‘A Christmas Story’ is The Greatest Horror Film of the 20th Century

LIKE tens of millions of other people, I traveled over the holiday season. My wife, referred to in my writing as The Duchess in order to protect her reputation from my public incompetence¹ and ramshackle approach to fashion, has family in Texas and so every year we board a plane at some ungodly, pre-sunrise hour on Christmas Day and emerge, starving and confused, in the humid air of Austin some hours later².

We then have a visit. Greeting people you literally see once a year is a strange and awkward proposition, made doubly strange and awkward due to my natural state of strangeness and awkwardness. But The Duchess’ family is welcoming and the dinner they prepare is huge and delicious, so the day usually goes well³. The bulk of the trip, however, is spent visiting The Duchess’ mother, a woman in her nineties, spry and typically ensconced in a comfortable chair in front of her television. Which means we spend a lot of time sitting and watching TV with her. It usually falls to me to find something appropriate for us to watch; even at my advanced age watching something with your mother-in-law can be nerve-wracking. No one wants to suffer through a Fifty Shades of Grey-like experience with a woman whose DVR is filled with videos of a nun reciting the rosary⁴.

The key is to balance wholesomeness with entertainment that The Duchess and I can also enjoy, which isn’t easy because apparently we are much more jaded than we might initially appear⁵. This year I settled on A Christmas Story, which seemed holiday-appropriate and as wholesome as they come; after all, this is a film whose central conflict involves a toy gun. But as I sank into the pink recliner I’d been provided and we watched the movie in the perpetually-dim room, I slowly realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Because A Christmas Story isn’t wholesome at all. It’s terrifying.

A Serial Killer Incubation Pod

If you pause to think for one moment, it becomes shockingly obvious that every child that appears in the film is broken and emotionally abused—sometimes physically abused. Right there in front of us. These kids all grew up to be grimly silent men who probably—definitely—began killing other people just so they could quiet down the voices in their heads for a few moments of peace.

Ralphie (the cherubic little boy played by Peter Billingsley whose desire for an official Red Ryder carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time drives the episodic story) is a high-functioning kid with a social life and an active imagination—his damage is well-hidden in the early going. His little brother Randy, however, has clearly seen some shit. Randy’s vacant, open-mouthed stare reminds you of Private Pyle sitting in the bathroom in Full Metal Jacket, and his fondness for hiding in cupboards speaks of a boy frequently driven by terror into hiding in cupboards. Ralphie and Randy’s father, played affably by Darren McGavin, is likely the cause; he’s a man with a furious temper who often flies into profanity-laden rages—at furnaces, at a neighbor’s dogs, at the accidental destruction of a surprisingly sex-charged leg lamp (the lack of personal names for the parents screams ‘borderline personality disorder’⁶). These kids live in abject terror.

Ralphie’s friends don’t fare much better. Flick is encouraged to put his tongue on a frozen flagpole and is left to die⁷. Later he walks around with a bandaged tongue and a thousand-yard stare, only to be ritually abused by Scut Farkus on a regular basis as his friends abandon him again—and Farkus the bully is depicted in the film wearing shabby clothes, a subtle detail that implies his own home life isn’t so grand—a cycle of violence and misery. When Ralphie is punished for speaking the worst profanity in the world, he desperately tosses the blame to his friend Schwartz instead of admitting he learned the word from his own incredibly angry father, and we are treated to the sound of a young boy being beaten by his mother so fiercely his screams can be heard over a 1940s-era phone from across the room.

In short, everyone in this film is miserable, angry, and violent. No wonder Ralphie’s daydreams are always about mass-murder. The closest this plotless film comes to an emotional denouement involves Ralphie suffering a psychotic break and attempting to beat Scut Farkus to death with his tiny, bare little hands⁸—an act of violence he is encouraged in by his mother, who gently comforts him and then covers up his crime with the calm, proud demeanor of Emperor Palpatine encouraging Darth Vader to use his anger. If that explosion of profanity and violence is what Ralphie—a sociopath who can at least appear to be a normal human being—is capable of, I can only imagine what the sequel, set in the 1950s and focused on a teenage Randy grown into a blank-faced time bomb, would show us⁹. Cannibalism, probably.

Cannibalism, Definitely

Sitting in my mother-in-law’s room watching this, I began to realize that the film is really about the way emotional and physical abuse is transmitted like a disease through generations. At the end of the movie, when Ralph is forced to wear a humiliating pink rabbit costume for no reason other than the sight of his misery seems to amuse his mother, it became clear why the boy hallucinates her as a jester-clad demon who cruelly taunts him. Ralphie clearly only understands violence, deceit, and emotional manipulation. It’s possible the quest for a Red Ryder air rifle is symbolic of the messy, loud suicide Ralph will commit in a few decades, probably as he has a classic daydream about his family finally feeling sorry for him as he shoots his eye (and brains) out.

This, of course, makes A Christmas Story the ideal holiday film.

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but a universal law is that family gatherings are fraught and tense, even when the family is more or less unhappy in the usual ways. Family holidays are packed with suspicion and resentment, whispered conferences about problem relations and pointed questions about lifestyles, spending habits, and whether or not a certain brother-in-law is on his fourth or fifth bourbon of the evening¹⁰. And yet, a veneer of comfort and joy is slathered all over the surface, hiding all the horror. And then you sit down to watch A Christmas Story and you see yourself in it, somewhere. Maybe you’re Ralphie, wild-eyed and violent, angry at everything and everyone and convinced the whole of existence is a well-oiled plot against you. Or maybe you’re Randy, having glimpsed the Void at a young age and now shuffling about like a character from a Lovecraft story, blank-brained and slowly starving yourself to death. Or maybe you’re the Old Man, muttering curses to yourself in a never-ending monologue of impotent fury. Or Ralphie’s mother, lurking in the shadows and smiling sweetly as her children suffer.

