Michael Dougherty’s first feature film was the Halloween-themed anthology Trick r Treat. Despite being well received by critics and festival audiences, it was practically shelved by Warner Bros and released straight to DVD.
Dougherty’s second film Krampus is based around that most famous holiday of all, Christmas, and unlike his first it has been given a full theatrical release.
Krampus is also more family orientated than Trick r Treat and as such hearkens back to films of the 80’s like Gremlins and The Lost Boys, films that were just dark enough to satisfy teenagers and adults yet were not so overwhelmingly scary as to be off limits to younger children.
As previously mentioned, Krampus is a Christmas movie and as such it begins with that quintessentially modern Christmas scene: the Black Friday supermarket riot. Images of shop clerks being bowled over by the rush of people, adults beating each other with skateboards, and security guards gleefully tasering errant shoppers, are set to Bing Crosby’s version of ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.’
In this opening sequence, we are also introduced to Max, one of the film’s key characters, as he fights another participant in a nativity play – a fight which the adults in the audience film on their mobiles.
The rest of the film follows Max as his immediate and extended family – his aunt, uncle, and cousins - celebrate Christmas together. Of course when so many different people with different personalities are forced into close proximity there is bound to be clashes, and the most heated of these occurs over dinner. This leads to a frustrated Max tearing up the letter he’d planned to send to Santa.
The next morning, Max and his family wake up to find that a blizzard has struck the town, pretty much cutting it off from the rest of the outside world. They soon discover that this blizzard is only the beginning of a terrifying series of events marking the arrival of Krampus, the shadow of Saint Nicholas who comes to punish rather than reward and take rather than give.
The balance between horror, comedy, and family drama is appropriately judged and none gets in the way of the other. The relationships between the characters are also well defined although there are some elements, such as the relationship between Max’s parents, which perhaps could have been better explored.
Krampus himself is a suitably menacing antagonist, and the designs of both him and his multiform minions have a satisfying nightmarish yet playful quality to them.
There is also a nice nod to Krampus’s Germanic origins with the addition of the family’s German grandmother Omi. Her backstory is particularly pertinent to the film and is depicted in a wonderfully stylised animated sequence.
Buried within all this, is a thoroughly Christmasy message about the importance of giving and some quite mature themes about how nostalgia affects our view of the world.
Although it’s difficult to say whether Krampus will attain the cult status of the films it tries to ape – Gremlins has already been mentioned – it does make for some fun and creepy Christmas fare.
Star Rating: 3/5
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