Advent (aka The Krampus Calendar) had its world première at FrightFest Halloween, 1 November 2024, and arrives on UK digital 25 November (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play)
With Werewolf Santa (2023) and Satan’s Grotto (2023) behind him, and Vampire Santa and Zombie Santa in pre-production, writer/director Airell Anthony Hayles is carving out a nice niche for himself in Christmas-themed horror, and his latest, Advent (aka The Krampus Calendar), definitely fits the bill, souring the conventional iconography of the Yuletide season into something less joyful and more demonic.
Advent presents itself as a documentary made by folklore professor Richard Hill (Nicholas Vince) about his former student Hayley Bell (Rasina Pavlova) – and while Richard is its Master of Ceremonies, and his cosily sinister fireside to-camera pieces about Krampus folklore regularly punctuate the film, the bulk of the film purports to be footage shot by Hayley’s friend Charlie Hunt (Cian Lorcan) or by Hayley herself, as she documents her use, over the 24 days leading up to Christmas, of a rare German ‘Krampus calendar’ that she has acquired at considerable cost from the mysterious Mark West (Mark Arnold).
26-year-old Hayley, who had previously written a thesis for Richard on urban myths, wants to test the claim that if you follow the daily instructions of this calendar, “basically you play a Christmas game against the Devil – for your soul.” Where Charlie believes in the paranormal, and is increasingly alarmed by the Krampus calendar and its creepy challenges, Hayley is initially out to debunk any notion of the supernatural – and their ongoing debate about faith and scepticism is the dynamic that drives the film.
From the moment that Hayley opens the first door on the calendar at midnight of 1st December and carries out its direction (“Knock three times on the window that you’ve chosen to eventually throw yourself out of”), things quickly go bump in the night – and as subsequent nights pass, Hayley’s physical deterioration will be documented, as she grows ever more exhausted and sickly with each challenge, in what might be a gradual demonic incursion.
Yet Hayley, still haunted by the horrific death of her mother Julia (Marina Lazaris) the previous Christmas, still living in a suburban two-up two-down with her unpleasant, alcoholic father Stephen (Cory Peterson), and suffering from depression before the experiment even begins, is clearly troubled by unresolved trauma and (possibly hereditary) mental illness, so that she might, in submitting herself to the Krampus calendar’s arbitrary instructions, be opening up her own inner vulnerabilities and unleashing them in an unhealthy way. For in this house fraught with dysfunctional tensions, Hayley appears to be facing her fears and playing out her fantasies in a decidedly Freudian manner, where everything goes back to Mummy and Daddy.
“We could go around in circles debating whether her actions were down to Hayley or her use of the Krampus calendar,” Richard will later comment. “Her footage is often reexamined by people who come away scratching their heads.” This ambiguity between Satanic and psychological readings of Hayley’s fate permeates Advent, which combines elements from the semi-mythic, socially mediated Blue Whale Challenge and Patrick Ridremont’s The Advent Calendar (Le Calendrier, 2021).
Either way, Hayley is a filmmaker – even if her films are amateur offerings for a YouTube channel with very few followers – and there is something about what she shoots, and the responses of her audience, that mirrors all-too-familiar discourse on horror cinema and its reception. When, in speaking of the challenges’ incremental severity, Richard refers to “a gradual desensitisation” in the participant, he is describing an acclimatisation to horror that all fans of the genre will recognise. Similarly, Hayley’s viewers apparently take her acts of on-screen self-harm in their stride, but draw the line at her harming an animal off-screen (“You’re sick, stop this NOW”, one comments), or murdering someone else (“Oh my god, this is for real, I’m calling the police”, comments another).
The alarmed credulity in both these comments is offset by others questioning the reality of what has been shown (“Calm down guys, she’s obviously having us all on, lol”, “Fake with a neon F!”). Hayley too seems caught between her disbelief and her desire to believe in the supposed powers of the calendar, in much the same way that she knows her mother is dead, but still longs for her return. Later Richard will suggest that when the ‘evil’ Krampus calendars first materialised in Germany in the early 1920s, “the whole thing was largely laughed off as a hoax, or an incitement to moral panic” – in words that might equally serve as a response to any horror film (or indeed to the contemporary rise of Nazism). All this commentary serves simultaneously to modulate and muddy our own shifting reception of Hayles’ film – a work of fiction which deploys various reality effects (handheld reportage, found footage, documentary form), and which confounds a woman’s seasonal breakdown with a more diabolical home invasion and possession.
So for all its modest domestic setting and low budget, Advent offers echoes of itself with its films within films. For it holds up a confronting mirror to its own form, insisting that viewers stare into its distorted images and find something uncomfortable about themselves and their own dark desires to open forbidden doors and to let out whatever they may have been hiding within.
strap: Suburban legend: Airell Anthony Hayles’ Christmas horror uses found footage to mirror our own varied responses to genre’s challenges
© Anton Bitel
