Film Review: The Beauty of Horror: Ghosts of Christmas (short film) (2018)

SYNOPSIS:

A gory take on The Night Before Christmas.

REVIEW:

I love a good advert – I’m super susceptible to them and it’s very dangerous for my bank balance. Even just getting a takeaway menu through the door will throw my original dinner plans out the window. This advert is telling us about The Beauty of Horror: Ghosts of Christmas colouring book which I will now go out and buy immediately.

Stop-motion has always freaked me out a little bit and this one in particular has a real nightmarish quality about it. This type of animation is so tangible, it has the ability to appear tame while giving us tonnes of gore.

The narration is a gruesome Halloween take on The Night Before Christmas and our narrator (Jane Dashow) has a calm, gentle, yet sinister tone, perfect for this twisted take on a children’s rhyme. The mixture of this and the stop-motion obviously makes it feel a little reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas – I assume this was a deliberate decision.  In a way, it’s almost a shame that this was used for advertising purposes as it’s perfectly brilliant as a stand-alone short.