Holiday Pick: Carnage for Christmas
Come for the Christmas, stay for the Carnage.
It’s Xmas, and I haven’t started this yet, so I’ll be brief. My holiday pick for this festive day is Alice Maio Mackay’s 2024 “transgender holiday film” Carnage for Christmas. The film follows Lola, a trans true-crime podcaster who returns to her repressive hometown to find a true-crime mystery of her own.
I’ve talked about Carnage for Christmas in the past. I’m a big fan of the low-budget, high-concept genre productions of Alice Maio Mackay. The young filmmaker already has an impressive body of work, films including So Vam and T-Blockers. Thus far, Carnage for Christmas feels like the director’s most accomplished and thorough film. Carnage is possessed of a particular dynamism, accentuated by the film’s gonzo editing, courtesy of The People’s Joker’s Vera Drew.
For Xmas, it’s hard to beat a horror flick, and the field these days is crowded. From the tradition of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) to a modern retelling of Silent Night, Deadly Night released this year (and which I haven’t managed to see yet), there’s obviously a craving for films that twist the yuletide cheer into something darker.
I’m fond of Noah Berlatsky’s piece called “Die Hard’s Reactionary Values Make it a Christmas Movie”, in which Berlatsky convincingly settles the annoying debate implied in the title. Berlatsky writes that “U.S. Christmas films are often less about Christ’s commandments and more about celebrating a retro vision of wholesome Americanness”, and that this is why Die Hard qualifies.
Using this metric, most Christmas films come into clarity, including Black Christmas, where the implicit sinfulness of the sorority draws the attention of a mysterious murderer, who punishes the sorority’s residents. Carnage for Christmas, on the other hand, shapes a kind of reverse Christmas story, an anti-Christmas-movie, where progressive values triumph and queer community thrives amidst threats.
So this Xmas, embrace the anti-Xmas of Carnage for Christmas.