editions of tabletop roleplaying games that Lovecraft gave no name himself but came to be known by several different terms: the Worm That Walks, larvae mage, or Crawling Ones. Essentially, it is a creature composed of swarms of maggots that feasted on the decomposing flesh of wizards and gained intelligence and magical capabilities by unknowingly absorbing their powers. What exactly this has to do with Christmas, I’m not sure, other than the fact that for the purposes of the story the creatures observe the ancient, titular “festival” that is likely the dim, forgotten origin of Christmas.

Speaking of Lovecraft and Christmas, some of my favorite Christmas music to listen to was produced by the Howard Phillips Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS). Their albums, “Very Scary Solstice” and “Even Scarier Solstice”³ feature Cthulhu Mythos parodies of traditional and popular Christmas carols. Even with the weird, horror-themed alterations to the lyrics, they still manage to get you in the mood for the holidays. Ironically, the first time I read “The Call of Cthulhu” was around Christmas after I had received the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Although “The Festival” isn’t part of that particular collection, there is still something that draws me back to the Cthulhu Mythos starting around Christmas time and spiking throughout the winter, as mentioned in my October post on H.P. Lovecraft.

In terms of popular Christmas horror movies, Gremlins (1984) was probably my first official introduction to the concept. I remember being surprised to see it taking place during Christmas upon first viewing it as a kid—for one, all the previews I had seen for it were on various Scooby-Doo DVDs and tapes advertising classic Halloween bundles; I also think my family first showed it to me in March or April, which added to my confusion. I’m not really sure what else to say about Gremlins other than that I never felt the holiday spirit of the film, and I definitely had little sympathy for Kate’s father trying to pose as Santa Claus in the infamous scene where she explains her dislike for Christmas. One thing I will say, however, is that I got a kick out of realizing that Goonies (1985) had referenced Gremlins when Chunk called the police and the officer mentioned “creatures that multiply when you get water on them.”

I would probably be remiss not to talk about my own experience with adaptations of A Christmas Carol and how some managed to frighten me as a kid. One of the earliest I can remember was the 1984 adaptation starring George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge. Specifically, Frank Finlay’s portrayal of Robert Marley spooked me senseless; when writing this post, I originally thought I was just shocked by his tormented screaming, but seeing the image below made me remember that the makeup also probably had something to do with my reaction. I know for certain I slept with the lights on one night after I watched it.

The other adaptation (which is my second favorite behind The Muppets’ Christmas Carol) that managed to spook me a bit was Scrooged (1988). The terrifying, body horror take on Ghost of Christmas Future had a younger me averting my eyes from the tortured souls trapped in the specter’s ribcage. The whole movie in general has a definite New York City gothic aesthetic and soundscape that captures the cynicism many may feel during the holidays in the modern day; it feels uncomfortable and worn out in some scenes, a far cry from the coziness a lot of Christmas Carol adaptations capitalize on, feeling much more consistently like the shadows of the future Scrooge experiences in the original story.

In terms of recent or popular Christmas media that is definitively in the horror genre, aside from the ones I’ve mentioned, I haven’t engaged all that much in them. I haven’t seen Krampus (2015), any of the Silent Night movies, Rare Exports (2010), or any of the other cheesy holiday horror films. Admittedly, I usually find them on the underwhelming side of cheesy even though I do want a mild horror fix during the holiday season in some form or other. When I was becoming more keen on watching horror movies, I watched the anthology film A Christmas Horror Story after seeing a friend post about it on Facebook. Surprisingly, it had decent atmosphere, especially in the haunted convent storyline that worked in its favor as a winter horror movie, using a black and light blue palate for the interior shots of the bleak, empty halls. One story in the movie even has its own take on Krampus, which, even when I was younger, I found a bit underwhelming and inaccurate as it tried to move Krampusnacht to Christmas Eve rather than leave it on December 5th. The zombie elf storyline was probably the cheesiest out of the bunch and was most likely capitalizing off the wave of zombie media that inundated the early 2010s. However, its ending—which I won’t spoil—was grimmer and more unapologetic than I was expecting.

