Christmas Horrors

[00:00:00] Welcome back to Scared All the Time.

[00:00:07] I'm Chris Miss Calari.

[00:00:09] And I'm Sled Vekola.

[00:00:12] And this week we're going to trim the tree and talk about a subject near and dear to

[00:00:15] our hearts, Christmas Horror.

[00:00:17] It's a fun topic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is because I feel like

[00:00:21] almost everyone, especially listeners of the show, have probably seen a Christmas Horror

[00:00:25] movie. strong-storied pagan history of Christmas itself, as well as various monsters and creatures that surround the holidays, which is mostly what we're going to be drilling down on in this episode. Plus, Ed and I actually worked on a Christmas horror TV show back in 2016 called 12 Deadly Days for YouTube and Blumhouse. And as our Christmas gift to you show while they hide from their families in the bathroom. And in keeping with that idea, it is the holiday season. So we want to wish you and yours all the best. Take a little time for yourselves if you can, make that extra hot cocoa, hang up a couple of lights and put up some decorations if you haven't already, because no matter what you

[00:03:03] celebrate and if this episode proves nothing else, humans have been making time to hunker Alright, with that, let's get into the app. So today we're talking Christmas horror. We're going to start with a look at the pagan traditions that gave rise to the holiday, then discuss some insane Christmas monsters that make Krampus look like a crampus-y, and wrap up by talking about some of our favorite Christmas horror movies. And to top it all off, we're joined by two of our favorite writers and chroniclers of

[00:04:23] Christmas chaos, Josh Miller and Pat Casey. Like this is not a video podcast, but Josh is short and clean cut and I'm like a I'm like a giant Sasquatch I do love that even if this was a video podcast you're both sitting in chairs So like your height would be pretty indecipherable, but yeah, one is clean cut and the other one is a non-tonoch We do have similarly sized heads of sitting down. You maybe can't tell. There's like large hats

[00:05:42] Yeah, that's gonna say to kick things off, I wanna talk a little bit about violent night because for anyone who hasn't seen it, it's a perfect introduction to your guys' sensibilities and tone. It's funny, it's inventive, it's sweet, violent, crazy, a screaming ball of energy or whatever, we just called it. And I know it has a pretty unique origin story.

[00:07:02] So how did the movie come to be?

[00:07:04] So back in Bloom to Minnesota,

[00:07:05] we had this like puns in it. Like no wacky one-liners for Santa to say. No, your head wasn't big enough yet. Well, yes, not yet. So we always had this idea that every once in a while, I would be like, yeah, maybe we could do that. But I feel like we never even really seriously considered it at all, because we thought it was just too stupid.

[00:08:20] But as it turns out, it was just stupid enough.

[00:08:23] You know, we brought it up.

[00:08:24] We had a meeting with our agents around the time

[00:08:26] Sonic was coming it's like, oh, is it gonna be just like fucking die hard? Is it gonna be too silly? And it's not, it somehow strikes this incredible balance. There's like high wire act of having like die hard style

[00:09:40] stakes, but also like we can have a Christmas pun,

[00:09:43] we can have a thing that's not gonna take you out of it

[00:09:45] weirdly because if you're in this wacky whirlpool, someone just tosses something. I'd love to see your top 10 best carolous tossing movies. Oh my god, well if we start a Patreon, it'll be on there. Ed watches a lot of schlock with another one of his friends and the stuff they keep track of in those movies. It's like movies with wood-paneled station wagons and movies with girls with blue eyes.

[00:11:02] It's green eyes.

[00:11:03] Brando's.

[00:11:04] Green eyes, sorry.

[00:11:05] Things that whatever pops out to their own twisted brains. for sure. So how many drafts did it take you guys to find the right balance of Christmas, to violence, to sweetness, or was it sort of baked into the concept itself? It was baked in, and that was, again, we've been around enough that we can appreciate how easily that script came, because we certainly had plenty, including things we're working

[00:12:22] on right now, that feel like hard work, all right. Yeah, we were afraid he was going to say like to watch it. She told me afterwards, but she was like, I actually liked it. Like the title and the poster, I do think some people think it's about a killer Santa, a Santa killing kid. Yep.

[00:15:00] This sounds-

[00:15:01] Absolutely, that's the marketing. Yeah.

