Mainlining Christmas

30 Days of Night is a high-concept vampire survival movie with the gimmick of being set in a town so far north a single winter night lasts for thirty days. That last part is real, or at least real enough: the closer you get to the North Pole, the longer winter nights become (the North Pole itself has one night and one day a year, a detail I wish more movies about Santa would incorporate). The town where this is set is also real - it's the northernmost location in Alaska, now called Utqiagvik, though it went by Barrow in 2007 when this movie was made. I should note that 30 Days of Night never mentions Christmas, nor are there any major holiday decorations (there are some white string lights early on, but it's not clear whether these are meant to reference Christmas or simply decorative). In short, there's nothing in the dialogue or on screen suggesting this is set at or about Christmas in any way. So why am I talking about it? The answer, of course, is built into the premise...

I always love stumbling across a Christmas movie while catching up on genre fare I missed. Is that weird? Most likely, but then so is this movie, so that's appropriate. I should acknowledge this is one of those times viewers of the film are likely going to be surprised to hear it described as a Christmas movie, as references to the season are relatively sparse. However, the timing is unambiguous and noted on multiple occasions - in fact, the movie goes out of its way a few times to keep Christmas present. There's no reason that Orlok's familiar needed to be captured in the Christmas market, for example, but the movie drops in that detail. The second half of the film is explicitly set during the holidays (possibly the 24th through 28th, though I'm making a few assumptions to get that specific), which is plenty to cement this as a Christmas movie, albeit a subtle one. Backing up, Nosferatu is a remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent horror film, which in turn was an uno...

Fair warning: this is the first installment in this franchise I've seen, so if there's context in the first movie that provides depth or meaning to its sequel, or if subsequent films build off the ideas or characters introduced here, I honestly don't give a damn. That was harsh. Let's back up. The Conjuring is a series of interconnected movies that, depending on how you define the term, may constitute a shared cinematic universe. I'm a little reluctant to use the designation, because - to my way of thinking - a shared universe is a phenomenon generated when multiple franchises share a single setting more expansive than any single component. The Conjuring movies, as I understand them, are built around the characters of Ed and Lorraine Warren, with a handful of spin-offs following associated characters (or entities, if you prefer) introduced in the core movies. Since the spin-offs are offshoots of the core franchise, this is still a contained series, at least in my op...

Introspective and slowly plotted, The Eternal Daughter is a sort of ghost story featuring very few (if any) supernatural elements. Instead, the movie employs genre elements from gothic ghost stories to explore the way we're haunted by memory and our relationship with the past and those we've known. To clarify, none of the "genre elements" are used to evoke fear: this isn't trying to frighten us, but rather pull us into an ephemeral state of being where the line between reality and imagination is blurred. Depending on whether you find yourself on this movie's wavelength, you're either going to find all this deeply moving or about as boring as a pile of rocks.  To be perfectly honest, I think my experience was a bit of both. I don't say that as criticism. The Eternal Daughter is a gorgeous, evocative film centered around two phenomenal performances, both from Tilda Swinton (more on this in a bit). I think this is a successful, artistic work that achieves...

This 2023 Canadian movie is difficult to categorize. For purposes of marketing, it appears to be getting classified as some sort of horror/comedy or comedy/thriller, but - aside from a couple brief shots that feel as if they were wedged in as an excuse to connect it to the popular horror genre - this is really more a Christmas comedic fantasy. It's admittedly in the grey area between genres, but it's closer to something like The Bishop's Wife  or even last year's Dear Santa than It's a Wonderful Knife . The nebulous genre isn't an issue; the fact it's not all that good, however, is. That's also unfortunate, because the movie has a lot of potential. The premise is bonkers in the best way possible, and there are a handful of twists and concepts that are brilliantly inspired. Sadly, the pacing is off throughout, the ending is underwhelming, and whatever lore is supposed to be underlying this fails to coalesce. In addition, the movie is light on the sort of...

Another in a shockingly long line of high quality Shudder Christmas horror flicks, Brooklyn 45's premise, structure, and setting make it a bit of an outlier. The movie is set in real time during the evening of December 27, 1945, almost entirely within the confines of a locked room in a Park Slope brownstone. The cast functionally consists of six actors, all but one of whom is over 50. The movie is extremely well researched by writer/director Ted Geoghegan, who manages to deliver something that feels grounded without relying on cliches. The characters are written and performed like people, rather than stereotypes of how we imagine 1940s military personnel to speak or behave. At the same time, you can catch flourishes in the performances and direction borrowed from 1940s melodramas, enhancing the sense you're watching a fusion of past and present. The movie plays with this idea in the opening and closing, too: it begins in black and white, looking for all the world like it was sh...

1997's second-most famous movie about a sociopathic felon (played by an iconic Hollywood star) taking control of the aircraft carrying him across the country and forcing the protagonist to fight to minimize the number of innocent victims, Turbulence has mostly (and understandably) been forgotten. But unlike Con Air, Turbulence was set on Christmas Eve (aggressively so, as we'll discuss in a bit), so that's the one we're going to be talking about. I should acknowledge comparisons to Con Air are entirely surface level: Turbulence is a relatively contained suspense movie owing as much or more to '70s disaster flicks as '80s action, while Con Air is a grandiose action/adventure that seems to wear its "Die Hard on a plane" designation like a badge of honor. Turbulence has a minimal cast and with minor alterations could probably have been made on a shoestring budget, though somehow they managed to balloon this into costing 55 million dollars (roughly 110 mil...