People can complain about Christmas themed horror all they want, but it taps into three key traditions. You have the Northern European tradition of telling horror stories at Christmas, the horror genre tradition of taking happy situations and warping them, and the horror movie tradition of ripping off anything succesful. You also have the great tradition of misleading posters, which occasional leaves you with something other than a lump of coal.

The film opens with a combination of fantasy, reality, warmth, and unease that becomes the motif for the rest of its 92 minutes, with Santa coming down the chimney of a nicely decked out middle-class home where the kids have stayed up to catch a glimpse of him. Queue childhood wonder and a sibling argument about if that’s their dad or not. Then Harry comes back downstairs to see Santa and Mummy doing way more than kissing under the mistletoe. Queue childhood trauma, mild bloodletting, and a sense that this is going to be quite the wild ride.

Cut forward to the present, and Harry (Brandon Maggart) is a creepy as heck adult, the perfect candidate for being a slasher villain. Only he isn’t exactly the villain, and this isn’t exactly a slasher film. It’s got some of the hallmarks of it, but it’s far more a sinister tale of lose of innocence, dealing with grief, and the social realities of festive hypocrisy. However, even that isn’t what the film is about, because mostly it’s just the tale of Harry being incredibly strange.

The bravest thing the film does is never force you to sympathise with Harry, who is both in serious need of help to deal with their situation and a creepy little weirdo. His behaviour is shown for what it is and it lets you decide how you feel about it, which mostly is “yeah, I can see his point. But… no, not like that!”. Conversely this is also applied to the rest of the people in this world, which gets complicated when you understand why they’re running around with torches and pitchforks.

I don’t want to suggest this is some kind of morally grey gritty-realism story, as it’s got enough unreliable-narration moments that the urge to watch it again to try and work out what actually happened is high. Just that it feels emotionally realistic, enough if you will be yo-yoing throughout. It is a little confusing at times, but in a “you need to pay attention” way rather than trying to be too cleaver for it’s own good.

When it lands, it lands hard. However, as it’s determined to tell its own story in a very exact manner it means that there are places that are a little slow and some of the direction isn’t all that inspired. That adds a low-fi video-nasty feel to it, including some lovely build up of tension and expectations, but others may find it a bit annoying. Additionally, whilst topics of the commercialisation of Christmas are handled fairly some might find it a little preachy in places due to lingering shots.

Mostly, it was a way better film than the Black Christmas rip-off I expected from its posters and mentions on horror lists. This is a Treasure of weird cinema that is hard to categorise, and that will either stick with you for ages or you’ll want to turn it off before the end of act 1. Whatever writer director Lewis Jackson set out to accomplish he did, and it’s set a new benchmark for Christmas Bizarreness in my world.

The Raggedyman