[00:15:02] But-

[00:15:03] And it is extremely violent, but the violence is definitely of the sort of itchy and scratchy variety.

[00:15:07] Yes. It was like my dad's held hostage. Yeah. Well, while Violet Knight is the latest iteration, the bleeding edge of Christmas, maybe not Christmas hard, but Christmas action, Christmas excitement and weirdness, the combination of Christmas and strange tales

[00:16:20] goes back centuries, if not further.

[00:16:23] It's really no surprise, if you think about it,

[00:16:25] Halloween comes late into the year

[00:16:27] when the knights are getting shorter Like so much of people's lives was just, you had to know when to harvest everything and how to store vegetables and meats different ways. And like part of the reason people started making meat pies was because they were easier to store meat that way and then just like essentially, you know, do the 1800s version of microwaving them during the long winter. He pointed out basically how much of a slog

[00:17:41] and how boring a lot of life was.

[00:17:43] I guess winter is coming as part of the vernacular

[00:17:46] outside of Game of looking for a place that like if winter is going to be unavoidable, you want a place that then has a good harvest season or good land. And so Minnesota probably

[00:19:04] has some of that. If you like lakes, is that the theory that like, that's why Christmas happens when it does is it's like,

[00:20:20] it's at the very darkest longest nights of the year you needed to know what the plant and when to harvest. So during the winter solstice, which is the period of time, the winter solstice itself is the shortest day of the year. But during the time around that a lot of these celebrations

[00:21:42] started to pop up. And I think it was a this whole quote because it's so goddamn dramatic. I love it. So this is this is a Talmud. Sorry. It's just weird. This fucking quote come from a quote from Adam. Let's see who got this. When the first man saw that the day was continuously shortening, he said, whoa is me because I have sinned the world darkens around me and returns to

[00:23:02] formlessness and void.

[00:23:04] This is the death to which heaven has sentenced me.

[00:24:04] times. Well no, no, no. So I think I actually may have misspoke. He fasted. Oh, now you may as well look like idiots. No, no, no, no. Listen, listen, listen.

[00:24:07] He fasted when he saw the death to which heaven had sentenced him when the

[00:24:12] nights were getting longer and the days were getting shorter. And then when the

[00:24:16] days started lengthening again, he went and feasted for eight days, not fasted for eight days.

[00:24:21] So no, we understood that. But then the following year next year, he feasted twice.

[00:24:26] I thought was the rest of that cue. I mean, I guess he gets you probably right. It's kind of like Jehovah is spelled with a Y. I hope your listeners are not religious. They're going to be horrified, bear, ignorance. Dude, every week we do or say something that people are horrified by our ignorance. It's not a big deal at this point.

[00:25:40] Yeah, no, I think.

[00:25:41] I didn't go to Sunday school.

[00:25:43] I'm sorry.

[00:25:44] I went to a Monday school.

[00:25:45] It was the worst.

[00:25:47] Part of the reason this, based on Luke chapter two verses forty one through fifty two, the episodes are not found in the New Testament. What secrets are held in there? That sounds like a Dan Brown novel. Yeah I think there was a lot of puzzles. I don't know. A lot of stuff they had to cover up.

[00:27:00] Can we go back to Chris?

[00:27:01] You were saying that like, yeah, that we have these sort of winter solstice celebrations

[00:27:05] and all sorts of civilizations for various reasons. It's also the most depressing time of the year here. It really is. Is this an ugly city when the sun's not on it? And whether it's raining or just nighttime. And so you're like, we get more ugly city now than any other time of the year. Christmas being a depressing time, yeah, it's like partially, it's just the long nights, but partially it's caused by Christmas if Christmas is bumming you out or stressing you out.

[00:28:20] They didn't have to deal with that

[00:28:21] before they had started Christmas.

[00:28:23] Yes, well, of all the winter celebrations,

[00:28:26] there's two that are particularly relevant did it as part of like a celebration was more you would just buy those, you know, install log things to make your fire lazy to start. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's like this idea that this was a Yule tradition for the Vikings to be like to have a fire. They were having a fire anyway. I like to imagine they were going out. I guess for the Yule log, you get one particularly big one and just be like this

[00:29:42] one special.

[00:29:43] Yeah.

