directed by Yudai Yamaguchi
Japan
47 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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It's been a few years since I've seen this, and considering that the season has rolled around once again and I'm running out of Christmas horror movies (I have been running out of Christmas horror movies for several years now), and the fact that Kazuo Umezu recently passed away, I thought it was time for a rewatch. This might lead to me rewatching the other Horror Theater films, actually - they're all really solid.
Present opens with its main character, Yuko, in a flashback to her childhood, awake in bed after a strange dream. It's almost Christmas, and Yuko's parents remind her that Santa is always watching, and that he brings presents to good children, but if you're bad, he'll "come get you". This flashback sequence ends with Yuko looking out her window with a big grin, and it's implied that she sees something, but what happens next - if anything - is kept ambiguous for the whole film.
Next we see Yuko, she's an adult with a rowdy bunch of friends. It's Christmas again and everybody goes to stay at a hotel to have some fun. Yuko's the quiet one of the bunch, but she's making moves on the guy she likes, except... all this Christmas stuff seems to leave her really uneasy. We as viewers can tell she's got some heavy unaddressed trauma surrounding whatever happened to her that one night as a kid. Actually, this entire thing feels like it's about unaddressed Christmas-related trauma. Every cheery holiday thing Yuko sees seems to set her on edge, and it only gets worse when she sees the clerk at the hotel is a guy dressed like Santa.
This might turn out to be a longer review than warrants a 47-minute movie because I honestly think this thing is so interesting. There aren't many Japanese Christmas horror films, but those that exist put such a refreshing spin on the genre that I wish there were more. Santa in Present feels like an ancient god, capricious and vengeful, omniscient, ever-changing. The extent of Yuko's friends' involvement in the story is basically to be slasher fodder, but the film establishes that they all see Santa differently according to whatever their childhood idea of him was: one of them sees him as a woman, since her feminist mother told her Santa was a woman, and the other sees him as his father, presumably because he caught on early that Santa was actually his parents. Yuko sees what she was told Santa was: a big white guy with blue eyes. And remember the "come and get you" part? That's kind of the key here.
This movie packs so much gore into such a small space that it almost ruins the pacing sometimes. Although the elements like Santa being some kind of wrathful shapeshifting god are what make Present stand out from the slagpile of Christmas horror, it does at times feel like a long slasher movie chase sequence with a little tiny plot attached. There's a lesson here about being good and responsible - I've read a few other Umezu manga where the message is basically "bad girls get punished" - but for the most part we're watching it for the creative kills. (The film was certainly directed by the right man for the job: Yudai Yamaguchi is responsible for such films as Meatball Machine and Battlefield Baseball.) The overall atmosphere is unsettling and the lack of dialogue makes everything dreamlike - the characters have to be responsible for acting out the story rather than giving it to us via exposition dump, so a lot of the backstory only exists in what can be put together by the viewer through vague context clues.
I would love to someday see this in better quality than 240p on YouTube with the opening theme music muted to avoid a copyright strike. I just love the idea of Santa delivering gory retribution for "denigrating Christmas".
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