This much misunderstood psychological
horror film with an oddball New York Christmas slant now gets its seasonal due
on DVD in the UK, thirty years after its initial flop release, thanks to the timely
attentions of Arrow Video. The ‘evil Santa’ motif spawned a handful of
Christmassy horror flicks back in the eighties, but most of them were firmly
grounded in the slasher genre, their makers inspired by the success
of Halloween to have a go at making everyone’s favourite annual winter holiday
season the basis of some often very similar and unimaginative material. Few of
these films had much to offer beyond the cheese factor involved in setting a
killer Santa Claus on a murderous serial killing rampage, and even that aspect
of them had already been anticipated by the memorable Tales from the Crypt
story first adapted by Amicus for their ‘70s film version and later remade for
the anthology TV series that followed in the 1990s. But the very qualities that led
Christmas Evil (originally titled You Better Watch Out) to be dismissed or
ignored when it first came out, now serve to distinguish it as one of the more
original and well-crafted entries in the niche interest Christmas horror sub-genre.
The film became actually one
of the first full features to tackle the killer Santa Claus theme. Director
Lewis Jackson spent ten years attempting to bring this independent production, birthed
in an idea he first had in 1970, to the screen: he planned, drew and laid out
precise storyboards for the whole project in advance, which in turn managed to help
persuade the esteemed French cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich to come over to
the U.S. in order to lens this low-budget flick, despite the fact that the rest
of his lighting crew would be made up of inexperienced first-timers and the shoot would often involve
working long, arduous non-union approved hours.
The result was in fact a rich, black,
Grindhouse blend of weirdo comedy and drama, shot in an arthouse style and generally approached as
though the film were intended as a serious psychological portrait (by, say, John Cassavetes) of
mental decline in an unforgiving urban setting … but still decorated with tinsel and holly and liberally furnished
with a mordantly ironical sense of ice-cold humour.
The film refuses to be
slotted into any one identifiable genre: there are moments of absurdist comedy;
others deal in sharp, cynical satire; and still others are redolent with cheap exploitation-heavy,
drive-in-ready gore (although you have to wait a good fifty minutes for any of that to appear
– a fact which straightaway alienated any audience for such material it might
ever have had). Jackson was more influenced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Fritz
Lang than he was by John Carpenter or the Friday the 13th
franchise; the relaxed pacing, the film’s avant-garde edginess and unpredictable
shifts in tone; and the way in which its bleak, grungy urban backdrop gradually
becomes transformed into a distorted expressionistic version of Fritz Lang’s
M -- but dressed with fairy lights and flashing neon reindeer -- meant that
Jackson’s producers (who were expecting the usual unchallenging genre slasher piece),
dropped the ball with their marketing: the film came out before Silent Night, Deadly
Night, but seems not to have gathered anything like that film’s notorious
reputation, despite being way more evocative and beautifully put together.
Instead, the original You Better Watch Out was quietly forgotten for many years while it sank into a purgatory of complex sub-distribution deals that led to unauthorised title changes and poor VHS copies, etc. The film played on 42nd Street for a time, which is where it was eventually re-discovered by people such as John Waters, who managed to keep the memory faintly alive until Jackson was finally able to wrestle back the rights to his original cut and oversee its restoration for releases such as the present one with the original title restored to the print -- although Arrow have used the Christmas Evil title that most fans of the film will know it by for the DVD cover of this version.
The film’s whole approach to
the killer Santa genre is grounded in its bizarre character study of an
aberrant individual whose Christmas-loving psychosis becomes the basis for a
wry take on the cynical commercialisation of the season. Like the recent Finish
fantasy film Rare Exports, Jackson’s screenplay delivers an withering exposé
of the advertising industry’s sanitisation of the whole mythos surrounding Santa,
returning this questionable figure to his darker roots in traditional Germanic
folklore. Father Christmas -- or Black Peter – started off as something of a
vengeful, scary ogre before Coca Cola rebranded him with his current cheerful,
plump, rosy-cheeked grandfather image. The original Santa of legend was
wrathful, and spent as much time punishing and hurting children for their supposed
transgressions as he did rewarding them with presents under the Christmas tree.