[00:29:43] I like to imagine that they were all ton of cattle, so they wouldn't have to feed them during the winter. So they had more available meat than ever,

[00:31:02] and most of the wine or beer that was made during the year

[00:31:05] was finally fermented,

[00:31:07] and this was the time where, and it's weird that none of us mentioned it, there's channels, right? You can watch a Yule Log. Like 24 hours of a Yule Log burning or whatever. Well, no, if Chris is gonna get to it. I mean, I think a lot of modern Christmas was cannibalized from other European things like Yule.

[00:32:22] Oh, 100%.

[00:32:24] Well, and the Vikings invaded England

[00:32:26] and a lot of coffee, we all make log. It doesn't roll down, it doesn't roll down stairs. Does it travel in pairs? It's colored marshmallows wrapped in melted chocolate and sometimes with walnuts. And then you, so you kind of mix it all together in a bowl

[00:33:40] and then you roll it in like wax paper

[00:33:43] into like a log shape and then freeze it

[00:33:46] and then you cut it into slices. that the Christians took from Saturnalia, which was a proto-Christmas celebration that took shape in Rome. And in Rome, this yearly celebration of Saturnalia was thrown to honor the pagan god of agriculture and time, Saturn, which I think is fitting because agriculture and time would really feel one and the same to ancient people

[00:35:00] who were just using time to harvest.

[00:35:03] Saturnalia became a-

[00:35:04] Yeah, interestingly enough, sorry, Chris,

[00:35:05] interestingly enough, also a time period happens. The people are pointing out like, but we need the calendar to know when to harvest. Like, ah, you figure it out. Dude, if you're a real fucking farmer, you'll just feel it, dude. Don't even don't like don't worry about it. Now, anyway, back to our 39 day months. The 17 of that. Almost everything had said was wrong in different ways, but he was right that the calendar was

[00:36:21] an absolute mess until around the 1580s an episode not to compare slavery in any, in any fucking culture.

[00:37:41] We continue to have the tradition of like, you guess they're eating straw that had been saved up or something? Well, and a lot of them from the other research that I was doing, it sounds like a lot of them got killed around the winter time. That's ridiculous, never kill a sheep. You can make clothes on it. Now, they keep some sheep to get more sheep later.

[00:39:01] Like, you don't have sheep eggs.

[00:39:04] No, you don't have sheep or more.

[00:39:06] No, you don't just put one name on both. Yeah, exactly. So they also, of course, scrubbed any human sacrifices that may have previously been associated with this time of year, of which I think there were a few. The one thing they didn't cannibalize was cannibalism.

[00:40:22] How I'd rather.

[00:40:23] Yep, ding, ding, ding.

[00:40:25] So not only does Christmas have its roots

[00:40:27] in these pagan midwinter celebrations, Never heard of La Befana? I am not a telly. Fucking La Buser, if you get my drift. No, I've never stayed up to find this crone you speak of, nor did I ever do the fucking fishes or anything. I'm not that type of Italian. Okay, well, maybe you'll get a visit from La Befana this year. She'll come sneak down. I'm really mad at you for denying her.

[00:41:41] This sounds like a set up for your horror movie.

[00:41:44] Or my orts are meat-cue, and then next year

[00:41:46] it's like I dick fucking rule. Like you could just be looking up, like it's so out of your control. It's like a- Oh, there's a couple dick rules throughout some of these legends, but Odin kind of looked like Santa. He was depicted as a wild bearded figure

[00:43:00] with a spear and a cloak riding

[00:43:01] on his eight-legged horse, Slepeneer.

[00:43:04] So that's Santa-ish.

[00:43:05] But with an eye patch, right?

[00:43:06] Like that's really what makes Odin different.

[00:43:08] He has an eye patch. people were like, no, no, no, it's kind of blown out of proportion. I don't know. Pat and Josh, when you guys were, well, I don't know if you really even researched anything for a violent night, but have you ever come across any Santa Odin stories? I'll tell you one, I just ran across that's new this year, and I feel like might be slightly ripping off violent night to be quite frank.

[00:44:20] Ooh.

[00:44:21] Because violent night, the fact that Santa, I mean, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. That's true. Stanky DC comics for just admitting that we're great. Yeah, because the real reason we made Santa Viking had nothing to do with Santa mythology. And it was more classic action movie thing where you find out,

[00:45:40] you know, the security guard at the small used to be a green braid.

