Unsettling Christmas Movies for Every Occasion
If you are a queer and/or trans person who is going home for the holidays, it is only natural to spend much of that time yearning for revenge. Why not make your family watch a John Waters movie on Christmas Eve?
FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)
If you are a queer and/or trans person who is going home for the holidays, it is only natural to spend much of that time yearning for revenge. Your family is about to spend a week feigning tolerance of your “lifestyle” while passive-aggressively making you feel unwelcome and uncomfortable at every turn. Why not spend a few hours returning the favor by making them watch a John Waters movie on Christmas Eve? FEMALE TROUBLE is an important cautionary tale about what happens when straight people disappoint queer people on Christmas. It's also an unhinged, disgusting, and deeply funny piece of queer art that will make your relatives squirm. When Edith Massey sadly intones that the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life, lock eyes with your dullest cousin and know they have received your judgment. Your relatives might think they're good at passive aggression, but nobody's gonna out-dramatic a queer person scorned. Not today, bitch.
THE PEE-WEE HERMAN CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (1988)
On the other hand, maybe you're spending the holidays with other queer people. The usual holiday movies don't always hit with queer folks, but we do have our own sources of holiday nostalgia. If you're a Weird Gay like myself, you're at least partially as fruity as you are because you were exposed to the Pee-Wee Herman Christmas Special as a child. This super-sized holiday episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse features appearances and performances from nearly every gay icon in 80s Hollywood, and it's full of winky queer humor that breaks the fourth wall in increasingly funny and weird ways. (For example; Pee-Wee employs a bunch of buff half-naked dudes dressed like porno construction workers building him a room made out of fruitcake, which feels...unsubtle?) The result is a cozy, sweet and gleefully stupid fifty minutes of holiday gay. I dare you to keep a straight face during Charo's lovely performance of Feliz Navidad while a blindfolded Pee-Wee flails through the background trying to hit a piñata. I loved this special when I was a kid, and coming back to it as a gay adult has only made it more fun. It's also available for free AND remastered in HD on YouTube.
INSIDE (2007)
The New French Extremity movement is a horror subgenre known for its nihilism, brutality, and extreme sequences of torture and gore. Naturally, one of the most famous examples of the genre is a Christmas film. INSIDE is a home invasion film set on Christmas Eve, but it's not a weak copy of other Christmas slashers. It's a simple story with complex ideas about holiday alienation and grief that rests on the strength of two incredible lead performances, and it wrings terror out of every creepy lingering shadow. It's a movie about the impossibility of tradition protecting you from trauma in a burning world. It's also a nauseating experience in tension with endless endurance-test gore sequences and a bleak, hopeless finale that featured one of the only scenes of violence that I have tapped out on in recent memory. If that all sounds like a fun holiday outing to you and you live in Chicago, FACETS is screening INSIDE as a part of their Holiday Detours series on December 16th. Check it out unless you're pregnant, in which case absolutely not.
TOKYO GODFATHERS (2003)
On the off-chance that you're looking for a sincere, feel-good holiday recommendation, I promise that there is at least one semi-sentimental movie I actually like. TOKYO GODFATHERS is a wild caper film about three unhoused people who spend their holiday trying to take care of each other while also searching for the parents of an abandoned child. It's twisty and exciting and visually stunning, with sweeping shots and effects and Satoshi Kon's urban fantasy of a Tokyo Christmas vibrating behind every shot. It also has a refreshingly honest and empathetic portrayal of an unhoused gender-nonconforming person, which can be a rare thing to find in any movie, much less an anime film from the mid-2000s.* I get swept away by this bittersweet fairy tale every time I watch it. If you're a queer person finding joy with a chosen family this year, you might like it too.
RABID (1977)
In RABID, an experimental surgery renders Marilyn Chambers into the vampiristic super-carrier for a rabies-like virus that ravages Montreal. Because it's a Cronenberg movie, she has an armpit full of vagina dentata and a passion for psychosexual murder scenes. What does any of that have to do with Christmas? Not a fucking thing other than being set in December, but neither does DIE HARD and y'all have been beating that movie/holiday connection to horsey paste for years. RABID does have one scene where a mall Santa gets gunned down during an outbreak, so there you go. It's a Christmas movie now, just like DIE HARD. Deal with it.
*Content note: the original sub of Tokyo Godfathers has some unnecessarily transphobic language. While some of this is simply and sadly realistic, some is from a poorly-handled translation of the original script. There's no excuse, but nuances of translating gender and queerness between cultures are complicated, and critics of the original translation might appreciate this article on the improved translation that was produced in 2020.