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Further Reflections on ‘Krampus’

On my interpretation of the ending of Krampus, a reader has given a thoughtful commentary that deserves to be quoted in full:

A Christmas Carol can be seen as an early post-Christian artifact, with firm roots in Christianity that late Victorians and early Edwardians were beginning to see, in the light of scientific materialism, as a mythology like any other. This idea of religion as a source of moral guidance, exhortation, and cultural identity is the reason, in my opinion, for the enduring appeal of Dickens’ tale for us today. We are all post-Christians now, [or] at least we swim in a sea of post-Christianity. If we are anti-spiritual, we tend to be children of de Sade, doing good or bad depending on how we feel, because nothing is true and everything is permitted. If we figure “there must be something out there”, we are usually children of Crowley, and we syncretize whatever myths and legends suit us so we can justify whatever we want to do. We can dream of heaven, and aspire to be angels by our own efforts, but our home is hell, really, and most of us make our peace with it sooner or later.

Krampus is clearly a post-Christian film, and eager to mine the riches of Western Christianity for entertainment. As our culture falls further and further from the idea that there can be such a thing as the truth, and a God who is merciful enough to guide us to it, my hope is for signs of Grace. Will God truly lead the blind on their journey, by paths unknown? In presenting a version of hell as a place of punishment for evil, even in jest, does even a trashy movie like Krampus serve the truth unwittingly?

I don’t want to trivialize the plight of atheists and modern pagans who have no malice, but are simply following the indications of intelligent people who have concluded that there is no God. In the face of a seemingly meaningless universe, is the basis of morality simply the skill and persuasiveness of one’s own meta-narrative? One of our foremost moralists is Oscar Wilde, who wrote one of the best post-Christian fables ever written—”The Selfish Giant.” He converted on his deathbed, but during his life, he could not gather the strength to fight past the prevailing materialism of his day. As our peers engage in the same struggle, it seems heartless to think that pop art cannot have some role in turning our thoughts to the eternal. Maybe Krampus can do that, in a way, while not pandering to “Hallmark” Christian sensibilities.

My Comments:

There is a lot to unpack there. However we approach these dense three paragraphs, I think he is correct that Krampus is a “post-Christian” film. As I argued in my last commentary upon it, Krampus is a deeply Christian character (hypothetical pre-Christian roots notwithstanding), but the film is careful to avoid mention of any specifically religious purpose to the holiday that celebrates the birth of Christ. The movie also deliberately detaches Krampus from the plainly ethical purpose that he previously served: His job, as with most of the companions of Saint Nicholas, was to whip or at least threaten naughty children. In the horror movie, however, his job is to mercilessly destroy anyone who loses some nebulous “Christmas spirit.”

Ironically, this revamped and secularized role for Krampus is more in keeping with the maudlin and commercialized notions of Christmas that the movie artfully skewers in its opening scenes than it is with the original purpose of the holiday. After the filmmakers mock Christmas for becoming crass and commercialized, they might have pointed out what Christmas is really about—and what role Krampus might play in it. But they didn’t have the guts for that, or maybe didn’t have the knowledge or insight, so the result is a schlock horror film with a few laughs and a few thrills but not much of a point.

As for the notion in the final sentences of the comment, that Krampus might turn our thoughts to the eternal, I will say that I found its image of the mouth of hell to be quite frightening—but I am also aware that I say that as a Christian. I similarly found the image of hell at the end of The Mummy Returns frightening. Someone of a different background and different viewpoint, however, might find these images of hell merely thrilling in a theme-park or horror-movie kind of way.

Yes, we can maybe dig some deep themes out of Krampus, but I think it is next to impossible if we don’t already have an understanding of the mythological character and the religious basis of the Christmas holiday. As it stands, the movie is mostly an undemanding and shallow thrill ride.

Interpreting the Ending of ‘Krampus’

A few days ago, I posted a review of that cult classic of Christmas horror, Krampus, an exploitation of the recently popular Austrian Advent bogeyman. As I said before, I think the movie is a missed opportunity, a chance to delve into some intriguing lore that instead sticks to the familiar conventions of B-grade horror movies.

The ending of the film, however, is wonderfully ambiguous, so much so that it has led to some online arguments. I refrained from discussing the ending in my review, but I’d like to do so now. I will give the customary spoiler warning, though I will add that nothing I’m about to describe will surprise you.

