Krampus and the Dark Reality of Christmas

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER. 07, 2015

A Christmas warning, please don’t unwrap this wretched gift until you’ve seen the movie first.  Spoilers under the tree.

Krampus was fun in spite of all the cardboard cut-out uses of some of its stereotypical supporting characters, such as the fat kid or the angst-ridden teenage girl, who are among a dysfunctional family that are at the core of this twisted holiday tale.  Krampus was also horrifyingly disturbing as its main ghoulish demon character arrives, or is rather accidentally summoned, to teach this, and every other family in their neighborhood the consequences of not celebrating the true spirit of Christmas.

The ludicrously psychotic romp of a Christmas-themed movie centers around a disillusioned young boy named Max who gives up his festive spirit of Christmas.  This unleashes the wrath of Krampus who, along with his Gremlin-esque band of ghouls and goblins, lay waste to all the dispirited family members.  Max’s mother, father and sister along with their idiotic, gun-toting uncle and his aunt and their depressingly moronic, zombie-like children.  Also Max’s mother’s drunken hardnosed aunt and his quiet German grandmother who is holding a secret about this ancient evil who comes to punish all the non-believers.

The historical origin of Krampus, a hairy chain carrying creature with cloven hooves and horns of a goat, is not known but is believed to have come from pre-Christian times.  This anthropomorphized creature is said to have come from Germanic paganism and was later assimilated into Christian folklore becoming a sort of devil.  Saint Nicholas become widely known in the eleventh century in Germany where he and his elves would reward children with gifts if they were good all year.  Conversely, as all these religious traditions need their binary opposites, Krampus became the threat to all the misbehaved children that would be punished for being bad.

There is something incredibly morbid about the existence of this factious incarnation of the devil.  To be called a ‘good person’ is to say that one is living within the outlined parameters of what’s expected of them based on any given societies rule book.  To be ‘bad’ is to step outside of those parameters, which is to say any form of growth that doesn’t correlate with family and cultural tradition is deemed bad and as a consequence is punished.

The problem here is this isn’t always a bad idea.  Civilization as a human project was founded on making rules for people to follow in order to maintain a level of command.  Here is where the crossroads can cause a problem because some people aspire to grow, to think outside the box that their parents, their teachers, their employers, their religious leaders and their governments have built so tightly around them to keep them controlled.

This movie is about control and beliefs because we are manufactured by powerful men and thus communicated through a form of mythology, where naïve humans need such beliefs to allow themselves to surreptitiously be confused by the beneficiaries of the very creators, who made all this up in the first place.  Krampus explores this absurdity throughout as seemingly innocent people are being ripped to pieces because they lost the meaning to a holiday that was artificial in the first place, to get to as much money from them as possible.

Christmas is a holiday packaged as this joyful time, yet many people maintain a high level of stress throughout.  These neurotic people wish to be seen as followers, they want friends and family to experience the best time for reasons they probably will never know themselves.  We are all playing along while corporations are fucking cleaning up.  We have to participate because if we don’t we are ‘misbehaving’, we are ‘bad’, we are not following the flow which itself is leading us all to bankruptcy.  Do the corporations, the banks, the governments that hover over us all care?  No, because they are amoral, they are indifferent to our emotional plight.  They want the money to feed their stockholders, that’s it.  Christmas has become a product and we are all part of the packaging, we have been scammed because the house already won.  

Merry Christmas!!!

In the opening moments Krampus shows us who we are with a big fat mirror.  It shows that we are a lost and drifting society, desperately searching for meaning that we no longer have the rights to.  Corporations now own the rights to our very lives, they along with their religious institutions and government sponsors control our every purchase, our every social media update and now sadly our every thought because now we all only think in test messaging and facebook and twitter updates, assigning our very being to these corporate techno-farming camps.  

Krampus ended with this boy Max along with his family, who were all murdered by the Krampus itself or its goblins, to exist in the happiness of Christmas morning but yet trapped in the bubble of a snow globe.  The meaning here is that we can’t handle the so-called darkness of reality itself.  The Krampus within the film and its Alpine folklore ended being an unreality adjuster, where its purpose is to keep the people in the dream state and not thinking about the realities of the very world they exist in.  This movie is about how fucked up we all are as we wake up and go to work for whoever only to go home and fall asleep, only to wake up and do it all over again.  It’s about being good in the eyes of what’s expected and if you fail at this task you are excommunicated, removed from possibly influencing others to think for themselves.