Just last year, I watched another Christmas horror anthology film that was also found footage to boot—The Christmas Tapes (2022). Unfortunately it did not really have the same atmospheric upsides as A Christmas Horror Story given that most of the stories are filmed in bright, sunny locations where there is absolutely no snow or even many holiday decorations. The stories themselves also felt “weird” for the most part, not really in the good sense like how I’d refer to Lovecraft stories. The first, “Travel Buggies”, was probably my favorite out of the bunch as it actually had snow and utilized a lesser-known folkloric creature from Germany, Hans Trapp, a killer scarecrow that murders naughty children. The last story, “The Christmas Spirit”, also had a few decent moments and hinted at its location’s dark past, utilizing nostalgic objects and imagery to build at least a little bit of horror before it devolves into generic Paranormal Activity-like chaos.

I think what really made A Christmas Horror Story and the first and a little bit of the last films of The Christmas Tapes feel like actual “Christmas horror” was that they really leaned into the fact that they were supposed to be Christmas movies that happened to be in the horror genre. The other stories in The Christmas Tapes had a general theme of Christmas but were more uncomfortable and weird rather than horrific or even capitalized off the fact they were Christmas movies in the first place. It sort of felt like how when a pop singer releases a Christmas song, they have all the hallmarks of the season in their lyrics but it’s not enough to break it out of the mould of being a generic pop song.

Before I cap off this post, one other aspect of Christmastime horror (although I use “horror” rather lightly in this case) I’ve been engaging with has been spurred on by the rising interest in liminal spaces.⁴ Those of us who grew up in an era before the deluge of digital media and long before the Pandemic are slowly noticing the stark differences between our own childhoods and that of kids growing up in this new world. Things that happened not even two decades ago already feel like distant dreams, and image compilations (like the one I linked above) perfectly encapsulate how it feels to look back on memories that were made in years before our lives gradually shifted to the World Wide Web. Although videos or images like these are not meant to be explicitly horror, the atmospheres they present could be right at home in a horror movie or story.

Viewing these recently myself brought me back to what it felt like to look at Christmas during college. I realized not everything felt as magical as it did when I was a child—or even when I was in high school—when looking upon the lawn ornaments twinkling under the black-blue December sky, drifting between green-and-gold-bedecked rooms, and feeling dread rather than excitement while watching thick snowflakes drift in yellow streetlights. Going through my hometown during Christmas feels like going through a haunted house; there are strong memories and emotions occupying it, but those days have long since passed and only echoes remain for the time being.

Ultimately, one of the reasons why I was disappointed by The Christmas Tapes was the fact that it being a Christmas found footage movie could have capitalized even more off the fact it was found footage when those of us who grew up with analog media probably had a lot of our Christmas memories recorded on VHS and in red-eye photographs. When I look back on my own, sometimes my eyes are drawn to the dark shadows beyond the lights of the Christmas tree and I wonder what things could have been watching from those cold, black corners. The nostalgic yet unnerving scenery of Christmases past, even in the early days of the current millennium is perhaps the perfect setup for darker holiday stories to be told. At least in America, we have a massive culture surrounding the holiday season, even outside of consumerism—although consumerism definitely fuels the fires of our seasonal spirit—where we build these elaborate altars to bring light to the darkest time of the year. As Lovecraft addresses in “The Festival”, humans have likely held rituals under the Winter Solstice for eons, their purposes and narratives changing with each generation. It makes one wonder what ghosts haunted the dark spaces of winter all the way back then and if they still reside unseen and forgotten in the cold, empty areas beyond the lights of our hearths, trees, and bright decorations.

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1. Hallowell, Christmas Ghost Stories (Amberly Publishing Limited, 2009).

2. Lovecraft, “The Festival” (1925).

3. The songs are also available to listen to on YouTube.

4. I defined this term a little bit in my October post on Analog Horror. In short, the trend of liminal spaces online includes various forms of photography and videography depicting spaces that evoke feelings of discomfort, nostalgia, and Deja vu.