Carnage for Christmas had its Montreal première at Fantasia 2024, 19 July.
With her friend Riley (Olivia Deeble), Lola (Jeremy Moineau) runs a successful murder podcast known as Nancy Crew – a name which alludes to a popular fictive amateur sleuth while punning on the programme’s queer constituency. Like Alice Maio Mackay, the director and co-writer (with Benjamim Pahl Robinson) of Carnage for Christmas, Lola is a trans woman, loud and proud – but even though her endless enthusiasm for true crime began when she chanced upon a young girl’s hidden corpse back in her (fictitious) home town of Purdan, she is nonetheless reluctant to be returning for Christmas to the place she fled shortly after transitioning when she was 16.
There is a legend dating back to the 1930s of a Purdan resident – known as The Toymaker for his annual custom of dressing as Santa Claus and gifting the town’s children with hand-crafted playthings – who one day snapped and murdered his entire family. Now as Lola stays with her sister Danielle (Dominique Booth), and catches up with old friends and enemies, the Toymaker – or at least someone resurrecting his mask and myth – impossibly returns, leaving a trail of bodies from the town’s small queer community which seems to be leading straight for Lola herself. Undeterred and in her element, Lola starts to play detective in the same way that someone else is playing killer Santa, and uncovers corruption, cover-ups and crimes connected to her town’s and even her own history.
Horror tropes are both fixed, and highly flexible. Not only has the slasher been done to death, but even the Santa slasher is now a well worn subgenre – but Mackay brings her own touch by queering (and Australianising) these otherwise familiar terrains, and unearthing the rot at the heart of parochial bigotry. Purdan is “a town of fucking Karens” and “a small town filled with small people”, where prejudice is the norm and ranks readily close – and here, like in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), the greatest horrors are denial, self-loathing and the need to conform.
What Carnage for Christmas lacks in budget it makes up for in gonzo élan, with the ubiquitous Christmas lights bathing everything in suitably giallo-esque colours. There is some over-the-top pantomime gore, too silly to be truly nasty, but the emphasis here is more on detective work than slaying. It is a cheap, fun cracker of a movie, good-natured in keeping with the Yuletide spirit, and smart enough to find a monster bigger than a mere murderer in a mask – town-sized even. Still, be warned: its protagonist, though as plucky, determined and uncompromising as Nancy Drew herself, also comes with more than a little self-righteous smugness. The film’s moral paradox – an interesting one – is that, in exposing and bringing down the evil at the heart of Purdan, Lola is also effectively stopping future progress there. Still, as her boyfriend Charlie (Zarif) points out in a line that might apply as much to trans identity as to any community with history: “I guess you can paint over the walls of a haunted house, but the ghosts are still there.” No matter what changes are brought about, the same oppressive system always seems to remain in place.
