"Werewolf Santa" (2023) [Pigeon Shrine FrightFest]

by Joseph Perry and Mike Imboden

In our “The Good, the Bad, and the Verdict” film reviews, Joseph and Mike give their thoughts on a slice of cinema. For this installment, it’s writer/director Airell Anthony Hayles’ British horror comedy Werewolf Santa.

Synopsis

Down on her luck high-strangeness phenomena and cryptozoology YouTuber Lucy (Katherine Rodden) hunts for evidence of actual monsters, but only a few viewers follow her disappointing posts. Everything changes on Christmas Eve when she and her videographer Dustin (Charlie Preston) witness Santa getting bitten by a werewolf before he turns lycanthrope himself!

The Good

Joseph: Hayles takes a “low budget be damned” attitude — several outdoor locations help with that, and a ghost train sequence and strives for a fun Christmas horror comedy with Werewolf Santa. You won’t find any long, close-up man-into-lycanthrope transformation scenes here, though obviously a fair amount of time and care were put into the practical gore effects. The cast is certainly game, and joining Rodden and Preston are fear-fare favorite Emily Booth and prolific genre-movie actor Mark Arnold as Lucy’s divorced, argumentative parents Carol and Chief Constable Charlie, respectively, along with Cian Lorcan as the main pair’s conspiracy theorist acquaintance Rupert in spirited performances. You even get an animated sequence early on with Joe Bob Briggs reading “The Night Before Christmas,” which was a bit of an amusing puzzler to me. There has been a glut of horror and horror comedy films in the past few years featuring obnoxious social media influencers and streamers with no redeeming values and no reason to emotionally invest in their character, but Hayles wisely avoids this by giving initially off-putting Lucy a nice character arc with which to work. In an added bonus, viewers outside the U.K. will upgrade their knowledge of the country’s slang in a certain scene involving outdoor sexual adventures.

Mike: This is our second Santa-Gone-Wild film AND our second holiday comedy-horror film in a little over two weeks and I was a bit afraid that would lend itself to a little yuletide overdose for me, but thanks to a whole lot of chutzpah and some decent British humor, Hayles’ Werewolf Santa I was able to avoid the eggnog hangover.

As is typically the case, a low budget means the most efficient way to get the story on film is to do it as a found footage film, and that’s the case here. However, Hayles manages to avoid some of the expected found footage tropes and the ones that remain seem rather organic to the film. There’s also a bit of slickness to the film that, aside from the bouncy camerawork, doesn’t lend itself to looking like cheap camera footage.

Billed as a comedy-horror, you’d expect some laughs and, depending on the type of humor you enjoy, you should find a fair amount here. Whether it’s discussions about sex in the woods, seeing Werewolf Santa trying to do regular Santa things, or just the delivery and banter between the characters, I found myself chuckling far more than I did during our previous holiday horror.

The Bad

Joseph: The low budget can’t be ignored at times; however, it is often played for laughs, and with the huge amount of heart and the chutzpah-rich approach on display, I can’t help but cut some slack in that department.

Mike: The first thing you’re going to notice is the aforementioned low budget. Hayles impressively manages to try and hide the lack of money, but it’s still there and quite obvious. It’s mentioned at least once that protagonist Lucy reads (or at least once read) comic books and that could possibly explain why we get comic book inspired caption boxes that tell us what happens off camera in-between some scenes (there’s also the illustrated opening and character images during the credits), but with so very little time making us aware of her affinity for comics this seems a very odd choice and only shines a light on the fact that there was no way to film what we’re being told happened. It’s also pretty common for films to use a concoction of soap and other things to make fake snow, but it’s just far too obvious here that Werewolf Santa skimped on the “other things” and we’ve just soap bubbles floating around looking like, well, soap bubbles when they land on people’s clothes and hair.

This last bit isn't really about the movie so it sort of doesn't count, but I wanted to mention that - when reading up on everyone involved - I noticed the film at one point was called Frost Bites which I think is much more clever title and I wish that they had stuck with that.

The Verdict

Joseph: Hayles is a busy director (They’re Outside; one of the segments in the Midnight Peepshow anthology) and producer (Executive Producer on Midnight Peepshow; Associate Producer on Punch, which also screened at this year’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest; and 12 other producer credits thus far) in the U.K. indie horror film scene. He obviously knows his way around both serious and comical horror, and he is also fully aware of what can and can’t be done on limited budgets. What you can’t do with incredible special effects, you can do with an interesting story and characters that you have fun spending time with for an hour or so (70 minutes with credits, in this case), especially when featuring a cast that knows the vibe the director is going for and that fully gets behind it. It looks like Hayles has Zombie Santa and Vampire Santa in preproduction, so the man is fully committed to offbeat Christmas-themed horror comedies. Sure, there are bigger-budgeted, slicker holiday horror comedies out there, some of them classic, but from personal experience, I can tell you that there are some awful ones making the rounds, too. Although Werewolf Santa does not fall into the former category, it is very, very much above the latter. Fans of well-made indie horror comedies that seek to entertain as much as possible despite their low budgets and aficionados of holiday horror comedies should put this one on their “Nice” lists.

Mike: Sure, Werewolf Santa is a bit cheap, but it’s not without heart and the decent somewhat subtle comedic tone helps a lot. The found footage style fits within the narrative of protagonist Lucy’s YouTube Monster Hunter channel, and many of the annoying tropes found when filming in this style are either missing (thankfully) or included in such a way that they do not seem as obvious and cliché. Most of the acting is a bit middle of the road, but Katherine (“Lucy”) Rodden and Emily (“Carol”) Booth, are the standouts as daughter and mother delivering believable and humorous performances.

If you can ignore the budgetary shortcomings that Hayles does an admirable - if occasionally curious - job of hiding, you should find this an enjoyable bit of Christmas fear.

Werewolf Santa screens as part of the 2023 Pigeon Shrine FrightFest, which runs August 24–28 in London. For more information, visit https://frightfest.co.uk/.

Werewolf Santa