To me, watching a Christmas-themed horror movie during the most wonderful time of the year is more traditional than eating a stuffed turkey, hanging stockings on the chimney, or turning off the radio when Mariah Carey starting whining. Since you can't keep watching the obvious classics ("Black Christmas", "Silent Night, Deadly Night", ...) year after year, we luckily have been blessed with a couple of awesome new holiday-horror in the past decade. "Krampus" was great, "Better Watch Out" was surprisingly formidable, and also this "A Christmas Horror Story" turned out to be a pleasantly horrific experience. This film is pretty much the Christmas equivalent of what "Trick 'r Treat" was for Halloween, and I happen to love that movie as well!
"A Christmas Horror Story" unfolds as an anthology, but the separate tales do not follow each other like usually the case. Instead, they are interwoven and very loosely connected to each other via character links and the fact they all take place in the wider area of a little village named Bailey Downs. As a sort of thin wraparound story, the mighty William Shatner also appears as a local radio DJ during the interludes.
The quality level of the individual segments differs enormously. Personally, I didn't like the tale of the three students privately investigating an unresolved double-murder case in the catacombs of their school. The denouement is fairly grim, I admit, but the whole thing felt too much like the set-up for a lousy found-footage flick. The chapter with the dysfunctional family encountering Krampus has loads of potential, but the running time is too short to properly deep dive into the fascinating folklore of the creature. The makers of this film probably didn't know that, almost simultaneously, writer/director Michael Dougherty was working on a long feature "Krampus" movie. I quite liked the story of a couple witnessing how their young son behaves increasingly strange and menacing after he went temporarily missing during the family's illegal search for a Christmas three in a private forest. The tale contains a few very effective shock moments and the underlying tension between the husband and wife is quite unsettling. But the masterwork of "A Christmas Horror Story" is undeniably the tale where Father Christmas (the aptly cast George Buza) must fiercely battle his own elves, because they turned into ravenous zombies. This chapter is funny, original and exhilarating, and that was before I was even aware of the awesome twist-ending.