[00:45:44] Yeah, he put that life behind him.

[00:45:46] Yeah, it was like, what was Grim's fairy tales recognized this as a pattern in multiple cultures' fairy tales that there would be these women who had one abnormally large foot. Some people have tied it to the idea of a spinster, like a woman who would use her foot to pump the pedal of a sewing machine a lot.

[00:47:00] Oh, that's misogyn fish and gruel. So if you dared try to eat human food, Frau Pericta would cut you open and fill you

[00:48:20] with strong pebbles.

[00:48:21] Damn.

[00:48:22] Which is like a brutal, I mean, yeah,

[00:48:24] there's like getting whacked to the broom, getting coal,

[00:48:27] and then getting turned into the naughty list people as that, you know. Or that's how she, you know, like tricks you since I assume Ed's going to end up dating

[00:49:43] all of these creatures.

[00:49:44] I will.

[00:49:45] So, me to hot chick at a bar. Well maybe, because Fish and Grits is popular, and that seems like a thing you wouldn't think to put together, but I also don't maybe know what Gruul is. I just think of it as like, slop. I mean, I'm just picturing Grits, really. Yeah, so that was proto-Fish and Grits. So the sub-genre of slop and poo. It's like, in fucking slop and Joe Gruul.

[00:51:00] It's like my cousin Vinny, where it's like,

[00:51:02] no self-respecting Southerner would make instant Gruul

[00:51:05] put, I guess, based on your silence.

[00:51:08] Maybe no one's seen that movie. rather than like, hey everyone, I made gruel for dinner today. I'm young. I'm excited. Like I would, you'd never call your own food gruel. To me it applies to the name of grueling. Oh wow, yeah, I didn't think about the language having that version of it too. I don't think it does. I'm sure it's derived from some like German word that means something normal, but. Gruel is a German word, Josh.

[00:52:20] Damn it.

[00:52:21] Or it's directly, directly relates to this lady

[00:52:24] because it was like, oh, if we don't eat gruel for 33 days, Fral Berkta was kind of the cruelest, meanest, nastiest Christmas monster. But I wanted to touch on Iceland's Christmas monsters as well because they not only have a lot, but they're crazy. So Iceland has these two trolls who used to live in the mountains and during Christmas

[00:53:41] they come down to the town.

[00:53:43] There's Gorilla, who's an ogres with an appetite for the flesh of mischievous children whom The Yule Cat eats those who have not received any new clothes to wear before Christmas Eve. Oh, it just punishes the poor? It punishes the poor, apparently. Like if you just like our entire economic system. Oh my God. Yes. The Cat's a true American. The Yule Cat lurks about scarfing these people down. But the real reason I wanted to bring up the Icelandic legends are the Yule lads.

[00:55:04] Have you guys ever heard of the Yule lads?

[00:55:07] They sound awesome. Dully's waiting for an opportunity to sneak into the cowshed and steal milk. Then you have Stubby who shows up on December 14th. Stubby is abnormally short and steals pans to eat the crust left on them. Then relatable. Yes, yes. That seems pretty hot. Then you have Spoon Licker who steals and licks wooden spoons and it's noted he is

[00:56:24] extremely thin due to malnutrition. haven't been harassed by any of these spoon liquors or bowl liquors by December 18th, you might meet door slammer who you might be surprised to find out likes to slam doors, especially during the night and waking people up. Then you have Skier Gobbler who has a great affinity for Skier, which is like a thick yogurt.

[00:57:42] It's very uncreative names they're giving.

[00:57:45] Really, truly some uncreative names.

[00:57:48] They don't know what leaf bread is, but I'm sure it's delicious. It's spelled like leaf the ice lander or leaf the... L-E-A-F-L-F-Bred. Okay. Lough the bell. Okay. That's just like what the hobbits were carrying with them on their lawn.

[00:59:01] Yeah.

[00:59:02] Well why is he in the doorway?

[00:59:03] Do you have to invite them in like vampires?

[00:59:04] I don't want to lick was another one. Sniffing in my baby's doorway. Yeah. Yeah. I saw you through the window. Like all the songs are fucking fun as hell. Now I thought you smelled like leaf bread. And it's. And they all have groupies.

