Sleigh
2025 · 10m
Directed by MK Kopp
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, mythic
On her first night back in her small hometown, Trish joins friends at the local bar, where they recount the legend of a well-meaning mall Santa condemned to a brutal death on Christmas Eve, followed by six mysterious murders twenty-five years later. Now, twenty-five years to the day, they tell her ominously, the stage is set for the third installment.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A horror-comedy that weaponizes small-town myth-making and treats a cursed Santa with the dead-serious mythic weight of a folk tragedy — it's exactly the kind of premise that sounds ridiculous until you realize the film earns every ounce of its tonal weirdness.
Kopp orchestrates a formally clever descent from nostalgic bar banter into genuine dread, positioning the film within a lineage of folk-horror that respects both the ritual of storytelling and the curse narrative's ancient architecture.
The decision to make the Santa legend genuinely mythic rather than campy — to let the tonal shift from comedy to dread actually *land* — hinges on a single sustained commitment that transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring.
Reviews
The film combines this mythical quality with the awful incident at its root and the childlike pleasure Trish's friends gain from scaring her to make itself into an illustration of the ingredients that go into making a Christmas themed slasher. Of course, this red lit scene is only one of three acts. The other two reliably come with golden, gooey sweetness and gory violence in heaping portions.