Holiday Fear
2017 · 4m · United States
Directed by Nicholas Payne Santos
Genres: dark comedy, horror, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
In the final act of a Christmas slasher, a young man tries to reclaim his manliness and impress the final girl by finishing off a killer in a Santa suit who may not be as dead as he looks.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Christmas slasher that subverts the final-girl formula by making the hero's toxic desperation to prove himself the actual horror—Santos is weaponizing genre convention to skewer masculinity, which is exactly the kind of premise that makes other scouts nervous and makes me pay attention.
The film's formal intelligence lies in its precise inversion of slasher codes: the timing of reveals and the careful staging of masculine failure within the genre's visual language demonstrates a director working in deliberate conversation with the tradition he's dismantling.
What elevates this beyond a one-joke premise is Santos's decision to play the threat ambiguously—keeping us genuinely uncertain whether the killer is actually incapacitated forces the audience into the protagonist's delusional headspace, and that single narrative choice transforms satire into something unsettling.