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Movie Review: ‘Krampus’

He sees you when you’re sleeping, etc.

Krampus, directed by Michael Dougherty. Written by Tod Casey and Michael Dougherty. Starring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, and David Koechner. Universal Pictures, 2015. Rated PG-13.

The folklore character Krampus, who comes to us from Austria and Bavaria, has enjoyed increased international popularity in the last decade, both because of resurgent interest in his land of origin and because any number of artists have found him useful for creating Christmas horror, usually of an ironic variety that thumbs its nose at what has become a materialistic and commercialized holiday divorced from its religious roots.

A knife thrust through a gingerbread man — The *Krampus* aesthetic.

Several B movies about Krampus exist, most having received largely negative responses from viewers. Two more positively received middling-high budget films about this monster do exist, however. One is the William Shatner vehicle Christmas Horror Story, and the other is the film before us now, a cult classic out of Hollywood.

Krampus is a movie hard to categorize. Some call it horror and some call it comedy. It’s a bit of both, a movie with a fair amount of goofy humor as well as some genuinely scary parts. I would argue that it fills the same genre niche as that great classic, Poltergeist: a family-centered horror film peppered with equal amounts of laughter and fear, in which children are frequently menaced but, ultimately, no one gets hurt.

Shoppers fighting in a store — Close-combat shopping.

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Sneak Peak: ‘Son of Hel’

This is a draft of the first chapter of Son of Hel, my novel currently in progress. It is rough, so naturally contains some overused words or wordy phrases. This is to show the expansion of the concept over an earlier version of the same work. There is of course no guarantee that any of the following will be in the final.

I’d like to see that land beyond Pole. That area beyond the Pole is the Center of the Great Unknown.

——Admiral Richard Byrd.

It was the End of the World.

It was a place few mortals had seen—and most who had seen it had not survived to tell. At the pinnacle of the Earth, the Arctic Ocean’s surface turned to ten feet of ice, but beneath that ice, the deep waters still flowed. At the Symmes’ Hole, the very lip of the world—a vast opening 16,000 miles across—the water poured over a great cliff down into the planet’s interior in a massive waterfall that dwarfed every other spectacle on the planet. Deep in the world’s crust, in mazelike caverns fed by this tumbling sea, were light and life and vast civilizations that the men of the surface, crawling like maggots on a corpse, could hardly dream of. The water flowed through these subterranean networks like blood through the arteries until it at last emerged at the Symmes’ Hole of the south, a never-ending waterspout thousands of feet high.

But the Symmes’ Hole at the North Pole was not a mere void: Standing in its exact center, jutting starkly into the sky and supported by no one knew what, was the Black Precipice, a dark, windswept mountain tall enough to rival Everest, entirely of lodestone. This mountain it was that caused all compass needles to point inexorably north.

Though enormous, the Black Precipice was invisible from the distant lip of the Symmes Hole, shrouded as it was in a thick ring of icy mist. Few explorers had glimpsed this terrifying mountain, and most who had, had soon met their deaths in the bottomless drop of the waterfall. Though clever in his inventions, man had not yet built the flying ships capable of crossing that chasm and landing safely on the Black Precipice’s craggy cliffs—so those who dwelt on its rough and barren slopes remained, for the time being, unharried by the rapaciousness of human greed.

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Crazy Christmas Characters: Krampus

Gruß vom Krampus!

Today, as I write this, it is Krampusnacht, so now seems a good time to discuss Krampus, who will be one of the major protagonists in my next novel.

Krampus is one of several bogeymen who orbit Saint Nicholas in the legendarium of the Germanic and Francophone peoples. For whatever reason, Krampus has gained a lot international popularity lately, eclipsing the similar Belsnickel and Knecht Ruprecht, who were, until recently, probably the most popular such characters outside their regions of origin. This is due in part to the internet, but also to the revival of traditions surrounding Krampus in Austria and Bavaria.

If I were to guess, I would suppose that it is his distinctive appearance that makes Krampus popular. The typical “companion” of Saint Nicholas is a bearded and rough-clad character whose dark and shabby appearance contrasts with the saint’s bright and festive one. These figures tend to have similar accoutrements—chains, a wicker basket, and a whip or switch or bag of ashes or some other device to punish naughty kids.

