What doesn’t work is the cascading redundancies that plague the already lean 76-minute running time. Repeatedly, Locke will take several more frames than needed to establish what he is trying to get across. It moves the needle on pacing from deliberate to meandering. Also, repeated ragged reaction shots keep cropping up to ensure the seams remain visible. The camera constantly cuts to everyone else, looking at what has just been done or said, like the cemetery finale in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. You would have to go back to the silent days when Stroheim invented the reaction shot method to find examples of this much overuse. These unsightly globs of fat and gristle should’ve been trimmed off the roast prior to serving.
Of course, none of these flaws matter a fig because Santa Isn’t Real is wicked scary when the rubber mask hits the road. That Santa mask is eerie, like the glistening eye of an enormous sea monster ready to swallow you. The sound of Santa’s voice will make your spine collapse like tinsel. The seasonal violence is well played, lack of budget be damned. And in the end, that is all that matters to the horror audience. The genre crowd is never concerned about the big picture. They are there for the “good parts.” And this has several good parts.
“…maintain[s] the fantasy element of Saint Nick.”
Locke’s most brilliant move is to introduce and maintain the fantasy element of Saint Nick. We definitely see the masked Santa come down and go up the chimney. So, there is a logical argument running through the picture as to whether Santa is real or not. If he is real, then why the mask? I’ll tell you why: slashers in slasher movies need masks. It is that unmoving facade covering the face that makes the homicidal maniac so menacing, like the hood of a cobra. One of the big let-downs of the old-school Santa slasher, Silent Night Deadly Night, is that the killer goes bare-faced in his Santa suit, even though he has a beard hanging that he could have pulled up. So it makes sense that if Santa goes slashing, he will wear a spooky mask while doing it.
Santa Isn’t Real deserves a spot under your horror holiday tree. The gory bits are juicy and creepy. It won’t be your favorite toy this year, but at least the batteries are included.
"…deserves a spot under your horror holiday tree."
