Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 1, 2015, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Spreading some Yuletide fear early, A Christmas Horror Story weaves together four tales of Krampus and other creatures, bringing William Shatner along for the slay ride. FANGORIA spoke to director/producer Steven Hoban and producer Mark Smith about their anthology outing.
A Christmas Horror Story, released by RLJ Entertainment, is set in the fictional town of Bailey Downs, the setting of Hoban’s Ginger Snaps franchise, and also has the Ginger sequels’ Brett Sullivan and Grant Harvey on its directorial team. The tales, intertwined à la Pulp Fiction instead of presented as stand-alones, concern a group of teenagers investigating a crucifixion murder in a haunted school, a family who run afoul of the “anti-Claus” Krampus and another father and mother whose young son comes back from an outing in the woods exhibiting scary behavior. Meanwhile, Santa Claus (veteran Canadian actor George Buza) takes on an unusual army of undead attackers, with Shatner popping up throughout as DJ “Dangerous Dan,” offering Christmas-themed color commentary. This writer spoke to Hoban and Smith after hosting A Christmas Horror Story’s world premiere at this past summer’s Fantasia festival in Montreal.
What were the particular challenges of shooting not one traditional movie, but four smaller films that weave in and out of each other?
STEVEN HOBAN: In a way, that made it hard to shoot but easier to put together creatively. Almost all the writers were people we had worked with on an anthology TV series we did at Copperheart Entertainment called Darknet, and we knew that if each of them was writing roughly 20 pages, that would be very containable and something they could do quickly. We only had a couple of months; normally we spend years on our scripts before we shoot them.
MARK SMITH: Originally, Steve wasn’t going to direct the Santa story, and then [the first Ginger Snaps’] John Fawcett, who was going to do it, wasn’t available. And ultimately, Steve was kind of the showrunner of the film, so it made sense to give that to him.
HOBAN: John was interested, but there was no way he could, just because of his schedule on Orphan Black. I was already prepping it as a producer, and it just seemed smarter to stick with somebody who knew what we really needed. To be honest, though, for that kind of style, John is one of the few directors in the country who, hands down, could have knocked it out of the park. There were a few others on the list, but not very many.
With each writer scripting his or her own individual piece, how difficult was it to weave them all together?
HOBAN: It was fun. It was kind of like clay, where we kept molding until we realized, “Oh, yeah—Caprice [from the Krampus segment] could be the girlfriend of the boy in the basement.” In fact, if we’d had a little more time to shoot, we would have had a scene at the mall at the beginning, where the food drive is starting and you see everybody, which would have tied it all together. It was actually surprisingly easy to pull threads from one story and put them into another, which we learned from Darknet, because that’s a hallmark of that show. The audience loved it when one story would dovetail with another and characters would reappear.
The hard thing was the tone, and I would say that in some ways, that’s a pro and a con for the movie. On the pro side, it’s varied and different; on the con side, you’re with one set of characters in one part of town, and things are building up, and then you go to another set of characters in another part of town, and it becomes more sedate. It changed a lot in editing; we spent so much time on the weaving in the script, and it was almost pointless, because in the editing room, we reworked it and figured it out.
Can you talk a little bit about the Santa story? You mentioned during the Fantasia Q&A that that was the one that went through the most changes.
HOBAN: Well, it started with Doug Taylor, the writer. He pitched a couple of different ideas, and the Santa one was so great and hysterical and funny. But we also thought, “It’s so big, and our movie is so small”; you can’t tell by looking at the film that it was shot in so few days and we had so little money. But I believe that of all the films we’ve made—and our budgets range from $3 million to $30 million—this has the best production values per dollar, by far. So we just weren’t going to do it, but then Mark very smartly said, “You know, there’s nothing more Christmas than Santa, so we really should have him in the movie.” That’s why we decided to bite that off, even though we weren’t 100 percent sure we could chew it.
George Buza is terrific as Santa…
HOBAN: He was 100 percent born to play that role; there was nobody else we ever considered. However, eOne at one point said, “Well, what if we give you more money, so you could go out and get somebody else—get a name to be Santa?” On one hand, that excited us, because if we could have another name in there [besides Shatner], it could really help the film, but…who could possibly be better as this Viking Santa than George Buza? We did start looking around at name actors, and as it turned out, there was no time to get someone else—which pleased Mark and myself, since we didn’t want to switch from George, because, really, who else are you going to get? We had a terrific stunt supervisor named Paul Rapovski, who we’ve done all of our movies with, and George was really game and did a lot of that himself. It’s a very physical role.
Who was responsible for your many, varied makeup FX?
HOBAN: David Scott of Form & Dynamics created all the gore and blood stuff, Krampus and so on, and he designed it along with another artist we’ve worked with on several films, Amro Attia. Amro came up with the designs, worked on them with David and then David took them and made them physical. Again, there was very little money, very little time, but David knows how to roll with it, and he took on the challenge. He’d been dying to do a Krampus in a film for ages, and of course now there are a million Krampus movies coming out…
SMITH: David wanted to play Krampus! But Rob Archer, who took the part, is 6-foot-6 and God knows how much he weighs, and David is smaller than I am. But he is in the movie; it’s very quick, but you can see him as one of the zombies whose head gets cleaved.
Can you talk about working with Shatner, and how you got him for the movie?
HOBAN: Bill Shatner is friends with a visual effects wizard from Toronto, a guy named Bob Munroe, who we worked with on Splice; he used to own the C.O.R.E. company. We’ve known Bob for years, and he’s done effects on most of our movies; he didn’t actually work on A Christmas Horror Story, but he’s a friend of A Christmas Horror Story. We cast the role of Dangerous Dan after we had finished up the rest of the movie, and at that point, we were talking to Bob, and he said, “Yeah, I’d be happy to see if Bill’s interested.” So we wrote up a synopsis and cut a trailer for the movie, and sent that over. Bill looked at it and said, “Yeah, I’ll read the script.” Bob told us later, “I’ve submitted a lot of things to William Shatner over the last 15 or 20 years, and he’s only said yes to three of them, and this was one of them.”
How much of Shatner’s dialogue was scripted, and who wrote his material?
HOBAN: It was all scripted, by a great writer from Calgary named Jason Filiatrault, who’s uncredited. It’s funny; we had many writers take a crack at Dangerous Dan. It was tricky, and it was actually Brian Morey, who is our head of development at Copperheart, who kind of fashioned the movement of the Dangerous Dan character, but all the dialogue ended up being written by Jason, and it was so funny. None of it was ad-libbed; it just looks like it was, because Shatner did such a great job of making it feel natural and real.
Ginger Snaps fans will appreciate that the movie is set in Bailey Downs; was there ever any thought about getting Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle from those films to do cameos?
HOBAN: No, but we really have to now in the sequel!
SMITH: I wish we had talked to you earlier, that’s a great idea!
HOBAN: It never even occurred to us, because there was so little time. And also, we were choosing between whether the movie should take place in Bedford Falls [from It’s a Wonderful Life] or Bailey Downs. I was torn, but when we would mention those two towns to people, most of them, surprisingly, didn’t remember what Bedford Falls was. But enough people do know Bailey Downs, and because it’s self-referential to the movies we’ve been doing for so many years, there’s a fun in that.
