Holiday Extra: Bad Santas

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If Christmas brings you to mind of a benevolent, chubby-cheeked ole Saint Nick wreathing you in comfort and joy, well, you’re in the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you regard the holiday season as an incrementally tightening vise of dread, pressure, anxiety and guilt — all presided over by those holly-jolly cheeks of Father Christmas — then these dyspeptic pictures might just be the dose of bile you need.

Everyone knows department store Santas are a dicey bunch. Even in the thoroughly pro-Santa Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Edmund Gwenn’s saintly Kris Kringle enters on the heels of a reprobate (the great character actor Percy Helton, uncredited) who reports for float duty at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade so soused he can barely stand. This was back in the day when “the funny drunk” was a comic trope.

It still was in 2003 with, literally, Bad Santa (2003), but in a very different form. The dark comedy stars Billy Bob Thornton as an alcoholic, foul-mouthed child-hater and 3’6” little person Tony Cox as his larcenous sidekick. Every year they pick one unsuspecting department store and sell themselves as a Santa-and-elf duo, the better to rob the place blind. A misbegotten 2016 sequel, Bad Santa 2, dials up the vulgarity and misogyny — quite a feat when it includes the Thornton character’s strong, confident and even more despicable mother (Kathy Bates) — and trades serious personality disorders for cartoonish personality disorders.

Billy Bob Thornton (left) and Tony Cox in Bad Santa (2003)

Less larcenous but equally irreverent, The Hebrew Hammer (2003) pits Adam Goldberg’s tough-talking Jewish detective Mordecai Jefferson Carver against evil Santa Damian (Andy Dick) — “Damian” being is the name of the literal child of Satan in The Omen series — who murdered Mordecai’s father and is out to destroy both Hannukah and Kwanzaa. Just typing the Hammer’s catchphrase — “Shalom Shabat, motherfucker!” — is making me smile.

Then there are the slasher Santas. The first may be the escaped mental patient (Oliver MacGreevy) who stalks murderous wife Joan Collins in the first of five segments of the omnibus film Tales from the Crypt (1972), adapted from stories in that classic 1950s EC Comics title and a companion series. “And All Through the House...,” from Vault of Horror #35, gets moved from the U.S. to England, since it came from scrappy Hammer Films challenger Amicus Productions, and actually depicts the Merry Christmas mayhem left unseen in the comic’s twist-ending tale … plus, dig that house’s mod mid-century decor!

Joan Collins as Joanne Clayton and Oliver MacGreevy as “maniac” in Tales from the Crypt

Christmas Evil (1980), originally titled You Better Watch Out, set the template for serial-killer Santas with its portrait of a disturbed loner (Brandon Maggart) who in true B-movie fashion was traumatized as a child by a scene in which I Saw Mommy Doing More Than Kissing Santa Claus — in silk stockings, no less. Maggart is surprisingly sympathetic for a character who graphically kills naughty people with an ax, a knife and other sharp objects, and even smothers one with his Santa bag. The satirically irreverent tone of ’70s exploitation films carries through here in such scenes as a police lineup of suspects all in Santa suits. Technically, Christmas Evil was preceded by several months that year by the grammatically suspect Santa slasher To All a Goodnight, but that $75,000 micro-budget movie, the only directorial effort by actor/singer-songwriter David Hess (Last House on the Left), had too-limited distribution to even have been seen by most people, let alone launch a subgenre.

And neither movie received as much attention as Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), which got a wide release by the minor-major studio Tri-Star Pictures, home of that same year’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Appropriating and twisting the title of the pious Christian hymn “Silent Night, Holy Night,” about the birth of infant Jesus, it trades the low-budget, anything-goes ethos of Christmas Evil for a standard-issue slasher story. Ah, but the poster — depicting Santa disappearing down a chimney toting an ax — stirred up a firestorm, inciting protests, picketing and other variations on “You can’t buy publicity like this!”

The story involves young Billy, triply traumatized as a child by the supposedly catatonic grandpa who hisses, “Christmas is the scariest damn night of the year”; by seeing a stick-up man in a stolen Santa suit murder his parents; and by being dumped in an abusive orphanage. Years later, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson, in his movie debut) is working at a toy store and forced to don a Santa suit. Suffice it to say the costume dredges up some very toxic memories. Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 (1987) rehashed it with the young brother of the first film’s killer Claus.

Original one-sheet, Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Three European horror films bear mention here, the first two of which I’ve yet to see but know by reputation. France’s 3615 code Père Noël / Deadly Games (commercially released 1990 after festival screenings the year before, limited U.S. release 2019) is often called Home Alone done straight: A serial killer dressed as Santa tries to invade a rural French mansion where an inventive boy lives with his mother and partially blind grandfather. And Dutch writer-director Dick Maas (1983’s De lift / The Lift, 1989’s Amsterdamned and the stunning 1982 music video for Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”) gave us Sint / Saint (The Netherlands 2010, limited U.S. release 2011), in which Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas by another name) is a murderous ghost let loose every 23 years.

And you really must see the 2010 Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a dark — and I mean dark — comedy written and directed by Jalmari Helander. (See image at top of article.) It involves an especially bad Santa who kidnaps and tortures children who don’t toe the line: Damned right he knows who’s been naughty, and he is not letting anything slide. It offers a fabulously macabre origin story for department-store Santas, involving trapping feral, free-range Santas and taming them for commercial profit … and that’s not the half of it. It’s truly transgressive, cynical and weirdly funny when it’s not being straight-up disturbing. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This list, of course, isn’t comprehensive, especially since over the last couple of decades Christmas movies of all kinds — funny, scary, pious, romantic, life-affirming — have multiplied like tribbles. The appetite for them appears to be bottomless for Christmas junkies who spend the month of December jonesing for such flicks. So there surely are Bad Santas in the bunch. Christmas, after all, is a Lucullan banquet of folklore, childhood fantasies and commercial cynicism ... there’s a dish for just about everyone. Please chime in with your favorite Bad Santa movie. Don’t we all have one?

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