[01:00:20] Tons of them.

[01:00:21] George Foreman, grill scraper is the hot.

[01:00:23] I mean, it's fine a shelf like the one weird Christmas tradition that is not thousands of years old, because it only just started a few years ago, because none of us had that when we were kids. Exactly, yeah. It is funny that like, it's been sanitized though, because there was a time where it was, you know, because even today I never got cold or anything,

[01:01:41] but like it used to be like,

[01:01:42] listen, someone's gonna fucking disembowel you

[01:01:45] if you're not good.

[01:01:46] Well, yeah, but you were bad. That's a great question for the listeners, actually. That's a good discussion for Facebook this week. We wanna know the shittiest parent that you've ever heard of who gave their kids something terrible on Christmas. Or just have you ever received coal yourself and don't fucking lie about it

[01:03:02] or else you're gonna get more coal this year.

[01:03:03] Yeah, because like our neighborhood growing up on Halloween,

[01:03:06] you know, there fits like in keeping in theme with this episode, I feel like I'm just gonna rattle off ones that feel sort of rooted in weird mythology. And that's rare exports, definitely one. That's finished too.

[01:04:20] Yeah, it looks like Santa Claus is truly like a,

[01:04:23] he's a creature along the lines of some of these other

[01:04:25] creatures we've talked about,

[01:04:27] like a horrible monster who's going around like murdering people. But there's like a scene where the cops are chasing him and they're in a cop car

[01:05:42] on the streets of whatever Dutch city they're in.

[01:05:45] And Cinderclaws, who's cool. We're throwing candy. It's like, don't fucking distract me with candy. No, it's not racist because it's a tradition.

[01:07:00] There it is.

[01:07:01] Well, and then they were like, he's not black.

[01:07:04] He's covered in soot.

[01:07:05] He's not Black Heat.

[01:07:06] He's city.

[01:07:07] But then everyone's still just like Deadly Night, which is a crazy... Punish. Yeah, it's a crazy punishment base, Christmas movie, about a kid who witnesses his family murdered by a guy dressed like Santa Claus, and now he has a fear of Santa Claus until he's put in a position to, I guess, kind of replicate that. For his work, they make him dress up as Santa Claus,

[01:08:22] and then he snaps.

[01:08:23] He snaps, you shouldn't do it.

[01:08:25] That's why I don't believe in immersion therapy. It was like on track to be a big hit, actually. I mean, it's still technically what I get made in. You should look it up, like considering inflation, it made an insane amount of money very quickly. Which is nuts, because the movie's fucked up. But it caused this huge uproar because it was about a killer Santa that this was so offensive. There were all these protests and stuff in the media

[01:09:42] about how this was evil.

[01:09:44] And like Mickey Rooney was involved in these protests. of some sort and five, he's like, he makes like evil toys. Oh, we all worked on a Christmas anthology, Christmas whole rad anthology. We did. Yeah, before we get out of here, we'll do a quick 12 Deadly Days shout out. The four of us all worked on YouTube and Blumhouse's series 12 Deadly Days back in 2016. It's out there on the internet.

[01:11:00] If you like Christmas horror, it was a crazy experience.

[01:11:04] And we got a lot of it. So sorry everybody.

[01:12:20] You're listening at home.

[01:12:21] You about to show us porn that.

[01:12:21] No, no, no, no.

[01:12:23] I mean, if you want, whatever.

[01:12:24] But it's just saying is I'm getting it. I mean, I think if that's what it is on the Blu-ray, that's canon now. Yeah, so he, because they don't show it, it's a wrapped gift. So for all we know, it is a porn parody of Die Hard called Die Hard On, and someone requested that on Blu-ray for Christmas.

[01:13:42] And they were good this year, so they were getting it.

[01:13:44] Hell yeah, well not now, I guess I would most want to be haunted by the Yule Boys because they seem pretty harmless and fun. Yeah, they seem to. I think the Yule Boys I most want to take in and raise an under-alloving family. Like they just they're a bunch of orphans. I mean they act like they're stealing but they're also just kind of doing your dishes for you so that sounds dope.

[01:15:02] Yeah, it has a real like Batman begins like the first time I met a man who stole to feast fans.