Holiday Horror (pt. III)

P2

Jack Frost (1997)

Ho ho howdy my darling readers, I hope you’re surviving the holiday hustle and bustle and taking care of yourself amid the incoming/ongoing Christmas chaos. I probably say this every year, but the holidays just feel off this time around. Maybe it’s because Hanukkah doesn’t even start until Christmas day, maybe it’s the inconsistent weather, maybe it’s because of the election, maybe it’s because Timothée Chalamet has joined in on the obnoxious-never-ending-press-tour-forced-headline-cycle-and-desperation-to-go-viral that the Wicked press tour kickstarted, but I’ve struggled to feel holly or jolly. I think what actually set off my humbuggery, was last week’s viewing of Love Actually, a movie that was so offensively uncharming that I may never stop ranting about how depraved it is. I mean, if I’d known how misogynistic and moronic last week’s holiday rom coms were going to be, than I probably wouldn’t have followed up with tonight’s holiday horror movies, because I’ve experienced enough trauma for one month. But given last week’s chilly Friday the 13th, and the general spooky feeling that the American empire is crumbling all around us quite steadily (#FreeLuigi), it felt more than appropriate to explore some holiday horror shows that actually intended to be scary. Last year’s holiday horror selections took the myth of Santa Claus to terrifying levels—which is not that difficult considering how frightening his lore actually is—but this year I wanted to think even further outside of the gift box and explore a different variety of Christmas creeps. Up first is a horror film that my best friend and I had both wanted to see for years, but for whatever reason kept choosing to watch other horror films instead. But when we realized that this film was a Christmas horror, we knew that it was time to finally give it a watch—this is Franck Khalfoun’s 2007 film P2. P2 is not the most Christmassy title, nor is it the most coherent title, but anyone who’s ever braved a parking garage knows that this letter and number combo stands for parking level 2—where this minimalistic horror film sets its tale. It was randomly Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, the creators of French extremity horror classic High Tension, who first dreamed up the idea for this movie—basing their premise upon the real-life attacks on women in French parking garages. They chose their friend Franck Khalfoun to direct, and the film was shot in a real, functioning parking garage over the course of two, grueling months. The film immediately opens with Eartha Kitt’s rendition of “Santa Baby”, which, as with all Christmas jingles, can very easily come off as creepy, so it sets the tone for P2 quite well. We are introduced to this eerie, steadily-emptying parking garage, and a very busy businesswoman named Angela (Rachel Nichols), who’s so busy with business that she’s working late at her NYC office on Christmas Eve. Angela is typing and working away as her coworkers begin to file out for the holiday break, saying “Merry Christmas” to her on their way out. An older male coworker of Angela’s comes by to say goodbye, and also apologizes profusely for having “one too many” and coming onto her at the office Christmas party—a tale as old as Kris Kringle himself. Angela forgives him, wishes him a Merry Christmas, and before she knows it, she’s the only person left in this building—or so she thinks. Angela’s family is eagerly waiting for her over in Jersey, especially because she’s been tasked with bringing a bunch of presents for her nieces and nephews, as well as a giant Santa costume for grandpa to wear. But just as she is finally leaving, walking past every empty parking spot until she gets to her own, she realizes that her car won’t start. Out of nowhere, a pale, young, dweebish security guard named Thomas (Wes Bentley) approaches her car and offers to give it a jump. Angela accepts this offer, but still, the car will not start. And to make matters stranger, Thomas asks Angela if she’d like to have Christmas dinner with him, to which she politely declines. So Angela goes back up to the office, calls a cab, and just when it arrives, she is unable to get out of the main entryway because the automatic locks have kicked in. So she goes back down to the parking garage, still lugging a giant stuffed teddy bear and a giant Santa costume, exhausted and frustrated, when suddenly, all of the lights go out. Of course there is no phone reception down there, and Angela has only the light of her flip phone to guide her through the pitch-black caverns of the garage—which would be horrifying enough, but then someone comes up behind her, chloroform rag in hand. Angela wakes, tied-up and handcuffed, in the security guard’s office, which has been decked out in Christmas lights and holiday decor. Thomas has put on the Santa costume she was carrying, heats up some nasty looking food, and basically insists that Angela go on a date with him. Angela very calmly tries to reason with Thomas, explaining how she already has plans and obligations, to which he responds, “You don’t need to be at everyone’s beck and call all the time!” He’s essentially telling this girlboss that she’s gotta slow down and make time for herself, so he’s forcing her to—which is frightening and freakish and still far more romantic than anything that happens in Love Actually. Angela is rightfully scared out of her mind, but she does an excellent job of placating her kidnapper, as well as eventually fooling him. In its short hour and 38-minute runtime, P2 crafts a shockingly creative cat-and-mouse horror experience with a superbly tenacious final girl. It has moments of campy absurdity that would typically land this film among the ranks of all the other cheesy, spooky movies of the early 2000s, but it’s also thoroughly disturbing, and wildly imaginative. It makes excellent use of its limited locations, characters, and maniacal motives, and ultimately builds a compelling plot that had no business being so suspenseful