The holidays are hell in Michael Dougherty’s horror-comedy Krampus, in which a dysfunctional family is terrorized by the title beastie, an Alpine folklore figure that’s pretty much the antithesis of jolly old Saint Nick. Rather than bring presents to all the good girls and boys, Krampus, a malevolent goat-like monster with cloven hooves and a mangy beard whose origins predate Christian tradition, punishes misbehaving children, sometimes banishing them to the netherworld. The figure has remained a popular fixture in many European celebrations, but he’s a relatively new phenomenon here, a trend some people consider indicative of a worrisome anti-holiday movement, the supposed “War on Christmas” waged by atheists and major coffee corporations. But as Krampus illustrates, with scenes of flamboyant mayhem and subversive black humor, that’s not quite the case.
The film opens with a manic group of people literally fighting over various items in some sort of Target-esque retail store, the kind of frenzied mob scene normally captured on blurry smart-phone cameras and video surveillance tape during a Black Friday shopping spree, depicted here in close-ups and super-slow motion by Dougherty and cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin. What seems mildly alarming on the evening news is suddenly quite horrifying; it’s all flared nostrils and bug eyes, and any semblance of humanity is replaced by an unyielding desire to consume. The sequence culminates with our child protagonist Max (Emjay Anthony) pummeling another kid during a Christmas recital, which continues undisturbed as the two children fight on stage in front of a Nativity scene.
The rest of the film isn’t as seething, but a sense of discontent is prominent throughout, particularly when Max’s well-to-do family returns home to await the arrival of their countrified relatives. Max, an innocent if somewhat perturbed proponent of Christmas cheer (he was beating on the other kid for telling him Santa isn’t real), just wants everyone to get along. But his hoity-toity mom Sarah (Tony Collette) is utterly embarrassed by her redneck sister Linda (Allison Tolman), and his successful left-wing dad Tom (Adam Scott) isn’t above mocking Linda’s husband Howard (David Koechner) for his ultraconservative views and financial struggles. Compounding matters are a few crazy cousins, an alcoholic aunt and a distant older sister; the only thing keeping him sane is his doting German grandma (Krista Stadler), but even she has a few issues of her own. It doesn’t take long for a nice dinner to devolve into heated political arguments, mean-spirited bickering and physical altercations.
Frustrated, Max crumples up his letter to Santa and hurls it into the wind, wishing ill on both his family and the season in general, which is enough to invoke a massive, inescapable blizzard that brings the evil Krampus to his doorstep. The rest of the film is dedicated to the family’s desperate fight for survival as the mythical monster unleashes his unholy horde of minions upon them, but the most important conflict is the one that happens at the aforementioned dinner table, the one that underlines all the horror goofs and playful grotesqueries that follow. Despite a supposed “War on Christmas,” the consumerist nature of the holidays has never been more pronounced; the season is marked by “giving” only as far is it requires one to buy stuff before giving it to someone else. In other words, your success at “giving” depends entirely on how much you can afford financially, meaning consumerist holidays like Christmas aggressively exasperate class and social disparities. Otherwise copacetic groups are driven apart by capitalistic ritual, and in Krampus, it divides an entire family, at least until they’re united in an effort to suppress an evil force.
And because that evil force arrives in the form of anthropomorphized Christmas iconography—gingerbread men, angel ornaments and various toys transform into bloodthirsty ghouls—it becomes pretty obvious that Dougherty and co-screenwriters Todd Casey and Zach Shields are out to show that Christmas is waging war against us, not the other way around. Indeed, Krampus is anything but subtle, and its broad characterizations are essentially caricatures, but the film fully embraces a self-reflexive tone, eschewing tongue-in-cheek observations for brazen, legible social commentary, the kind whose clarity and cogency is both refreshing and extremely persuasive. Dougherty’s inventive style keeps the film from feeling too burdensome. Fans of his cult hit Trick ‘r Treat will find a lot of similarities, most notably his offbeat humor and eager experiments with the contours of cinematic space. The best sequences feel simultaneously elastic and concrete, a unique marrying of cartoonish irreverence and hard reality, equal parts “Looney Tunes” and oriented realism. Krampus’s most obvious forebear is the similarly themed Gremlins, and when viewed in that light, the film seems to bear the true spirit of giving: a Joe Dante movie we didn’t ask for but so desperately need.