Mainlining Christmas

The last fifteen years has seen a number of attempts to adapt northern European Christmas folklore into horror. Rare Exports  gave us a version of the Yule Goat, both A Christmas Horror Story and  Krampus  (as well as numerous low-budget horror flicks) have played with the now iconic demon (though I'd argue the character in the latter more closely resembles the Yule Goat, but that's a subject for another time), and another installment in the aforementioned  A Christmas Horror Story  was inspired by the tomte (which is essentially another name for the nisse). And of course there's the Danish series, Nisser , which Netflix picked up and rebranded, "Elves." Looking further back, there's a strong case to be made that  Gremlins  was in part inspired by the same lore, albeit filtered through WWII stories and the mind of Roald Dahl. Regardless, put a pin in Gremlins, because we'll be circling back. There's Something in the Barn represents a somewhat mo...

In a lot of ways, the second season of Hjem til Jul (Home for Christmas, in English), feels more like the sequel to a movie than a continuing television series, despite technically picking up the instant the first season ended. To be fair, season 1 ended on a cliffhanger with Johanne answering the door and smiling as she sees... someone... who surprises her. That someone, it turns out, isn't someone she knows but is instead a flower delivery person carrying 100 roses, the origins of which form something of a mystery through the season. More immediately, she later encounters a coworker and the two date for a year, the story of which is presented over the course of the first episode. The relationship is nice at first, but by next Christmas, they've grown distant. Meanwhile, Johanne's parents are having their own issues, and it appears they'll spend Christmas apart, leaving the family without a spot to gather and celebrate. Johanne refuses to concede the holidays, so she d...

Hjem til Jul is a Netflix-produced Norwegian semi-romantic Christmas comedy/drama series. As is becoming more and more common, it's produced as a solid block of Christmas entertainment, almost like they surgically removed a holiday episode, regrew it into a full organism, and discarded the rest. Alternatively, you could think of this as a movie that got chopped into episode-length pieces. That might be more accurate in some ways: Hjem til Jul's seasons are six episodes, each approximately 30-minutes long, so at plus-or-minus three hours, it's still within movie-length (though admittedly twice as long as you'd typically find within this genre). Be aware said movie would definitely be rated R. The humor is at times crass and explicit, and while the vast majority of the dialogue is in Norwegian, speakers occasionally switch to English to drop an F-bomb. This review is going to cover the first season - I'll do the second at a later time. Also, I guess there's a thir...