12 best holiday horror movies
4. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
Let’s face it: most of the films on this list are pretty bad. Now, they can be “fun bad” or “shockingly bad”, both of which are usually pretty safe bets for a friend-focused holiday party or whenever you’re feeling a tad Grinch-like. However, just because a movie is a holiday horror film doesn’t mean it’s bound to be panned by critics. Some of the movies here are, surprisingly enough, pretty good.
Take Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, which has won several European Awards and holds an 89% percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert even gave it three and a half out of four stars, going so far as to call it “a rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking… This is an exemplary horror film”.
Even horror fans need to push aside the cheese plate every once in a while. Sometimes, you just want a good movie.
Rare Exports begins with Subzero, a British research company. They’re in a remote part of Lapland, the northernmost region in Finland. The team is investigating a fell, a sort of barren mountainous land feature.
Reindeer troubles
It turns out that the fell is actually an ancient burial mound constructed by the indigenous Saami people. Disregarding any and all horror movie tropes about ancient, buried evil, the team begins to dig. They’re also being observed by two local boys, Juuso and Pietari.
Pietari’s father, Rauno, is a local reindeer slaughterer. However, he’s been having a hard time keeping up with the bills, as it appears that the reindeer have been slaughtered by some mysterious predator. Probably wolves, thinks Rauno, or maybe something those Subzero people have done. However, the savvy audience member may start to think that something far worse is stalking both the herd and its herders.
When Rauno goes to complain to Subzero and seek retribution, he finds only a huge pit at the top of the fell and no company employees. Things get worse when his wolf trap captures a strange, violent old man. Later, young Juuso goes missing, replaced by a creepy straw effigy. Rauno, Pietari, and Juuso’s father Piiparinen must make their way to the American base in order to put things right and defeat an ancient evil.