Viking Night: Krampus
By Bruce Hall
December 21, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
It's Black Friday at a big box store, and the moment the doors open, grown men and women literally trample one another for the privilege of spending themselves out of house and home. And why? Just to buy kitschy bric-a-brac for people they see once a year, who will derive exactly 20 minutes of fickle joy out of it before moving on forever.
Ah, Christmas. The happiness lasts a day but the credit card bills will be with you forever. What was once a celebration of life and renewal is mostly now just a yearly obligation to flush a month's pay down the toilet so our greed based economy can stay afloat for another year. And it actually gets worse all the time. I don't think they even wait until Thanksgiving anymore to start pumping you up for the Big One; they want you standing in line with your wallet open before the turkey and stuffing has even hit your small intestine.
Spend spend spend, but never save. There's a welfare state to take care of you later so why bother? Unless there's not. One day it'll all just implode, and every day can be Black Friday.
I used to love Christmas. Now it's like an expensive rash that just never quite goes away.
This is about where Tom Engel (Parks and Rec's Adam Scott) and his family are when they return home from the Melee at the Mall. Tom's youngest son Max (Emjay Anthony) has just discovered Santa isn't real, but he still cherishes Christmas the way only a preteen can. Max's older sister Beth (Stefania LaVie Owens) is on on the cusp of adolescence, and therefore already rocking a perma chip on both shoulders.
Tom works hard and is gone much of the year, which puts a lot of stress on his wife Sarah (Toni Collette). But, they slog through it and hold it together for the kids. In addition, Tom's German speaking mother lives with them. Everyone speaks English to her, and she speaks German back, and somehow somebody in the room always understands her. It's a contrivance similar to the one Han Solo and Chewbacca communicate with, and it's just as weird. But Krampus is a German legend, and you know that at some point in the movie, the old German lady will be the one to explain it all.
Whatever Tom does for a living, it's enough to let them live in one of those absurdly huge houses that in real life cost more than God's cufflinks. But in movies, homes sell for like ten bucks a square foot. Good thing, because Sarah's less fortunate sister Linda (Allison Tolman) is making her annual visit with her husband Howard (David Koechner), and they need something to be resentful of as soon as they walk in the door.
It could be the company they keep. With them are Linda's boorish aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell) and what seems like a hundred bratty, undisciplined kids, one slobbering bull terrier, and a partridge in a pear tree. Dinner turns into a cage match when Max's horrible little cousins find his letter to Santa and taunt him with it at the table. Later, Tom tries to explain why they have to entertain these mutants every year. Family, he says, are people you try to be friends with even though you have little in common. It's an apt, if somewhat grim description of what it means to have an extended family.
Max, being a precocious, curly headed boy named Max, questions his father about the wisdom of all this. Tom admits that it's hard to believe in the spirit of Christmas sometimes, but he does so because he WANTS it to be real. It's a genuinely warm scene, of the kind you rarely see in a horror movie. But it also feels like an unintentionally morbid thing to say to a kid.
Case in point - once, when I was a precocious, curly headed boy myself, I sat in church and realized the pastor had no proof of anything he was saying. I realized that the very definition of “faith” (whether we're talking religion, or crossing your fingers as the ball sails toward the uprights) is a willingness to believe in something not because you KNOW it, but because you WANT it. It's the kind of existential crisis most children are unequipped to handle, and Max is no exception.
So he tears up his note to Santa and flings it straight out the window, because in movies nobody EVER has screens. The next day, a freak snowstorm blankets the area and the power goes out. Max notices that there's a snowman in their yard, which only seems weird because, you know, nobody remembers BUILDING it. Then, when Beth leaves the house to visit her boyfriend and vanishes, things start to get truly weird. Tom and Howard decide to team up and search the area in Howard's Humvee, which is conspicuously well stocked with special guns that never need to be reloaded.
Little do they know, their recent family discord has awakened Krampus, a vengeful (and bulletproof) German spirit whose job is to open a can of whoopass on non-believers. And brother, you'd better believe the Krampus is one sour Kraut.
Ahahahaha. Okay, I'm sorry.
Bad but still pretty solid puns aside, it's worth noting that this film takes place almost entirely in Tom's living room, with the occasional sojourn onto a soundstage or into someone else's living room. It doesn't cover a lot of ground in the geographic sense, so it's critical for the actors and the material they're working with to be pretty solid. So while this is indeed a horror movie, for approximately half its run time Krampus is first and foremost…I don't know. I hate blended words (I'm looking at you, “carjacking”) but “deep dark dramedy” comes to mind.
And that's really the key to what makes Krampus work. Howard and his brood seem like little more than spiritual successors to a certain Randy Quaid creation when we meet them. But, do you remember that early heart to heart between Tom and Max? There's more of that. Howard and his family may be trailer trash, but they're also people and to Tom, they're still family. It's clear that while life took them all in different directions, they all still share the same values, and this comes in handy when everything gets down to brass tacks - and boy, does it. After 45 minutes of NOT being a horror film, Krampus goes completely bonkers in a way that I can only describe as “Neil Gaiman took acid, locked himself in the boot of his car with a flashlight and drew what he saw”.
But when two men have huddled between a Humvee and a combat shotgun, while being stalked by an evil more ancient than time itself…those horrible moments become precious ones. This really is, at its core, a heartwarming family movie (seriously!). There's even a sequence that will make you think you accidentally started watching Coraline, at least until the demons show up. While under the Krampus spell the town becomes a twisted parody of itself, as if Tim Burton and John Carpenter opened an amusement park ten percent finished, during a blizzard.
And, set wild dogs and braying demons loose in it.
Michael Dougherty has primarily made hay as a writer - on two of the better entries in the the X-men franchise, as well as his own directorial debut, Trick 'r Treat (another imaginative holiday deconstruction). He's a pretty solid scribe, and seems to know his way around behind the camera well enough that someone decided to give him the keys to the next Godzilla movie. So if you're interested in that, you want a taste of his work, AND you're feeling like Christmas can suck it this year, take Krampus for a spin.
You just might change your mind.