Today, Universal Studios and Legendary unleash a new holiday horror in theaters everywhere, Michael Dougherty’s Krampus, and to get you guys ready, Daily Dead brought back highlights from the film’s press conferences held earlier this week.
Check out what co-writer/director Dougherty, as well as a trio of the movie’s co-stars—Adam Scott, Toni Collette and Allison Tolman—had to say about working on Krampus, and be sure to look for the film in theaters this weekend.
Toni Collette on what she loved about Krampus: There are a lot of things that I like about this movie. I have never read anything like it and I haven't seen anything like it. I guess the ultimate message is, you know, for those who've lost their sense of spirit, faith, and connectedness at Christmas. It's about family. The family finds their way. They have been completely disconnected and this is them uniting and learning to appreciate each other again, and really express their love for each other, only when faced with the worst possible situation.
It really surprised me. I think it's so original and it's like nothing I've ever done before. I got to do things that I'll probably never do again, like wrestling with a demonic angel bitch with a very active tongue [laughs]. It was actually just a really strange and interesting physical experience. And I really love that this story feels like a John Hughes film, like this kind of dysfunctional family and they're really assertive, witty, and dry. Then it just fully swings into something else and I just love being shocked that way in any film or in anything. The element of surprise is so rarely successfully implemented these days. You can see what's coming. This is totally shocking and I love that.
Allison Tolman on the message of Krampus: You know, I think one of the fun things about this movie is that it's really about those sort of common Christmas movie themes, which I like. I think everybody likes the spirit of the season, and the importance of family, so it's just this bad guy... and this is a really, really bad guy. It's a monster. So, you see, the struggles of the family having to band together to get through the holidays are the same as any Christmas movie. That really spoke to me and I thought that was a lot of fun to kind of turn that on its head.
Michael Dougherty discusses the visual process for him on Krampus: I used to be an animator in traditional animation. My first job out of college was doing animation for Nickelodeon and MTV, so drawing is something that I used to do a lot more of. I really love it and so when it comes to developing a script, stories, kicking around ideas, I'm always sketching and doodling.
If I get writer's block, especially sketching is a great way to get over that. When I was working with my co-writers Todd Casey and Zach Shields, a lot of times we'd just be bouncing ideas around and I'd be in a sketchbook drawing Krampus or the creatures and things like that.
So one of the first get-togethers we had, we went to a bar in Hollywood and were just chewing the fat, trying to figure out the story and that's where the first sketch for Krampus happened. Then it became an evolutionary chart from that really rough cocktail napkin sketch all the way to a 3D model through to an eventual final creature. But I love doing visual development while writing, I think it’s really important.
Adam Scott on collaborating with Michael Dougherty: Michael's great. He's a really collaborative director, really imaginative guy, really smart, great writer and just has a real childlike enthusiasm for what he's doing. He loves giving people a fright, and he loves creatures. He and I grew up in the ’80s, and we're [a] similar age.
The first time I sat down with him, he said he wants to make a movie to go alongside the Amblin movies of the ’80s. That's what I grew up on, those are my favorite movies—Gremlins, Goonies, Poltergeist, E.T.—this kind of vision of suburbia in the ’80s, and something unsettling the domestic bliss that we were all supposed to be living out. It was a really interesting little subgenre. I saw the movie for the first time last night and was so pleased that he more than pulled it off. He really made one of those movies, and I [am] really happy to be in it.
Michael Dougherty on tackling a family-friendly horror movie: It's not a genre that's done very often. A lot of horror movies are squarely aimed at teenagers, which is why most horror movies involve five dumb teenagers going off into the woods and getting killed off one-by-one.
But a lot of the movies I grew up with, again, it's that Amblin era. It's that 1980 to 1987, 1988 maybe, where you had Gremlins and Poltergeist, or even Dark Crystal. There was just a great chunk of time when movies were willing to mix up genres and they were frankly willing to scare kids. Because I think back then movies gave kids more credit then we do right now. They knew kids were braver and more courageous and we didn't think to make everything so kid-safe, necessarily. I personally believe that it's okay to give kids a healthy dose of fear every now and then because you teach them how to deal with anxiety and stress and fear. You don't always have to round all the edges.
Poltergeist was probably one of my all-time favorites because it's about a very suburban, American family, which really if you look at the movie in the beginning the family is sort of disconnected. They're all off watching their own TVs, but by the end of the movie they've gone through living hell together, literally, and they shuffle down and go into this hotel room together. But at least they're together.
Allison Tolman on finding her inner badass while on the set of Krampus: That's what sold me on it. We had a little bit of stunt training. Just basically like how to fall and not hurt yourself and curve your spine so you don't bang your head and things like that. I was pretty nervous on the first day doing all that stunt work because I had never done that kind of thing before, but then by the end of the day I was ready to dive on the ground, and roll around with the bear and everything, and do my own stuff. It was fun. It was hard, but it was fun.
Adam Scott chats about his experiences on the set of Krampus: It was actually probably like 70 degrees or something. We were all sweating underneath our jackets, scarves, hats, and stuff. It was really fun doing that. We were in this fake snow up to our waist and trying to trudge through it. We had to take our shoes off. We were all barefoot in those snow scenes, because this silicon material that they used for the snow would suck your shoes right off of your feet.
It was exhausting trying to get through that snow as fast as you can, cock a shotgun, and point it at an imaginary snow beast—but really fun. I love that stuff. My favorite movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark, so getting to run around and do that stuff is a dream come true for me. I love doing it. Michael really smartly had knocked these sequences out, so it was easy to figure out exactly where we were at any given time, there was no chaos or anything like that. It was really concise and fun. It was great.
Toni Collette on the playful tone of Krampus: This has its tongue firmly wedged in its cheek. It retains a sense of humor and it also has this giddy kid-like quality imbued in it. The creatures alone are amazing—they use a teddy bear for god's sake. I imagine kids are going to love it. It is kind of a family film if you have kids of a certain age.
Michael Dougherty on how Krampus takes on the current state of the holidays: Something I really want to make sure we get across is that it's a Christmas movie at its core. It's not just a slasher movie or a horror movie or even just a monster movie. It was important for us to retain the Christmas spirit and actually have something to say about the state of the holiday. So that meant really examining Christmas movies as their own genre.
And what a lot of them have in common are families struggling to deal with each other and deal with Christmas. We can just go down a long list of Christmas movies and they're almost all about that idea: A Christmas Story, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, for example. Every single one is, “Here comes Christmas and some of the family can't quite handle it. And Mum dropped the turkey again.”
So I think we're all subconsciously aware of those tropes, so the idea of letting a horror movie invade that and forcing these families' fears to really come to life in a completely different fashion, that was just too tempting to resist. I'm always watching movies to figure out, "How would I turn this into a horror movie?" I just run that way. Romantic comedies especially [laughs].
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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