Words Seem Out Of Place

As everyone knows, jump scares and subversive fun make Christmas infinitely better. Watching movies like Black Christmas , Krampus , and Christmas Evil this time of year is a favorite custom of misanthropic scrooges everywhere. Hey, I like Christmas just fine, but I like it even more when you ratchet up the body count. Calm down, I mean  fictional body count, yeesh! "I saw Mommy being naughty with Santa Claus " : In  Christmas Evil , Santa skips the cookies and milk but still eats out, if you know what I mean. And yes, I just channeled my inner R-rated Joe Bob Briggs commentary with this caption. #sorrynotsorry So, in the spirit of Our Lady and Savior Cassandra Peterson, AKA Elvira Mistress of the Dark , I'm wishing you a very scary Christmas season. Here's where I could make the obvious joke about unwrapping Elvira for Christmas, but nope, I'm keeping it classy. There probably won't be any new content here over the next week o...

Subversive Christmas films are the best kind of Christmas films. I appreciate when films offer commentary and insight on the season's often-nauseating cheer and crass commercialism, revealing the darker side of it all, the stuff most of us want to ignore this time of year. So in the spirit of the season, here's my top five Christmas films, each of which resides a little left of center. And it should surprise absolutely no one that my top yuletide season flick stars—drum roll, please— Michelle Pfeiffer . As always, this list is subject to change slightly, annually. Please, share your lists below, and we can argue about movies as if we were drunk relatives at the Christmas table screaming about politics. Hey, can you pass the eggnog? 1. Batman Returns (1992) Michelle Pfeiffer. ‘nuff said, but I’ll say more. As Selina Kyle/Catwoman, she has the film’s most complete character arc , a personal growth journey that begins with Selina as a meek, put-upon, frightened l...

Olivia Hussey, the original Final Girl, in Black Christmas (1974). How do you celebrate the holiday season? If you answer with anything other than, "Why, watch Black Christmas , of course!" then you need to reconsider your priorities. Okay, I understand we all have family obligations this time of year. Still, I implore you to take some time out and watch this 1974 cult classic, considered by many to be the birth of the slasher film genre. I wrote about it for The After Movie Diner this week, but the long and the short of it is this: I've seen an awful lot of slasher movies in my lifetime (I'm a child of the 1970s and 1980s, after all), and while several have been as good as Black Christmas , none have been better. I've long held John Carpenter's Halloween as the gold standard for horror/slasher movies, but now I'd slot Black Christmas in right alongside it. Amazingly I hadn't seen the film before this year. Oh I'd been hearing about an...