Krampus, however, is a slavering, horned demon-like creature with a long tongue. He still has the switch and basket, but he is considerably more striking and terrifying in appearance than most of his counterparts.

Worth noting, however, is that people outside the areas of Austria and Bavaria frequently confuse Krampus with similar characters called perchten, who are associated with Frau Perchta, a hobgoblin-like witch who comes around at Epiphany (and whom I’ll discuss in another post). The perchten are her minions, similar in appearance to Krampus and celebrated in similar fashion with dress-up and physically intense parades. I am informed that a lot of images or descriptions of krampuslaufen—Krampus runs—that one sees on the internet are actually perchtenlaufen.

Although these two creatures have migrated to different parts of the calendar (Krampus before the Feast of St. Nicholas and Perchta around Epiphany), the similar features suggest similar origins or at least a lot of trading. This is typical of folklore, with concepts dividing and combining and dividing again.

And if we want to get picky, we could also ask whether Krampus and the Buttnmandl, a monster made of straw and wearing huge cowbells, are really the same, or different. The answer is that there’s not really an answer: Trying to define these things is like a fanboy trying to explain away inconsistencies in his favorite franchise. For this reason, too, someone like me who wants to write a novel on all this folklore has to quit at some point, or lump together as many of these characters as possible, lest the cast be overwhelmed with too many, too similar monsters.

In any case, the website SaltzburgerLand explains:

A Percht is not a Krampus, even if similarities certainly exist. Confusing the two is hardly possible, even though the Krampus is on the go only up to 6th December, with the Percht being around only after Christmas. The name is derived from the mythological figure “Perchta”. Both beautiful and ugly Perchten travel around in the harsh nights between Christmas and the Epiphany with the slogan: “To peace, to rhyme and to health”. They should exorcise the dark and cold winter with loud bells and chase away any evil spirits.

The same website helpfully explains the traditional equipment of someone dressed as Krampus:

Tradition dictates the Krampus’ equipment: a fur suit usually made from goat or sheep skin. Large, heavy rumble bells carried on a wide leather belt around the middle of the body. A rod of thin Birch branches or a cow’s tail. And of course the elaborately carved mask. Each Pass has nowadays their own style and sometimes the masks are modern and zombie-like, or, as with the Rauriser Devils, strictly traditional. In the Rauriser Traditional Pass the masks are carved by the members themselves and painted with red, white and black colours. They must meet certain criteria, such as the red fabric tongue and specific arrangement of the horns from a goat or a ram.

The origins of Krampus, like all these characters, are obscure. But they all serve a similar role: They are bogeymen, creatures that threaten children with punishments. The great folklorist Jacob Grimm also saw all these characters as related to household goblins such as kobolds and brownies.

One of the reasons I want to write a novel of Krampus even though Krampus stories have been done (perhaps done to death) a lot lately is because, so it seems to me, nobody who gives these characters a modern take wants to treat them with any respect. Brom in his admittedly entertaining novel Krampus the Yule Lord depicts Krampus and Santa as the last remnants of an ancient rivalry between Norse gods, and the comic book Krampus features a Hellboy-like Krampus unwillingly serving an entire organization of Santa Claus-like characters.

For whatever reason, nobody seems to want to write a story in which Santa Claus is actually St. Nicholas, the St. Nicholas, with all that might imply, or depict Krampus as his servant, reluctant or not, rather than his enemy. Nobody except me, that is.

The reason for this, in Brom’s case at least, probably arises from a decidedly modern hostility toward Christianity, so moderns pit Krampus against St. Nicholas as a supposedly freer, naughtier, less stuffy alternative.

The only problem with that is that Krampus is a decidedly Christian character: The reward/punishment dynamic of the saint and his sidekick developed in a Christian context. In fact, one thing Krampus does, often not mentioned in today’s essays on the subject, is demand that children pray. If they say their prayers, they can escape his wrath. Some of the Krampuskarten, those grotesque but whimsical postcards from the nineteenth century, depict Krampus demanding prayers from children.

Krampus may have some pre-Christian origin (the claims across the internet that he’s the son of Norse goddess Hel have no backing that I know of), but that origin is lost, and even if we could see such a hypothetical pre-Christian Krampus, he would have changed so much that we wouldn’t recognize him.

Book Review: ‘Krampus: The Yule Lord’

If you hate Christmas, then I have a book for you.

