It’s the season of joy, peace, and goodwill… unless you live in Bailey Downs. Horror comedy A Christmas Story follows the aftermath of what happened last Christmas Eve, when two teens came to a grisly end in a school basement. Now, one year later, a new set of terrors has come to town and plans to make things even worse.
The intersecting fables follow several scary and sordid storylines: As three friends explore the site of the massacre, a malevolent spirit is determined to keep them there forever. One of the first cops to the scene of the murders has new complications as his son exhibits terrifying and violent behavior. When a local family seeks reconciliation with an estranged aunt, they suddenly find themselves running in terror from Krampus, the demonic anti-Santa Claus. And, lastly, not even St. Nick is immune to the terror as he fights a horde of zombie elves.
We caught up with one of the three directors, Steve Hoban, to pick his brains about the madness behind the method.
Dread Central: You break from tradition a little with A Christmas Horror Story. So, would you consider this an anthology film? You do have sort of a “Crypt Keeper” in the form of DJ Dan (played by William Shatner), but even so… he’s also living one of the horror stories.
Steve Hoban: It is an anthology film in that there are several stories, but because they weave in and out of one another and, to some degree, impact one another through shared characters and plot points, it plays more like a conventional movie rather than a string of individual stories starting and stopping one after the other. It is the Pulp Fiction approach to anthology. I think this makes for a more satisfying movie-going experience.
DJ Dangerous Dan is an incredibly important character in the movie. At first his scenes play like amusing interstitial moments that help to bridge the gap from one story to another, but as the movie goes on, you start to realize he is the conscience of the town of Bailey Downs. Then, near the end, his story dovetails unexpectedly but organically with one of the other stories and pulls the whole movie together. For such a pivotal character who didn’t have other actors to work with for most of his time in the radio booth, we needed someone very special. We needed an actor who had a great voice but who was also very charismatic and funny. William Shatner was the perfect choice. His performance is so entertaining but delivered with such pathos that it really elevates the whole movie.
DC: Why make a seasonal horror film and not just a regular scary movie?
SH: I love horror movies and I love Christmas movies so that was the first reason to combine the two. But the main reason was that it just seemed like such a fun idea and a great way to experiment with several different sub-genres of horror. I have always been a big fan of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas and am a sucker for Joe Dante’s goofy but fun Gremlins, but my current favorite seasonal horror flick is “White Christmas” (the Black Mirror Christmas Special) from last year. It is really smart, tense, and chilling.
DC: I noticed there are three different directors – did each person tackle a different story, or did you all collaborate?
SH: We each directed different segments. Grant Harvey directed the Changeling and the Krampus in the Woods stories, Brett Sullivan the Teens in the Haunted School, and I directed the Santa vs. the Zombie Elves and William Shatner DJ stories. We had one cinematographer, Gavin Smith, for the whole thing to help us maintain some consistency while also allowing each story to have its own style. Mark Smith (no relation to Gavin) and I produced together so were overseeing the whole production and, to borrow a term from television, I acted as the “showrunner” for the whole movie, working with all of the writers and the other two directors. Having said that, each of the writers made suggestions for the other writers’ stories, and Grant and Brett were both involved with the movie as a whole, including making suggestions on script, each other’s shooting, and especially in the editing room. It was a very collaborative process. We also had one single composer, Alex Khaskin (Ginger Snaps Back, Darknet), for the whole movie. Alex’s great and moody score is a big part of why the movie plays as one cohesive story.
DC: What’s your favorite moment of horror (without spoiling…) in A Christmas Horror Story? Any particularly delicious scares or kills?
SH: That’s tough because there are a few. I love the unexpected ending. It is fun to sit in a theatre and listen to the audience’s initial reaction of confusion followed by stunned understanding and then finally clapping and cheering. I really like the sense of dread that builds up when one of the teens in the school basement goes off on his own to find a bathroom and how that scene crescendos. The moment when the changeling is crawling under the covers of the sleeping mother’s bed always creeps me out. And, of course, Santa’s epic battle with his foul-mouthed zombie elves is bloody fun.
DC: It seems like a lot of research went into the folklore; what was the most interesting aspect of that, and did you learn anything you didn’t know prior to diving into this project?
SH: We asked a number of writers to pitch us ideas, and James Kee pitched us the Krampus story to fill our “creature slot” in the movie. If you are going to have a Christmas-themed horror movie and have a creature in it, James reasoned you had to have Krampus. To be honest, we only had vague recollections of the mythology of the alpine anti-Santa until James and Wikipedia filled us in. Once they did, we were sold. James then did a lot more research that, of course, impacted our design of the creature. There are many variations in both look and behavior of Krampus so we were able to make decisions that were consistent with the overall folklore but also unique to our character and the needs of our story. Oddly, once we started shooting, we heard that Kevin Smith was going to make a Christmas horror anthology movie with Krampus, and then we found out that Michael Dougherty was going to make a big budget movie all about Krampus, called KRAMPUS! We are fans of both of those guys, but we did curse them viciously and wish them many lumps of coal in their box office stockings until we realized that Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy, peace, and goodwill. So now, we really just want to ride in the slipstream of Krampus’ marketing budget and be “the other Krampus movie” with the added bonus of William Shatner, foul-mouthed zombie elves, and a killer ending. And the truth is, our albino Krampus is quite different from the other one.
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like anyone else is doing a changeling story right now. For that storyline our writer, Pascal Trottier, did a fair amount of research to come up with our “creepy kid” story. Like Krampus, there is so much folklore about these woodland creatures that we had a fair amount of latitude to create what is, I think, the most emotional story in the movie.
DC: Any plans to make more season horror films like this? And what’s coming up next for you?
SH: We would very much like to make a sequel to A Christmas Horror Story. We have learned so much about how to construct this kind of anthology, and it is tricky, that we would like to put that experience into practice. Also, we’d like to check in on some of the survivors of the first movie and also go back about 40 years to find out what started the whole Christmas curse on Bailey Downs.
In terms of what is coming up, in the spring we are planning to shoot an adaptation of a really cool novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill called In the Tall Grass. Vincenzo Natali wrote the script and will direct. Sticking with titles that start with “In the,” we are working on In the Lost Lands, a fantasy epic based on stories by George R. R. Martin written and to be directed by Constantin Werner. In the world of television we have been developing a very cool high-concept science fiction series with novelist Robert J. Sawyer (Flashforward).
A Christmas Horror Story hits VOD and iTunes on October 2. And make sure you check out Gareth Jones’ review of the horror anthology flick by pointing your browsers right here.