Why ‘Krampus’ Is the Perfect Anti-Christmas Movie

Christmas horror has become a subgenre unto itself, a refuge for those who love to inject a little Halloween revelry into their holiday festivities. It’s home to one of the earliest slasher movies, iconic creature features like Gremlins, and just recently added the gorefest Terrifier 3 to its ranks. But one of the best, and least talked about, examples has to be 2015’s Krampus, a film that strikes an ideal balance between its horror and Christmas movie elements.

Directed by Trick r’ Treat’s Michael Dougherty, the film was a modest financial success, earned decent reviews upon its release, and has developed a small cult following in the nine years since. But for those who’ve never seen it or haven’t in a while, its critiques of rampant consumerism and ideological divides have only become more relevant in the almost-decade since its premiere. Movie fans looking for an antidote to all the warm and fuzzy Christmas classics, look no further.

‘Krampus’ Satirizes Christmas Movie Conventions

For the uninitiated, Krampus can probably best be described as a combination of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Gremlins, and The Mist. It takes the premise of Christmas Vacation, where an upper-middle-class family is forced to spend the holiday with their obnoxious working-class relatives, and throws in a healthy dose of isolation horror and creature effects. It also takes aim at over-consumption and the ways that a season that’s supposed to be about togetherness is so often an opportunity for our worst impulses to come out.

The film opens on a slow-motion melee, as frantic department store shoppers fight over discount goods, trampling store employees with the misfortune of being caught in their path, all while the soothing voice of Bing Crosby sings ironically in the background. These scenes of carnage transition to a young boy named Max Engel (Emjay Anthony) in a fist fight with another kid, until he’s pulled away by his parents, Tom (Adam Scott) and Sarah (Toni Collette). This opening sets the stage for the movie as a whole, as familiar holiday iconography is distorted in all kinds of grotesque ways.

Max has a problem that’s familiar to a lot of kids in Christmas movies: despite being old enough to “know better,” he still believes in Santa, and his parents and older sister Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) don’t quite have the heart to disabuse him of this fantasy. His German grandma “Omie” (Krista Stadler) is more willing to indulge him, but she’s a product of an older world that still leaves room for magic. Tom and Sarah aren’t bad parents by any means, but they’re distracted, as Tom’s job keeps pulling him away from family time.

Things only get worse when Sarah’s sister Linda (Allison Tolman) arrives with her family — husband Howard (David Koechner) and kids Stevie (Lolo Owen), Jordan (Queenie Samuel), and Howie (Maverick Flack) — joined by their acerbic Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell), just to add to the misery. After a scuffle at the dinner table, Max tears up his heartfelt letter to Santa and throws it away, leading to a visit from the titular Christmas demon and his array of helpers, explained by Omie in a stop-motion interlude reminiscent of Rankin-Bass classics. The setup is all fairly standard Christmas movie fare, all the better for when things start to get weird.

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How ‘Krampus’ Subverts Audience Expectations

One of the smartest moves Krampus makes is that it doesn’t make any of its characters one-note angels or jerks, but rather multifaceted characters that the audience can root for. Howard comes off as an obnoxious red-state kind of guy at first, but his preparedness comes in handy, and he’s willing to show some vulnerability. Tom starts the film as a distracted “business dad” type character, but finds new layers of strength and resourcefulness in times of crisis. Even Max, who seems like the most noble, innocent character, has an angry, violent streak that a lot of little boys have. Its characters feel like human beings who sometimes act impulsively or selfishly, but don’t really deserve the kind of punishment that Krampus is so good at handing out.

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Krampus is a creature from a very different time and place, one whose black-and-white morality doesn’t really apply to the modern world. In his day, he was used as a tool to frighten children into behaving, lest they be punished for their “naughtiness,” and this approach doesn’t really allow a lot of room for nuance. The Engels end up being punished for the same sins that most people are guilty of these days. In this way, Krampus serves as an indictment of modern society as a whole, one where selfishness and greed are built into the world that everyone is forced to navigate. The Engels could easily be any family around the holidays, or any time. As the film’s eerie final shot shows, Krampus’s Christmas season gets busier every year.

It seems that every year, the Christmas season gets extended earlier and earlier, its yuletide cheer encroaching more and more on Halloween’s autumnal turf. For horror fans who might want to return the favor, Krampus is the perfect addition to their yearly watchlist. Stream on Max.