A Christmas Carol

When I saw that we had to read A Christmas Carol for class, I was gobsmacked. It fits the bill and it's appropriate for the season, but I approached it with a sense of exhaustion. I'd seen a zillion versions of the story, featuring yuppie Bill Murray and Muppets and Scrooge McDuck and Jean-Luc Picard. I felt like I knew the framework back and forth and I even had my snarky little opinion about the whole thing: he wasn't actually moved by the kindness of the human spirit into celebrating the holidays. He was just terrified into a death-row conversion.

One of the academics writing the introduction to the ebook version I read said that the value of reading the original work is that you can reexamine the character of Scrooge as he was meant to be written, before his cruelty was exaggerated for comic effect in later iterations of the story. The Ebenezer Scrooge I grew up was a hair's breath away from The Grinch. He was a cartoon character, cringing and hissing and cowering in his evil moments and tapping his heels together when he was happy.

Yes, the Scrooge in the book is much more toned down than the interpretations I've seen in other mediums. His miserliness isn't quite as screechy. He's just a cheap old bastard who doesn't have much use for other people. Whatever shell he built around his soul strips him of his humanity to the point where he doesn't feel the cold that nearly freezes his poor whipping boy of a clerk.



One of the nice things that I enjoy about discovering accessible classics is that you often find a shared spark of the collective human experience. When I read the scene of Scrooge chastising the men who came to collect for the poor, I heard the same perfectly rational and completely heartless arguments I hear fiscal conservatives sometimes make about poor people being poor because they're unwilling to work or undeserving of aid. It's the same sort of blanket statement minimalist bullshit you hear from people talking about welfare cheats and it's complete anathema to the spirit of the holidays.

What else is there to say? I liked the story, I liked that the spirits were slightly more mysterious and eerie than I always imagined them to be, and I liked the peculiar way Dickens wrote. I haven't read too much Victorian fiction but I've read a tremendous amount of stuff that parodies Victorian fiction and it's funny to see how oddly postmodern it scans to my modern sensibilities. Dickens is an odd mix of ominous narrator and focused POV storyteller, with the occasional asides to address the reader directly. It was jarring at first, but I eventually grooved to it.



I'm really happy I was forced to read this book.

I read somewhere recently that the vast majority of people who have claimed to watch classic movies like The Godfather haven't actually watched them. I don't actually think they're lying, but rather that the tropes and images of those movies have so completely invaded the public consciousness that we feel as though we've watched them from beginning to end. When I saw A Christmas Carol on the syllabus, I felt that feeling. What I needed to learn was that knowing the story doesn't mean you know the book. It's incredibly rewarding to see the tale directly through the eyes of the creator and to get a sense of what other creators drew from the source material.



Do you want to know the secret story of how A Christmas Carol ends?

I've been collecting comic books since I was a little kid. These days, the stories are geared toward mean old dudes like me, but back in the day they were a little more kid friendly. Marvel Comics released a Christmas Special back in 1991 that told the story of Franklin Richards, the young child of Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic. As he's going Christmas shopping with his mother, he spies an old man wearing Victorian era clothes and wrapped up in chains. He's Jacob Marley and he's decided to lie down into the New York City snow until he fades from existence. Through a bunch of self-sacrifice and courage, Franklin manages to break Marley's chains and everyone has a happy Christmas. It's a terribly sweet story and a wonderful coda for Dickens's book. Go check it out.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Rare Exports is the kind of idea that should have been made a long time ago.

Most of the big Christmas horror films I can think of involve some nut stabbing people during the holidays, which is fun and all but leaves the holidays as little more than dressing for another run-of-the-mill slasher flick. Very few major horror films actually tweak with the roots of the Santa Claus myth, which can actually be pretty horrific. Legends of naughty children getting dragged away by demonic woodland spirits to be thrashed and disemboweled and cast into Hell are the kind of stories that would have terrified me as a child, yet we really haven't seen the definitive Krampus story.

Well, look no further.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is there!


Once upon a time, in a tiny town in Finland, an excavation team uncovers something terrible in the depths of a lonely mountain. Shortly thereafter, a band of hunters discover something has butchered their herds. As the mystery deepens and naughty little children disappear, one little boy follows the clues that lead him to the dark heart of the holiday season.

Thus begins the tale of Rare Exports. The whole movie has a sort of Lovecraftian vibe to it. It's all about isolated locales and ancient secrets, only the heart of the matter is jolly old St. Nick. On paper it sounds ridiculous, but the movie plays the concept with deadly seriousness. The movie isn't particularly campy or humorous and its seriousness keeps the movie engaging.

I like foreign horror films for the same reason I keep watching the travel channel: it's a great peek into the weird foibles of another culture. One of my favorite aspect of the movie is the Finlandishness of the whole thing. The film focuses tightly on a father and son who make their living in the wilderness and the chill of the countryside is almost tangible. It's rough, wild terrain they live in, and the people who make their lives there are a hardy bunch.

One of the most unsettling images in the movie are the wooden dolls left in the place of naughty children. They're creepy and primitive and brought back memories of the stick crosses from The Blair Witch Project. Looking at them, you can't help but imagine the vicious and subhuman mind that created them.



Now, while there's a lot of stuff I enjoyed about the movie, not everything worked. Spoilers here, but we discover that the creepy old man the heroes have chained up is merely one of Santa's helpers. We never actually see the Santa monster throughout the movie. It's clearly meant to be something grand and terrible and probably out of the filmmaker's budget. Still, there's a lot of tease for little payoff.

Also, the little boy hero becomes a little bit too competent and capable towards the end. He starts out as a quiet, nervous boy with a strained relationship to his father, but by the end of the film he becomes Rambo, dangling off helicopters and charging the horde of buck-nekkid Santa men. By the end of the movie it felt more like a child's wish-fulfillment fantasy than a character arc.

I don't know if this is a movie I'll keep coming back to, but I could see this being a sort of cult film. It was playing in the art house circuit in NYC when I caught it and I'm sure it will be passed from dorm room to dorm room. So, basically, if you ever wanted to see Santa Claus done properly scary, this is probably the best example you'll find.