Krampus, directed by Michael Dougherty. Written by Tod Casey and Michael Dougherty. Starring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, and David Koechner. Universal Pictures, . Rated PG-13.
The folklore character Krampus, who comes to us from Austria and Bavaria, has enjoyed increased international popularity in the last decade, both because of resurgent interest in his land of origin and because any number of artists have found him useful for creating Christmas horror, usually of an ironic variety that thumbs its nose at what has become a materialistic and commercialized holiday divorced from its religious roots.
Several B movies about Krampus exist, most having received largely negative responses from viewers. Two more positively received middling-high budget films about this monster do exist, however. One is the William Shatner vehicle Christmas Horror Story, and the other is the film before us now, a cult classic out of Hollywood.
Krampus is a movie hard to categorize. Some call it horror and some call it comedy. It’s a bit of both, a movie with a fair amount of goofy humor as well as some genuinely scary parts. I would argue that it fills the same genre niche as that great classic, Poltergeist: a family-centered horror film peppered with equal amounts of laughter and fear, in which children are frequently menaced but, ultimately, no one gets hurt.
The movie’s relationship to actual Krampus lore is only tangential, as it prefers to stick to conventions of the horror genre rather than give a serious exploration of the character. The film opens with a jolly Christmas carol playing ironically under scenes of shoppers brutally attacking each other during a Black Friday sale. That sets the tone: Krampus quietly whispers, “Bah humbug,” even as it gleefully depicts the brutal deaths of anyone who voices the same sentiment out loud.
Synopsis
The story focuses on a dysfunctional family of sniping adults and bratty children, played with believable dislikability. Young Max, probably the only lovable character (played with convincing sincerity by Emjay Anthony) has written a letter to Santa Claus, mostly describing this familial strife and asking for help. After his two tomboyish cousins (Queenie Samuel and Lolo Owen) embarrass him by stealing the letter and reading it aloud at the dinner table, he tears it up and throws the pieces out the window.
The death of his Christmas spirit calls forth the vengeful Krampus, the “dark shadow of St. Nicholas,” who punishes anyone who loses hope in Christmas. Max’s German grandmother (Krista Stadler) had a previous, terrifying encounter with Krampus in her childhood, when the moster dragged her parents and other relatives off to hell. As a blizzard sets in and isolates the family from the rest of the town, she alone understands that Krampus has returned to exact further vengeance.
The movie takes the standard horror scenario of survivors under siege and being picked off one at a time by monsters. Creepy-looking snowmen surround the house while killer toys and other monsters try to force their way in. Original to this film, Krampus is depicted as accompanied by an array of menacing assistants including malicious gingerbread men, a child-eating jack-in-the-box, and a host of masked elves who look like something you might see during a Krampuslauf in an alpine village. The movie largely eschews CGI, refreshingly preferring practical effects provided by Weta Workshop.
Krampus himself, portrayed by Luke Hawker, is a combination of conventional depictions and movie-original ideas. He is a hulking, hunchbacked beast with gigantic claws. He has the traditional long tongue, hooves, and chains, but is otherwise a corpse-like Saint Nicholas in a ragged Santa suit, apparently to emphasize his role as Santa’s dark half.
As a horror movie, the film is tame, eschewing both jump scares and gore, though its frequent depictions of children getting killed make it more intense than it otherwise would have been (a kid’s legs getting slurped down by the jack-in-the-box is an image that will stick with me). The pacing is good as it moves steadily from a more humorous tone in the beginning, based largely around the family’s sniping, to a more action-focused and terrifying second half. Cleverly, it also depicts the family members growing closer and overcoming their differences as they face the menace of Krampus and his minions. Although it has a generally ironical tone, Krampus has an undercurrent of respect for familial love that makes its contents considerably more palatable than they could have been.
Although a few sequences are choppily edited, the cinematography deserves a nod of respect. Some of the imagery, such as Krampus dragging himself out of the chimney or opening a portal to hell for the naughty children, is iconic.
Discussion
Oddly, the movie this most reminds me of is The Polar Express. Some years ago, when that animated feature first came out, I read a resoundingly negative review in the Toronto Star that criticized it for trying to convince children to believe in Santa Claus by scaring the bejabbers out of them—referring primarily to the scene in which the train is derailed and skids across the ice.
Although the review was not entirely unfair, it may be worth pointing out that The Polar Express is based on a picture book with lots of pretty imagery, but in which very little happens. The train probably derailed, not to scare the children into believing, but because the filmmakers were desperate to add action to a story that didn’t have any.
By contrast, Krampus is unabashedly encouraging belief through fear, though it does so with its tongue in its cheek. At one point, the elderly grandmother who understands Krampus even says that it’s not what you do, but what you believe, that brings Krampus around to exact punishment—a decided contrast to the traditional role of the character.
The result of this is that Krampus, in this film, has ceased to be the Krampus of old and has instead become just another horror movie spook. He has come not to punish any actual wrongdoing, but merely to punish, arbitrarily, a negative attitude toward Christmas. The Christmas holiday’s religious purpose is never mentioned, nor is the moral basis of the gifts and punishments traditionally handed out during the season. The movie begins by asking exactly what the point is of Christmas, and it never gives answer.
For this reason, although Krampus is an entertaining film, we might also call it an opportunity lost. It does not try to explore this obscure but increasingly popular Advent tradition, instead remaining safely within the bounds set by previous movies of the horror genre.
Krampus
9.99
