Editorials
‘Christmas Blood’ – The Gory Norwegian Santa Claus Slasher from 2017
While Norway’s horror output is small when compared to that of Hollywood, the country’s frosty climate lends itself to the most bitter of terror tales set around the holidays. For an especially frostbitten experience, the “Norror” movie Christmas Blood (Juleblod) combines the temperament of Scandi noir with the trimmings of slashers. More than the cold creeps in as estranged friends reunite on Christmas Eve.
Reinert Kiil’s 2017 movie starts off in the past, as these kinds of stories often do. A nameless, Santa-suited intruder butchers a family of three on Christmas Eve in 2011, only to then be shot down by a detective named Rasch (Stig Henrik Hoff, The Thing). In the opening credits, which also serve as an exposition dump, it’s said that the assailant survived his wound, and has since been locked away at a prison in Oslo. Confusingly, the on-screen text states the killer escaped on Julaften (Christmas Eve) in 2016. Yet the detective working on the reopened case, Hansen (Sondre Krogtoft Larsen, Snarveien), first arrives at the escapee’s empty cell on December 22.
Nevertheless, that expo of information seen earlier additionally revealed Santa’s M.O.; since the late ‘90s, he’s been hunting down lawbreakers on Christmas. His list contained a staggering total of 324 names, though only 14 are still alive. More importantly, another two died of other causes while Santa was put away. This one-man mission to stamp out the malefactors of Norway leads to the movie’s main characters. Julia (Marte Sæteren, All Must Die) has invited her friends to stay at her family home for the holidays after being apart for six years.
As these women stir up drama in an almost empty town where the only readily available entertainment is Tinder dates of the “last call” variety, Detective Hansen searches for his perp. He first goes on a wild goose chase, which wastes both his and the audience’s time. It feels like forever before Hansen realizes the mistake, and by then, Santa is already on a direct path to Julia’s house. Devoting such a large portion of the movie to the police procedural element is risky enough without making it too severe for its own good.
Aside from a bloodthirsty Father Christmas heading straight their way, a black cloud hangs over Julia and her friends; her mother recently took her own life after living with cancer. And in a scene that sucks the air out of the whole room, the resident bad girl Ritika (Haddy Jallow) asks Julia pointblank why her mother killed herself. Julia woefully bares her mother’s misdeed of drunk driving and running over a kid before then clamming up. What Santa doesn’t know, though, is Julia’s mother is dead now, so he’s making the long trip for nothing. Well, not nothing because Santa ultimately finds other naughty people to punish.
The murky presentation here is intended to enhance as well as communicate the movie’s miserable mood. Heavy and sweeping colors, including a recurring yellow hue, contribute to the noir vibe of Christmas Blood. In the same breath, far too many scenes are cast in near darkness. It makes no logical sense for these characters to sit around with barely any lights on. This aesthetic choice forces the audience to step into the characters’ shoes as they run around with no sense of where they’re going, but adding a shaky camera to the mix makes action scenes borderline unwatchable. At the very least, the scenes outdoors and beyond Julia’s house are easier to bear. Low lighting and overcorrection in post does more harm than good here.
Christmas Blood also suffers from barely drawn characters, and other than a few distinguishing traits, they’re exchangeable. Detectives Hansen and Rasch play a nearly passable odd couple in spite of their shopworn cop personalities. Julia and her friends are designed to be basic fodder for Santa. Ritika stands out by being blessed with an actual personality, but the director missed an opportunity to do something different and give the mean girl more to do, other than butt heads with the ostensible survivor as well as endure the most elaborate chase. As for the movie’s villain, his utter anonymity leaves a hole in the story that his prey fail to fill.
If Christmas Blood does anything right, it’s the kills. The deaths are spaced out to the point where the movie has to resort to a flashback in order to raise the on-screen body count. Yet once Santa catches up to the women in the present, the ensuing violence becomes the pretty wrapping on a so-so gift. Santa swings and hurls his ax with embellished accuracy, he spills guts in a sea of snow, and most amusingly, he tops off a snowman with a cop’s severed head. The massacre is indeed saved for last, but after seeing it unfold with such ferocity, the wait is forgivable.
As anyone who watches enough of them knows, Christmas horror movies tend to be weird. This unique branch of the genre is driven by an urge to counter seasonal merriment with gloom and replace yuletide cheer with screams. Christmas Blood certainly comes across as peculiar, but it also takes itself much too seriously. Almost to the point of satire. When the overwhelmingly bleak movie does break character, it’s a bit easier to digest. These moments include Detective Rasch discovering the killer’s murders form a Christmas tree shape when mapped out, and a psychologist (Frank Kjosås) somehow making the line “manifestation of pure evil” sound hilarious despite his saying it with a straight face. That sort of relief, intentionally funny or otherwise, is sadly uncommon. So anyone looking for more humorous and openly weird Christmas horror should look somewhere else.
It’s easy to come down hard on Reinert Kiil’s Christmas Blood. It’s egregiously underlit, overlong, addled with clichés, and lacking in charm. A big bright side is that the movie lives up to its name and then some. This slasher is generously vicious. And depending on why someone is drawn to this type of movie to begin with, that may be more than enough to warrant a watch.
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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