This film slyly highlights just how similar the original Santa was to the kind
of oddball nutter it depicts as its central character; the kind who you’d actually cross the street to avoid. Here,
Brandon Maggart plays sad, lonely neighbourhood outcast Harry Stradling: an
isolated Christmas obsessed inadequate who connects with no-one but the little
kids who live in and around his run-down district (most of the shabby-looking
locations were based in New Jersey, though the film is set in New York). He
works in a drab, soul-destroying toy factory (ironically named ‘Jolly Dream
Toys’) where his single-minded obsession with improving the Company’s cheap and
perishable plastic products has seen him promoted from the production line to
the executives’ office, yet still he’s looked down upon by his colleagues and
generally treated with derision and a complete lack of respect.
Former Broadway
musical actor Maggart (now the father of singer Fiona Apple!) gives a pitch-
perfect performance here that completely captures Harry’s deranged personality,
echoing the film’s own schizophrenic tone as the character slips and slides
between comic slapstick exuberance one moment and scary screaming mad guy unpredictability the
next. One minute Harry is rolling out of bed dressed in his Santa pyjamas while
joyfully mimicking all the typical Father Christmas mannerisms and acting out
the familiar contemporary Christmas card image of St. Nick, the next he’s
frantically crushing plastic dolls in a psychotic frenzy while manically
humming ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ under his breath in his empty, dimly
lit house.
That house is, of course, a
fetishistic shrine to Christmas cheer stuffed full of kitsch, faintly
disturbing Santa Claus memorabilia, the décor all painted in red, green and
white Christmas colours for providing the appropriate setting to any number of
the carefully posed, creepy-looking dolls and toys that fill up every part of Harry’s
living space. He even has his own little hideaway in the garage where he makes his
own toys -- a glowing candle-lit woodshed grotto that looks for all the world
like Santa’s Lapland workshop made reality. This is the story of a man who
loves Christmas so much he actually wants to be Santa … it’s just
that the rest of the world won’t accommodate his warped desires. John Waters,
speaking on one of the two commentaries accompanying this release, likens Harry’s
situation to that of a transsexual who feels themself trapped in the wrong body; only
in this case Harry believes himself to be Santa Claus trapped in the body of a
human schmuck!
In the build up to Christmas Eve, he sets about stitching together
his own Santa costume for the big night. ‘Being’ Father Christmas involves all
sorts of activities that most parents these days might find rather unpalatable
– especially if one were to (as Harry does) mimic the practices of the traditional
folkloric Santa: Harry spends his days, all year round, spying on the activities
of the neighbourhood kids: peering through their windows, peeping on them -- even
in their bedrooms -- through high powered binoculars from the top of a tenement
opposite. He’s noting down their good and bad behaviour in two huge volumes marked
"Good Boys and Girls" and "Bad Boys and Girls" and he seems to have a creepily
comprehensive knowledge of what everyone gets up to: entries include specific
details that indicate Harry’s devoted pretty much all his time to keeping tabs
on these kids; their crimes range from ‘smoked cigarettes in an alley’ and ‘has
bad breath’ to eerily personal observations such as ‘always has to be first in
everything’. He also seems to have taken rather a dubious level of interest in
one particular little girl, whose picture he keeps on his desk and whose entry
in his book of "Good Boys and Girls" reads, simply ‘just a darling!’
The fetishistic angle to
Harry’s obsession is spotlighted in the suggested reason given for his Peter
Pan-ish need to live forever in a bubble of childlike Christmas-themed
expectation: the film’s 1947 prologue depicts in a stylised Christmas card-like
dream haze Harry and his younger brother getting to spy on Santa on Christmas
Eve, watching him coming down their house chimney and eating the mince pies and
drinking the milk their parents have laid out for him. Of course, this magical tableau
has been staged by the kids’ parents -- with their dad dressed up as Santa – to
enhance the magic of the season, but Harry isn’t able to accept that fact and is
driven over the edge when he creeps back down stairs later on and finds ‘Santa’
now lewdly making out with his mom! Harry’s reaction is to grow up deploring
any hint of sex and embracing all aspects of the Christmas spirit with a sort
of sublimated fanatical fervour. The many images in the film of Harry, dressed
in his full Santa Claus regalia, stood outside in the cold while gazing
through people’s windows and into their warmly lit homes, serve to highlight his
self-imposed isolation as well as his voyeurism. Jackson sets out to frame
every shot with exquisite care and many scenes here are actual recreations of
images by 19th Century German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose
sketches of the Santa Claus figure combined the modern white-bearded,
red-suited Coca Cola ideal with the more sinister traditional elements of the character.
