December is a month for spending time with your family, reflecting on the year that has passed, drinking too much hot chocolate and engaging in the most brutal and taxing of all holiday traditions — shopping.
I hate malls. I spend 11 months of the year successfully avoiding the stress and malaise that they bring but sometime this month, I will undoubtedly get sucked into a mall excursion.
It’s a good time to break out your copy of Dawn of the Dead and compare the zombies with the equally lifeless crowd waiting in line at (insert name of big box store here).
Yes, this festive season can bring on heaps of stress, but it is also that time of year to break out that most weird of sub-genres — the holiday horror flick.
Black Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Santa’s Slay, Christmas Evil, Santa Claws (the list, and bad puns, go on), it’s only right to watch these babies in December.
One of my favourite films in this weird, weird collection is Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a Finnish film that came out last year. It would be a good stocking stuffer for that film fan in your life if they don’t mind subtitles or really, really scary elves.
It is hard to write about Rare Exports. The concept of the movie is so odd, and so good, that I would rather you just pop it on without knowing anything about it and enjoy a solid “alternative” Christmas movie if you’re not feeling up to Miracle on 34th Street, yet. I promise that you will like it (if you don’t mind a wee bit of movie violence).
Stop reading here, if you can, and get your paws on the movie!
For the rest of you who need to know more to be enticed, I understand. This is a movie about Santa Claus. Rather than going the “Santa with a knife” route that so many other scary movies have tried before, this movie explores a different side of the guy in red.
Santa has supernatural origins and isn’t the jolly guy Coca-Cola has been marketing to us. And what’s more, he has been buried for hundreds of years and an excavation team is about to unleash him. Santa is none too pleased and has to get back to work, but he’s not delivering presents.
The Santa character in this film reminded me of the story of Sinterklaas that my Dutch father told me about growing up. Putting presents in kids’ shoes and singing carols is great. But what about the part where “naughty” children are taken away in a burlap sack by his minions?
That has been carefully edited out of our North American Santa story.
As strange as it sounds, this movie could be appealing to film fans of all ages. The best part of the film is the kid protagonist — Pietari — who, of course, is the only sensible person in the whole film.
(In case disaster strikes, always have a wise-beyond-their-years child around to sort out the situation.)
A good companion film for Rare Exports would be the Norwegian film Dead Snow, a movie about a winter vacation gone awry thanks to Nazi zombies buried in the snow. Obviously, it’s less of a crowd pleaser — given the especially nasty nature of the undead creatures — but an amazingly quirky film nonetheless.
Enjoy Rare Exports, kids … and remember, be good. Santa is watching.