This post is sponsored by UCLan Publishing.
You wouldn’t necessarily think that Christmas and horror go hand in hand, but that’s exactly what happens in Frank Cadaver’s You’d Better Watch Out. When a Christmas tradition goes horribly wrong, the Watching Elf is always one step ahead. Colm Field (Frank’s wicked alter-ego) kindly sat down to delve into the depths of the connection between Christmas and horror.
“The road to Christmasland is paved with dreams!” – Joe Hill, NOS4R2
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. No really, it is. In my scary Christmas book You’d Better Watch Out! (shameless plug #1), the father of Evangeline, a bullying protagonist pursued by a psychotic skin-flaying Elf, would quite happily have Christmas all year round. This is entirely based on me. Whenever someone moans, ‘It’s started earlier than ever this year!” I always think… So? Isn’t that good?
Aha, I hear you say, but if Christmas is so great, then why is it so often associated with horror? And at first you’d have me flummoxed, because you’re right – it is. A quick IMDB search reveals an average of seven Christmas horror movies being made each decade… until more recently where that total increased to twenty three in the 2010s! ‘Nuff applause to Krampus, my favourite of that decade, btw.
And speaking of Krampus – not out loud, obvs, in case we get his attention – holiday horror isn’t exactly a recent fad. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, was his eleventh supernatural Yuletide tale. Susan Hill’s classic The Woman In Black opens on a group of friends sharing ghost stories on Christmas Day in the 1900s – but this was already portrayed as an auld pastime in a 1820s horror story by Washington Irving, and was even hinted at by the playwright Christopher Marlowe in 1589!
Oh, and that goat-faced Christmas devil himself, Mister Krampus? Historians suggest that he was originally the son of the Norse god, Hel, a pagan symbol transplanted into Christmas tradition like thrash metal egg nog. He’s in good company. Iceland’s berserk Yule Lads became so grim that a 1746 ruling banned parents from scaring their kids with these stories. (It’s okay now, the Yule Lads are as cheery as a Coca-Cola ad… except for the bit where their mother boils children in a stew, and a Yule Cat devours anyone not wearing new clothes). Austria’s Frau Pertcha visits your home on the Twelfth Night, slits open your guts and fills them with straw. In Wales, Mari Lwyd is a real horse’s skull which is dressed up and sings wicked ditties at people till they pay up, and in Japan, young women who die from cold return as Yukiona, blue-lipped demons whose icy breath can kill. Indeed, the season is so jam-packed with monstrosities eager to turn your insides into origami, that the happier festive tales are a relief. You know, like the strange old bearded man who visits your room in the dead of night, and who’ll leave a lump of coal if you’ve been naughty, or the boy born in a barn after his parents fled a King determined to slay every firstborn baby in the land…
Because – and this is my point – Christmas features horror because it should. Fear and guilt are sisters, as Shirley Jackson said, and something so wondrous, so laden with food and drink and too-many presents, should also come with a healthy dose of guilt attached. In the depths of winter solstice, when the nights are longest, when food doesn’t grow and even the weather can stop your heart with its silent drab hand, yes we must sing louder than ever in the dark. And, in that most human contrary tradition, we must also begrudge the cheer, slap down the smiles with the age-old warning:
But you’d better be good.
Or, if you’re smart like horror fans are, you combine the two. Because what could melt the chilblains better than watching some other poor mug go through hell? Especially when they deserve it. So Merry Christmas, Krampus. Seasons Greetings, Hans Trapp. Happy Holidays, Itku Henki, a.k.a The Watching Elf (shameless plug #2; my book, You’d Better Watch Out is released on Halloween).
Pick up a copy of The Blood Texts: You’d Better Watch Out, here.