Editorials
Embracing the Darker Side of Christmas in ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol,’ ‘Krampus’ and “Millennium”
Christmas, more often than not, is sad. That’s why “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is such a perfect seasonal song. The pressure to be happy, to have a perfect celebration, combined with the myriad pressures of cooking, cleaning, shopping, traveling, and decorating, combine to place enormous stresses on people. Plenty of folks lack the money or resources to buy piles of gifts or even to see family and friends for the holidays. This year is even more difficult—the threat of COVID looms large, and my partner and I are among the many who won’t be seeing our families.
The best Christmas media understands and reflects the melancholy side of the holiday, and that includes horror. Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol captures this well—on its way to a happy ending, it reveals that Ebenezer Scrooge’s miserliness stems from deep personal pain. The book also follows the tradition of Christmas ghost stories, so it’s inherently spooky—even Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) features a coffin cracking open to reveal smoke and flames. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) borrows heavily from the horror tradition, and tackles the story’s emotional themes head on, refusing to condescend to young audiences. That could be why it’s apparently a favorite of many horror fans.
“Words cannot express how happy I was to learn that the horror community is rife with Muppet Christmas Carol fans,” @blkmagicbarbie tweeted earlier this month. Michael Caine’s excellent performance as Scrooge helps immeasurably—he plays the role with the gravitas it deserves. The filmmakers deliver plenty of creepy touches, from Miles Goodman’s eerie score, to the series of close-ups that signal the ghostly ringing bells just before “Marley and Marley” (Statler and Waldorf) arrive to warn Scrooge of his potential fate, to the frightening hooded Ghost of Christmas Future. (“Should we be worried about the kids in the audience?” Rizzo the Rat asks at one point. “No, this is culture!” Gonzo replies.)
The spirits force Scrooge to confront his demons: the lonely childhood, the lost love of his life, Belle, who tells him exactly why she’s leaving him in the heartbreaking ballad “When Love Is Gone” (at least, in some cuts of the movie), and the strained relationships in his present day life. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Miss Piggy go off on what a terrible boss, and dresser, Scrooge is. Of course, Scrooge ultimately finds redemption thanks to this eye opening, haunted evening, but The Muppet Christmas Carol, like all the best adaptations of the tale, confronts the sadness that is part of the holiday for many head on. Any adaptation of A Christmas Carol needs to hit the emotional beats as well as spooky atmospherics in order to work. The terrific Muppet rendition is no exception. Moments like the heartbreaking scene in which Kermit and Piggy discuss the gravesite of Tiny Tim really make the emotional side hit home. The happy ending is joyful precisely because the lead up has been both sad and frightening.
A darker, but still hopeful, Christmas unfolds for Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) on “Midnight of the Century,” a memorable Christmas episode of Chris Carter’s series Millennium (1997). The episode, written by Erin Maher and Kay Reindl and directed by Dwight Little (Halloween 4), opens with a Christmas Eve flashback to Frank’s childhood. As a selection from The Nutcracker plays, Frank’s mother Linda (Cheryl McNamara) helps him draw an angel (the flashbacks are all in gorgeous black and white). Over the course of the hour we come to learn that Frank’s mom was troubled, like Frank, by visions of her own—of angels. She also struggled with more mundane challenges, like lacking the money to buy Frank the train set he coveted from the local toy shop. Linda died suddenly one Christmas, leaving Frank’s relationship with his father Henry (Darren McGavin) in shambles. But a series of mysterious events push Frank to confront his tragic past. Bells ring inexplicably in his apartment, and a letter postmarked 1946, with the same drawing from the opening teaser and the message “It’s the midnight of the century,” arrives in the mail. Catherine (Megan Gallagher), Frank’s estranged wife, tells him that their daughter Jordan (Brittany Tiplady) made her own angel drawing—with the help of Frank’s mother. (Jordan has shown signs that she shares Frank’s gift.)
It’s an interesting episode, and one of the series’ strongest. There’s no case for our hero to solve, but there is a mystery to puzzle out—threaded through holiday traditions like a Christmas party, a pageant starring Jordan, and a Midnight Mass. The separation from Catherine makes the holiday challenging and painful, and Frank spends several scenes trying vainly to pick up a suitable gift for his daughter. (A chorus of snarky gay sales clerks don’t exactly help.) Frank has difficult conversations with his wife, who worries about the impact of Jordan’s heightened perception on her well-being. He ignores voicemails from his dad, who is similarly alarmed by Frank’s abilities in flashbacks. At one point a mysterious spirit tells Frank about “fetches,” souls of those destined to die in the coming year, and warns him not “to put off until tomorrow what should be done today.” He serves a similar purpose to the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, for Frank ultimately reconnects with Henry and learns that his father isn’t the monster he thought he was. On Christmas Eve he and Jordan see a trail of fetches walking towards the church where they’re attending Midnight Mass—including Frank’s father. The episode exudes Christmas atmosphere, capturing the holiday as effectively as the series’ previous installment, “The Curse of Frank Black,” captured Halloween.
Another Christmas tale that deals directly with the trials and tribulations of the season is Michael Dougherty’s 2015 film Krampus. The terrific opening credits montage sets the tone. The sequence, set to the treacly “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” hilariously depicts frenzied shoppers descending on a big box store in the lead up to Christmas. It also reveals the ugliness and depression that are part and parcel of the holidays: a memorable closeup of a deeply sad woman waiting at the checkout says as much as the bit where a security guard tazes an unruly customer. We also meet the Engels, who are having a crappy time—son Max (Emjay Anthony) has gotten into a fight with another actor in the Christmas pageant, as his parents (Toni Collette and Adam Scott) look on in horror and his sister Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) gleefully films it all on her phone. Things only get worse from there.
The stress and misery of the holidays seem to be closing in on all members of the family, with Max’s grandma Omi (Krista Stadler) his only safe harbor. The arrival of mom Sarah’s sister Linda (Allison Tolman) and her family heightens tensions; Sarah and Linda don’t quite get along, and Linda’s husband Howard (David Koechner) looks down on dad Tom. There’s no love lost between Max and Beth and their cousins Jordan (Queenie Samuel), Stevie (Lolo Owen) and Howie, Jr. (Maverick Flack), either. A humiliating incident at dinner pushes Max past the breaking point, causing him to tear up his letter to Santa—and unleashing the forces of Krampus.
Co-writer/director Dougherty has a keen understanding of the dynamics of family, and draws them vividly with the help of his talented cast. The squabbling clan grows closer as their situation becomes more desperate. They discover, finally, that they’re not so different after all. Sarah and Linda bond over memories of their late mother. Howard gains new respect for his brother in law after Tom saves him from a beast in the snow. Even the cantankerous Dorothy has a sweet moment where she lets her grand nephew sip her peppermint schnapps. It’s not enough to save them from Krampus and his helpers—or maybe it is. Max makes a desperate appeal to Krampus to spare them. He’s finally come to see that for all his family’s flaws, they’re people he loves and cares about. As dark and bizarre as the movie is, it displays real heart and makes a case for the joy that might be found amidst the sadness and heartbreak of Christmas.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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