Krampus: The Yule Lord, written and illustrated by Brom. HarperCollins, 2011. 368 pages. ISBN: 0062095668.

Krampus: The Yule Lord, a Santa Claus novel for people who hate Santa Claus, is undeniably entertaining, but someone would have to be a serious Scrooge to embrace it unreservedly.

This is, so I understand, the second novel by Brom, an illustrator and game designer who made his debut as a novelist with The Child Thief, a subversion of Peter Pan. He followed that up by taking on the jolly saint of Christmas, reimagining him as a brawny, sword-wielding Norse god locked in a mortal duel with a devil-like Krampus in a continuation of the ancient rivalry between Loki and everyone else in the Norse pantheon.

Since Brom’s first talent is drawing, the book is lavishly illustrated. Both the cover and the illustrations throughout are by the author.

A nude, dancing fairy from Krampus: The Yule Lord — I can hear feminists screaming, “Where are her organs?!?”

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‘Son of Hel’ Sneak Peek

I have a lot of work to do to produce Son of Hel, my next project. Although the story is going to be an action-focused tale of Krampus, the Christmas demon, I want to do it justice in spite of the inherent silliness. My goal is to create a fully realized culture for the North Pole where Santa Claus lives, and to integrate as much existing folklore as I am able.

To that end, I am currently sitting here with stacks of books on folklore and making notes about various kinds of fairies from different cultures in order to integrate them into the society of elves at the North Pole. I’ve also been discovering the various companions of St. Nicholas, figuring out which ones I can combine into a single figure and which ones I must make separate characters.

Although they are of rather recent origin, I am also determined that Santa’s eight-plus-one reindeer will figure in the story. The following is a draft of how they appear thus far. I originally intended this scene to be a raucous party, though the result (at least at present) is surprisingly subdued. That may change in later drafts.

In a few hours it would be the fifth of December, the eve of what those at the North Pole had come to call the First Run. Mistakenly but understandably believing Nicholas to be dead, the universal Church had long ago chosen December sixth as his saint’s day, so that was the first day he delivered toys to children. Compared to Christmas Eve, St. Nicholas Day was a small, brief run with few deliveries, requiring no more than a few hours. But it helped Nicholas and the elves ensure that the sleigh and its accoutrements were in working order and ready for the Big Run, when he delivered toys to children all over the world. The First Run had a high margin of error; it was a good time for troubleshooting.

But the fifth of December, the day before, was not St. Nicholas’s day. It was a dark day, a day of fear, and it belonged to someone else, someone decidedly less jolly—and considerably less generous.

As evening came on, in anticipation of the First Run that would begin in twelve hours, Alpha Squadron congregated in the stables. This squadron consisted of the eight reindeer who had achieved the highest marks on the annual flight test, and for almost a century, the same eight reindeer had held this honor.

In scientific terms, they were Arctic reindeer, also known as Greenland caribou, or Rangifer tarandus eogroenlandicus, and those in the stables of Saint Nicholas were the last of their kind, for their subspecies had been otherwise extinct for almost four decades. It was thanks to the magic of the elves that they had powers of speech and flight as well as unusually long life. The Black Precipice of the uttermost North was a haven for them, just as it had become a haven for the last of the fay folk whom an encroaching modernity had driven from their woods and meadows.

Contrary to popular depictions, they were not tiny. They were huge, muscular brutes with shaggy coats, thick shoulders, and wide, blunt muzzles. Most were bareheaded, for they had shed their antlers the month before once their rut had ended. The only exception was Vixen, the one cow who had scored high enough for Alpha Squadron. Though considerably smaller than the others, Vixen’s tall, sweeping antlers lent her certain air of sober majesty. She would keep her antlers until spring.

In a dim corner of the stable, Comet, formerly the squadron’s captain, brooded atop a mound of hay. Although this was supposed to be a time of revelry, he was silent, and his hard expression had its effect on the rest of the squadron: The others spoke in low voices, giving Comet occasional, uneasy glances. Vixen, somewhat apart from the rest, gazed at him steadily for a minute before she shook her head and sighed.

Continue reading “‘Son of Hel’ Sneak Peek”

‘Son of Hel,’ Chapter 1

I spent the evening working on Son of Hel, a novel about Santa Claus inspired by the famously bad movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The following is the rough draft of the first chapter:

This was the End of the World. It was a place few mortals had seen—and most who had seen it had not survived to tell.

