“Krampus” fills that niche of holiday movies with a twist and does so pretty well, as mixing the tropes of your typical Christmas holiday movie with that of another, seemingly disparate genre (such as horror) can result in the kind of movie that satisfies two kinds of cinematic itches in one fell swoop. Like the raunchy comedy glazed with holiday sweetness that is “The Night Before,” here we have a movie about the real meaning of Christmas, but one that explores the consequences of forgetting that meaning, a mixture of the sincere with the horrific, a Christmas present wrapped in shiny paper and concealing something terrible inside. You know how it is around the holidays.
“Krampus” starts out like a Christmas dark comedy, kind of in the vein of movies like “Bad Santa” or “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” as the opening credits play out over scenes of people fighting each other during one of those Black Friday shopping rushes in which people get trampled and killed every year, showing how people have forgotten that holiday spirit and instead have turned this time of year into an ugly demonstration of excess, greed and an ungodly love for deep discounts on electronics. Then we meet our main characters, a well to do suburban family who have mostly become too busy to appreciate the holiday or more importantly each other, and like “Christmas Vacation,” they are visited by their extended gun-loving, redneck family with whom they do not get along, and all of their interactions together are awkward and do not end well.
