I love Christmas horror movies. The juxtaposition of lighthearted, wholesome family traditions with unbridled murder and mayhem can either be a powerful message about religion, consumerism and/or family values or, if that’s too tall an order, just a wacky series of ironic contradictions. At their best, Christmas horror movies bring out the subversive streak in great filmmakers; at their worst they’re usually entertainingly ridiculous.
It used to be that Christmas horror movies were among the most controversial entries in the genre, with films like Silent Night, Deadly Night sparking protests and causing celebrated film critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (who were never the biggest boosters of the slasher genre) to list the filmmakers by name on their show and declare “Shame!” after each one. But nowadays they seem to come and go with little fanfare, just another subgenre to be catalogued. Even though we had some truly excellent Christmas horror movies this past decade, they don’t seem to be talked about as often as the other great horror flicks of the 2010s.
And although I could wax rhapsodic about the wonderful horror-musical Anna and the Apocalypse, the twisted Christmas fable Krampus or (controversy be damned) the daringly confrontational Black Christmas remake, the very best Christmas horror movie of the decade seems to have almost completely slipped under most radars.
Some genre fans know and love Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, but this movie deserves more than mere cult status. It deserves to be a bonafide Christmas movie classic.
Rare Exports begins on a mountain in Lapland, where an eccentric millionaire has funded an archaeological expedition to uncover the tomb of Santa Claus. (The list of safety precautions includes watching your language, because Santa doesn’t like it when you’re naughty.) Nearby, a local hunting community discovers, to their horror, that all of the reindeer they rely on for food and industry have been brutally slaughtered.
Christmas, and their whole livelihood, has been canceled. A young boy named Pietari (Onni Tommila, who also saved President Samuel L. Jackson from terrorists in Helander’s underrated thriller Big Game) has watched these events with horror, because he’s convinced that Santa Claus is actually a demonic figure who kidnaps and tortures naughty kids at Christmas. And that means he’s the only person prepared to defend his family now that the expedition has unleashed that ancient evil.
Like The Monster Squad before it, Rare Exports relies on a child protagonist who, specifically because he is young and believes in the supernatural, is uniquely equipped to save the day. One of the wonders of Rare Exports is watching Pietari’s father, Rauno (Jorma Tommila), a depressed single father who’s cracking under the stress of caring for his son, gradually realize his young son is the hero their community needs right now. He’s got the expertise and, in the end, when Pietari is leading a massive supernatural migration while hanging onto a helicopter, he’s got the heroic chops.
Rare Exports is not a small film. As the story begins it looks relatively inexpensive, but the ideas – the archaeological dig, the mass reindeer murder – are big enough to suggest greater ambitions. And although the main plot begins simply, with Rauno accidentally capturing an evil Santa in a hunting trap, it evolves into a grand horror adventure, and plays more like a Spielberg movie than anything else. The aura of childlike wonder and genuine, magical threat is palpable.
That’s in large part because Rare Exports looks about as Christmasy as any Christmas movie. The gorgeous wintry locales and effervescent colors evoke the holiday season as wondrously as an elaborate holiday card. It is, in no uncertain terms, one of the prettiest horror movies of the decade.
The beauty of Rare Exports can be seen in every facet of the production. Even before the holiday villains attack our heroes, the story of a man struggling to take care of his son at Christmas, with nothing to offer for food but dry gingerbread cookies, is as sympathetic as any holiday tale. If evil Santa wasn’t real, Rare Exports could have been a captivating Christmas drama. But evil Santa is real, and he’s going to give that family an opportunity to experience true terror and – in unexpected ways – transform the whole season forever.
The ending of Rare Exports, which I won’t completely ruin by describing in detail, is a strange but clever development that reveals how problematic fairy tales become sanitized, corporate icons. If the movie had stopped just a few minutes before the epilogue it would have been a wonderfully weird Christmas horror movie, but the final moments reveal that this incredible adventure had a valid point to make about the troubling but inextricable connection between cultural traditions and modern capitalism. It’s a film about Christmas and what Christmas stands for, not just a scary movie with a seasonal backdrop.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is often overlooked during the holiday season but whatever you do, don’t miss these last few opportunities to celebrate the holidays with the best Christmas horror movie of the 2010s and, frankly, one of the very best scary yuletide movies ever.