The first half of the film concentrates
on detailing Harry Stradling’s strange and aberrant psychology in all its
bizarre but depressingly bleak glory, the film often coming across in tone a lot
like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Driller Killer but with an
unlikely Christmas theme added! The second half catalogues the events of Christmas
Eve and Christmas day, when Harry sets out to make his demented dreams a
reality: punishing the naughtiest kid in the neighbourhood with the traditional
bag of dirt on the doorstep and breaking and entering into peoples’ homes dressed as
Santa, to either leave the presents he’s carefully selected and made for them,
or to redistribute the presents waiting under their Christmas trees from those he considers
to be undeserving to those who are more in need. Disgusted by his Company’s idea
of a seasonal charity drive at the local Willowy Springs hospital for disabled
children (which is really just a cynical marketing campaign on their part), he
breaks into the toy factory and fills his van with its products to be
distributed to the hospital by him, dressed in his Father Christmas suit. All Harry
wants is to be accepted as Santa and to have people react to him as people
should react to Father Christmas at this time of year. There are moments when
he manages to engineer just such an outcome (a scene in which Harry practices
his Santa persona in the street, with it starting to snow just as he perfects his baritone
‘Merry Christmas!!’, helps invest the viewer fully in his distorted worldview
by its end) and is even strong-armed into attending a Christmas party by some enthusiastic
revellers who make him its star attraction.
But Harry is still tormented
by a lifetime of slights and insults and this is the night for punishing those
who haven’t always displayed the proper level of Christmas spirit in their
dealings with him in the past. Here the film manages to combine its edgy,
grungy New York indie spirit with an enjoyably black style of humour in
sequences where excited kids are shown happily waving ‘Santa Claus’ off not knowing that
he’s just brutally murdered their father in his bed, for instance; or where he’s
shown getting stuck halfway down someone’s chimney stack in a vain attempt to
be authentically Christmassy (Waters reads some overt sexual symbolism into that
scene!). The
police investigation into the spate of Claus-related crimes consists of nabbing all the city’s department store Santas
and forcing them to attend a line-up in front of all the witnesses who saw Santa
slaying people outside of a church, just after they’d come out of Midnight
mass!
But probably the most memorable
image to come from any of these ‘80s Christmas horror flicks is included in
this film when Harry’s murder
spree is reported in the press the next day and he ends up spending Christmas
night being hunted through shabby New York streets and back alleys by a
torch-carrying mob, in what is surly the most amusing tribute to Frankenstein
ever dreamt up. The image of a crying Santa being chased by a vigilante gang
waving flaming torches in a modern city setting (didn’t they have electric
torches in 1980s New York?) is gloriously surreal and highlights the film’s capacity
for shifting tone from the earthy and realistic to the utterly insane -- but then
how else should you be expected to react to some fat bearded guy who breaks into
your house and leers over your kids while they sleep?
There’s also a subtext
about how the inherent dysfunctionality which often exists in relationships between close family
members is brought out more at Christmas than at any other time of year, despite
the season supposedly being all about families coming together: Harry’s highly troubled
relationship with his brother is one of
the key subplots in the movie and the scene with the adult mob chasing Santa
concludes in Jackson’s tribute to Friz Lang’s M when Harry, increasingly
dishevelled and sweaty in his soiled Santa costume, is cornered in a backstreet
courtyard, but the children of his pursuers all crowd around to protect him from
the violence of their own parents -- one little girl even handing him her father’s
knife to protect himself with! 
RELEASING COMPANY: Arrow Video/AVAILABILITY: Out Now/GENRE: Christmas Thriller/FORMAT: DVD/REGION: 2 PAL/ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1/DIRECTOR: Lewis Jackson/CAST: Brandon Maggart, Jeffrey DeMunn, Dianne Hull
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