Director – SpookyDan Walker, Screenplay – Jessica Luhrssen & SpookyDan Walker, Producers – Esther Goodstein & Jessica Luhrssen, Photography – Graham Robbins, Music – Scott Glasgow, Visual Effects – Cullen Wright, Visual Effects Supervisor – Tammy Sutton-Walker, Makeup Effects – Vincent J. Guastini, Production Design – Matt Eskew. Production Company – Bad Juju Productions/Spookydan Entertainment.
Cast
Barry Bostwick (Santa), Kristina Klebe (Alexi), Susan Slaughter (Dahlia), Hannah Wagner (Sadie), Diane Salinger (Cherry), Stephen Ford (Sean), Joel Hebner (Krampus/Officer Anderson), Michael Galio (Sheriff Bruce), Maude Bonani (911 Operator), Richard Moll (Officer Green), Rich Manley (Brian), Matt Eskew (Jerry)
Plot
As Christmas nears, Alexi is dragged along by her friends Dahlia and Sadie who run the urban exploration video channel called Adventure Girls. They break in to the old abandoned Santaland amusement park. There they are pursued by a monster but saved by an old man. The girls have difficulty believing it when the old man explains to them that he is Santa, but has retired, and that the monster pursuing them is Krampus. As Krampus comes after them, they are forced to confront the truth of this.
There have been a great many Christmas films ranging from classics like Miracle on 34th Street (1947) to A Christmas Story (1984) and numerous versions of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843). Christmas-themed tv movies are so numerous and so banal that I no longer make the effort to cover them. There is another whole body of darker Christmas films from the Gothic magnificence of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) to the twistedness of Bad Santa (2003), the rampaging Santa monsters of Rare Exports (2010) and the less than rosy versions of Santa that we see in Fatman (2020) and Violent Night (2022).
Slay Belles comes from SpookyDan Walker who previously has credits as a visual effects artist on various high-profile films since the 1990s including Deep Blue Sea (1999), The Last Samurai (2003), Catwoman (2004), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Get Smart (2008) and Star Trek: Beyond (2016), among others. Walker has produced a number of other films including Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival (2012), It Follows (2014) and Spaghetti (2023), although Slay Belles was his first time in the director’s chair. The budget for the film was raised independently – the list of IndieGogo supporters, which are divided into a naughty and nice lists, runs for nearly five minutes of screen time.
(l to r) Adventure Girls Kristina Klebe, Hannah Wagner, Santa (Barry Bostwick) and Susan Slaughter
Slay Belles sits between being both Christmas horror and another work that not quite trashes Christmas but at least takes to it with an alt girls attitude (although for all that is a surprisingly good-natured film on the whole). Barry Bostwick – no less than Brad Majors from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) himself – gets right into the part of Santa, playing the part as a grizzled aging biker. Vincent Guastini contributes a surprisingly impressive looking Krampus costume.
The film was shot around an actual abandoned Christmas village in the midst of the national forest in San Bernardino, California. Slay Belles is a fairly scrappy film, made with low-budget resources but with an undeniable vigour that carries it over the rough spots. The film aims for a Horror Comedy vibe, although achieves more a geniality than out laugh-out-loud moments. The girls all seeming to be having a good deal of fun, in particular Kristina Klebe, who has gone onto more high-profile roles elsewhere, and Susan Slaughter, who the rest of the time advertises herself as a witch and paranormal investigator.
There are some surprising names on the credits. The film is produced by Darren Lynn Bousman, the director of various Saw sequels and Alleluia. The cast includes Bousman as a tow truck driver; C. Courtney Joyner, a writer on assorted Full Moon Productions films, and director of Lurking Fear (1994) as a deputy; a 75 year-old Richard Moll, in the last role before his death in 2023 as a police officer; and Diane Salinger, the waitress who dreams of going to France from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) as Mrs Santa.
