The holiday season is upon us, and there is only one solution for dealing with annoying visiting relatives and loads of leisure time -movies.
It doesn’t take much to get people out of the house and in front of the big screen around the holidays, as many movie producers well know. During the past few years, there has been a disturbing trend in holiday movie offerings and the film industry in general, but this year takes the cake.
Along with the usual feel-good, family-friendly flicks and Oscar contenders for the Academy’s notoriously short memory span, horror movies have been creeping their way into Christmas release schedules.
Since 2004, at least one gory, spine-tingling film has been released every year on Christmas Day. This year, audiences will get a special treat with “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem,” which is only scary because the ridiculousness of a sequel to a movie with combined characters from two other separate gore fests is really just uncalled for.
The scarier movie this season, in my opinion, is “Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” Tim Burton’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical. It stars the two most fabulously crazy actors in Hollywood – Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.
What’s scary about this movie is not the maniacal singing of a murderous barber while he hacks the throats of his patrons and passes the corpses on to his crazy meat pie-making wife. What’s really eerie is that the movie is being marketed as the blockbuster of the season.
According to the Daily Variety DreamWorks article, it was originally intended to have a limited release Dec. 21 (now the actual release date) and a wide release Jan. 11. Executives thought people would associate Depp’s Sweeney Todd portrayal with the infamous Jack Sparrow and flock to the theaters.
Apparently, they thought people really wouldn’t mind senseless murder on Christmas as long as there was singing and that guy from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” in it.
As it is, families might end up sitting down with their popcorn expecting the endearing craziness of Sparrow, only to be surprised by a demented serial killer with a cannibalistic wife. Even Disney magic can’t do much with that.
But many families might go to the theater fully aware of the disturbing cinema to come and be perfectly fine with it.
Considering the literal explosion of horror movies over the past couple years (23 released this past year and 42 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times) the success of Sweeney Todd is to be expected. Moviegoers have become accustomed to seeing at least one or two posters for scary movies every time they visit the theater.
Why should Christmas be any different? When people have been forced to see television trailers for movies like “Saw” and “Hostel” all year, with graphic excruciating torture and captivity of other human beings, a little musical throat-slitting might not seem so bad. It’s not like Christmas movies even pretend to be about anything but consumerism anymore. After all, movies are technically a product to be consumed.
Making a film like “A Christmas Carol” with its anti-materialism theme would be self-defeating. Santa’s workshops in movies today no longer involve wood and little hammers. Now, they’re giant mechanized assembly lines reflecting real-world corporate takeover.
The commercialization of Christmas is an unfortunate reality, and the result is the American public’s acceptance of cinema with subjects and themes on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from holiday spirit.
—-Contact Lauren Walck at [email protected]