Krampus will ruin your Christmas...
KRAMPUS | Trick ’R Treat director Michael Dougherty is delivering some festive fear with an ’80s flavour.
“It might sound strange to say it, but I actually really love Christmas,” laughs Michael Dougherty. “I just wanted to make my kind of Christmas movie.”
On the face of it, Krampus isn’t your typical winter warmer. Taking a dark approach to the holiday season, the film sees a typical American family settling down for an ordinary Christmas dinner, replete with dry turkey and familial bickering. Things take a turn for the sinister after they get snowed in and one of the kids unwittingly summons the titular festive demon.
The Krampus myth actually stems from a Germanic folktale of unknown origin, and the director (best known for superior horror anthology Trick ’R Treat) fused the concept with an idea he’d been fascinated with since childhood. “I always wanted to make a scary, supernatural Christmas film that featured some twisted version of the Santa Claus character,” he says, “but it wasn’t until I was introduced to Krampus that I knew who that figure was.”
For those unfamiliar, Krampus is an antiSanta of sorts. Standing on two hooved feet and with giant horns curling out from his head, he punishes the naughty kids while St Nick gives gifts to those on the ‘good’ list. Just the thing to encourage your kids to behave… Dougherty had no trouble drawing on his own childhood fears for inspiration. “As a kid, it always fostered a certain level of anxiety knowing that throughout the year there was a supernatural entity who was watching you and judging you. My parents took it a step further and said if I was bad, they would call Santa Claus and tell on me,” he explains. “As a kid, that was traumatising!”
Dougherty also drew on positives from his childhood – namely those just-scary-enough family films that had their heyday in the ’80s. Don’t expect Krampus to be too terrifying. According to the director, if you watched the first 15 minutes of the film without any context, you’d think it was a straight Christmas film. Dougherty admits that the tone was closely moderated, aided by cast members not known for one particular genre (Toni Collette, Adam Scott, David Koechner) and mostly practical VFX. “Even in the scarier parts of the film, there is always a level of mischievous humour. This isn’t torture porn. This is Gremlins. This is Poltergeist. It’s Amblin-style horror,” he says.
And don’t expect it to ruin your holiday season either. “We realised it shouldn’t defile Christmas,” says Dougherty. “It should actually be, at its heart, a Christmas film. So despite the fact we had monsters running around and people screaming, it really is a family Christmas film in a very strange way.” MM
ETA | 4 December Krampus opens this winter.
‘This is Gremlins, This is Poltergeist. It’s Amblin horror.’ Michael dougherty