At the pinnacle of the Earth, the Arctic Ocean’s surface turned to ten feet of ice—but beneath the ice, the deep ocean still flowed. Thus it poured, in a vast circle ten thousand feet across, into a round hole penetrating the surface of the globe, forming the world’s largest waterfall. This was the Symmes Hole: The water that flowed into it, lifeblood of the planet, ran through unseen rivers and streams throughout the Earth’s hollow interior, thus becoming the source of the planet’s innumerable springs and wells before it at last exited at the South Pole in a geyser as enormous and deadly as the North Pole’s waterfalls.

In the center of this vast circle of tumbling water, jutting up from the Earth’s unexplored interior, was the Black Precipice, a mountain to rival Everest, made all of lodestone. This mountain it was that caused all compass needles to point inexorably north. Though enormous, the Black Precipice was invisible from the iced-over ocean beyond, shrouded as it was in a permanent cloak of white mist rising from the tumbling water around the Symmes Hole. Few men had glimpsed this terrifying mountain, and most who had, had soon met their deaths in the ten-thousand-foot drop of the vasty waterfalls. Man had not yet built the flying ships capable of crossing the chasm and landing safely on the Black Precipice’s craggy cliffs, so those who dwelt on its slopes remained, for the time being, unharried by the rapaciousness of human greed.

The queen of Elfland, in her chariot pulled by atomies, passed over the deadly falls with no difficulty. Even the terrible winds howling about the great mountain gave her no trouble, as her magical steeds could easily block the frigid gusts with their gossamer wings.

No taller than a thimble, she landed on a level spot overlooking one of the Black Precipice’s sheer cliffs, but as she stepped from her car, she grew to human size—and then grew taller still, at last stopping at a regal height of seven feet. Cloaked in white fur, with a tall crown of intricately intertwined crystal, delicate as a snowflake, atop her head, she walked accompanied on either side by two fairies in golden armor, who bore spears and bows.

All around the Black Precipice’s lower slopes stood a vast city of the elves. Because of the mountain’s extreme magnetism, not a speck of iron was allowed in this place, so the great and nameless city sparkled all over like burnished gold. Every roof was of shining copper, and the high walls around its greatest fortresses were of brass. Gold leaf adorned every doorpost, and the walls of even the humblest dwellings were of marble. Although the waterfalls encircling the mountain thundered perpetually, as the queen approached the city, the noise of the tumbling ocean was soon drowned out by the cacophony of hammers and saws.

Continue reading “‘Son of Hel,’ Chapter 1”

New Project

I have just today begun a new writing project under the working title Son of Hel.

I have long been fascinated with fantasy works that syncretize existing lore, and this particular book will be an attempt to bring together various traditions about Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, and place them in a sci-fi story loosely inspired by the famously bad movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It will feature Black Peter as Nicholas’s faithful Saracen companion, and Krampus as a dark and violent projection of his troubled psyche. It will also feature aerial battles involving magic reindeer and flying saucers.

This will be, for the time being, a side project in addition to the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo. I have no projection at present, though I’d like it to release somewhere around Christmas when I complete it.

Merry Krampusnacht!

Gruss vom Krampus!

This is December 5th, the day before the Feast of St. Nicholas. Traditionally, in Austria and surrounding regions, December 5th is Krampusnacht, dedicated to Krampus, one of St. Nicholas’s companions.

In some versions of the St. Nicholas legend, Santa Claus does not punish naughty boys and girls himself, but has an assistant do it. One such is the devilish Krampus, a hairy, horned demon with a protruding tongue, scourges naughty children with his bundle of birch branches or carts the particularly bad ones off to hell in the wicker basket on his back. Then Santa can deliver treats to the good children on the following day after Krampus has cleared out the riffraff.

In the 1890s, after the Austrian government relinquished control of the postcard industry, colorful postcards featuring Krampus became popular. Most are darkly humorous depictions of Krampus tormenting children like he’s auditioning for a role in Made in Abyss.

A girl with a switch of her own looks to be ready for Krampus — The hunter becomes the hunted.

Krampus has enjoyed some popularity in American pop culture of late, mostly in the form of television references and low-budget horror films, though he also has one wide-release motion picture to his name:

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