or distressing—but it was! Wes Bentley is an expert at playing creeps, and really embodied the pathetic yet terrifying energy of an incel in this role. Bentley revealed in a 2010 interview that he only accepted this job so he could pay for his aggressive cocaine and heroin addiction, which he dealt with for nearly a decade—and his performance is so focused yet frenetic in this, so in a way it makes sense. As a woman who has had to endure many parking garages, it doesn’t require anything groundbreaking to make this setting terrifying, but P2 had the gusto and the technical precision of some of my favorite, edge-of-your-seat slasher movies. It’s psychologically-horrifying and scary in a jumpy way as well, which is really the ideal balance to aim for in horror, in this horror nerd’s opinion. Let’s move on to a far less balanced but even more bonkers holiday horror movie, Michael Cooney’s 1997 horror comedy titled Jack Frost. Now, this film requires several disclaimers, perhaps not as many as Love Actually, but still, the making of and release of this film was beyond convoluted. This film was shot in 18 days, after losing the majority of the funding that the producers and creators had planned for, which was storyboarded as a big-budget, CGI-based action-horror movie about a killer snowman. As the director once pointed out, Campbell Soup's "Let it Snow" commercial (which similarly features a living snowman character) had a budget "three times" that of his film. Jack Frost was shot on short ends—100-to-300-foot leftovers of 1,000-foot rolls that major film producers would discard—after director Michael Cooney, co-writer Jeremy Paige, and producer Vicki Slotnick stayed in a cabin up in Big Bear and built a rather creepy-looking snowman. Slotnick told Cooney the next morning that she could not sleep because the snowman was right outside her window, and suddenly the idea for Jack Frost was born. The film is about a small town sheriff, still traumatized from capturing their county’s infamous serial killer, a man named Jack Frost. Frost is set to be executed, but in classic Michael Myers fashion, the car he’s being transported in crashes—right into a van that says “genetic research.” Within moments, the already-scary human version of Jack is transformed into a freakish snowman who has fangs made of icicles and a menacing brow made of twigs. This sinister snowman begins his killing spree immediately, and takes out innocent strangers with his sharp icicles, and anything else he can get his snowy paws on—just as when he strangles a woman with Christmas lights then bludgeons her with broken ornaments. This holiday really is hazardous, huh. Most horrifying of all, is a sequence in which Shannon Elisabeth (in her film debut) is taking a bath, when suddenly a carrot appears in the water. Before she can react, the water around her morphs into ice, and she is suddenly enveloped in the frigid body of the evil Jack Frost, who then bashes her head into the shower wall repeatedly. Only, that’s not what it looks like. As the editor noticed when putting together the final cut of this film, it would appear that this snow demon is raping her, so the director added in a cheap sex pun for Jack to say, just to keep some semblance of continuity. I’m not sure what’s worse: planning and writing a scene where a woman is raped by an evil snowman, or simply coming to that creative decision accidentally after you’ve already depicted it. It is one of the most bizarre, disturbing, and unnecessary moments in a horror film I’ve ever seen, and yet it is successfully terrifying—which was the initial goal in making this movie. The original crew behind Jack Frost was disappointed when they realized they couldn’t afford CGI and their snowman would look less scary as a result, but I would argue that this one scene alone makes the entirety of this film scarier. It’s messy and immensely complex, but it’s partly what makes this film such a controversial favorite among other holiday horrors. The rest of Jack Frost is not very scary, of course, as Jack carves his way through town—killing good and bad people alike, and offering lame puns to each victim. Even with a minimal budget, several script rewrites, a swiftly-decreasing supply of the materials in which they built the snowman, and the fact that their production company went bankrupt during filming, Jack Frost would later become a rather beloved cult-classic of the snowmansploitation genre, and eventually had a sequel called Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman. But the film was panned before it was even released to the public, so its release was delayed, and it was demoted to straight-to-video status. And I can understand why, with all of its disjointed storytelling, bad acting, confusing camerawork, and the fact that Shannon Elisabeth’s character is shown drying her hair for 5 minutes before she then gets into a bathtub and gets her hair completely wet again, I was rather perplexed in my viewing experience, to say the least. But the one thing Jack Frost had going for it, was ingenuity and uniqueness. Well, that is until the very next year, when Warner Bros released a film about a man (Michael Keaton) who dies, then is reincarnated as a snowman who messes with his surviving family, that they called, you guessed it, Jack Frost. As this article points out, the Michael Keaton version of this story is actually far more twisted in its concept, and bombed just as hard as the 1997 Jack Frost. The fact that one Jack Frost movie exists at all is wild, but for there to be TWO, almost identical, bizarre snowmansploitation films back to back like that, really gives me a brain freeze. I can only imagine the terror and chaos that was felt by any families who may have picked up this version of Jack Frost from Blockbuster instead of the one made for the whole family… Well that’s enough ho ho horrors for this year! I hope you watch lots of good movies on your Winter break, I hope your holiday season is merry, and I hope that your yuletide is gay. Whatever that means!!