The list goes on, and you’re on there, somewhere. We all are.

The Horror. The Horror.

Horror is all about unnerving us, about removing any illusions of security or control that we might harbor. Horror reminds us that there are primordial forces in the universe that regard us as obstacles to be eliminated or insects to be de-winged and crushed. This is exactly what A Christmas Story accomplishes in its rambling, 1940s-era story.

Ralphie’s existence is one of frustration and violence, but as the film opens he’s on solid footing. He understands the intricate workings of his family and his school life so well he can confidently explain them to the audience, predicting actions and reactions¹¹. There’s a comfort in routines and predictable events, and Ralphie’s life seems happy despite the threadbare economics of his home, with the faulty furnace and the old car that freezes up. But anyone who has ever watched a horror film knows this peaceful, orderly beginning is all set-up, and the film loses little time in stripping away Ralphie’s sense of control and security.

Like a character in a Pynchon novel, Ralphie uncovers a world awash in conspiracies—every adult informs him that his desire for a Red Ryder air rifle is too dangerous for a young boy with the repeated phrase ‘You’ll shoot your eye out.’ The surreal way this meme is repeated by every single person of authority in Ralphie’s life coincides with a series of horrific events—or, events that would be horrific if they weren’t presented with the bland good humor of the sociopath: Flick’s flagpole experiment, a montage of Ralphie and his friends being chased by Scut Farkus and his henchman, administering beatings, and a series of chilling moments where Ralphie weeps and wails as he awaits a punishment that is implied to be of the severe corporal type.

As Ralphie’s world becomes one of violent conspiracy and undermined reality, he engages in bleak, violent fantasies that are horror imagery 101. He imagines his family under attack by armed thugs he casually murders. He imagines he has been stricken blind simply to spite his family. The exception to these imaginings is his fantasy about his school assignment, in which his work is so powerful and well-composed the entire class erupts into spontaneous cheering. This is a curiously positive moment for Ralphie in the film, but horror stories often have a false climax that implies everything will be fine before revealing the horrifying truth—in this case that Ralphie can’t even spell the word ‘Christmas’ correctly in a Christmas-themed essay¹².

Which leads us to Santa¹³.

The visit to Santa at Higbee’s department store is nightmarish and consistent with a final psychotic break as Ralphie finally sees the world for what it is. The holiday spirit is fakery. The elves are rough and violent—but none of the children complain, because they’re clearly used to this sort of treatment. Santa is a sarcastic fake, and the childish belief in the magical is shattered beyond repair¹⁴. The nightmarish sequence that follows is the final step into madness. It’s easy to imagine that everything that happens after this is just Ralphie’s fantasy as he shuffles through the house murdering his family while he spins out a story of a happy Christmas, complete with the long-desired air rifle and a miraculous escape from punishment.

The horror of A Christmas Story is familiar to us all. Everyone has seen our faith in wholesome fantasies like Santa Claus torn away, revealing an ugly, crassly commercial reality. Everyone has found themselves cooped up with family for far too long, fantasizing about violent escapes. Most of us manage to rise above our childhood traumas and adult frustrations to make a life. The kids in the film clearly did not. Watching it with my wife and mother-in-law this past holiday season, I realized that most of the great holiday stories—It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol—are truly horrifying at their core, filled with death, ruin, and hidden violence. A Christmas Story is no different—it just buries the darkness under tinsel and period-appropriate sight gags.

1. Suspiciously specific footnote: The word here is ‘incompetence’ and not, as some wags on the Internet have speculated, ‘incontinence.’ If I’m being totally honest, however, once I get into the cocktails on the plane it’s not entirely impossible that this word would also be somewhat appropriate.
2. Austin is a disorienting city for someone from the Northeastern United States. For one thing, sidewalks exist, but vanish at random intervals, and none of the crosswalk signals seem timed for actual human beings trying to cross a highway. For another, everything in Austin is 17 miles away. No matter where you are in the city or where you wish to go, Google Maps will report 17 miles and 22 minutes driving time. It’s like the city exists in the event horizon of a small black hole.
3. Aside from all the unsweetened tea. <shudder>
4. This is real, and it is terrifying.
5. It’s fascinating to travel to another state in your own country and be regarded with suspicion and hostility because there is a chance you might be a Democrat.
6. The fact that the father is called The Old Man, all caps, makes him sound like an Elder God and is simply terrifying.
7. When I was very young my older cousin once dared me to urinate in my basement, and when I took the dare he immediately ran and told my parents. I still haven’t gotten over the sense of injustice. I don’t know why I just told you that.
8. The fact that Farkus, after bawling and begging for mercy during the assault, appears to take his beating in stride is another hint at his dark home life. This is a kid with holes in his shirts who bounces back from an ass-kicking with weary experience.
9. On the one hand, yes I am aware there actually is an official sequel, produced in 2012. On the other hand I refuse to admit I know what you’re talking about, because that film is an abomination of a completely different sort.
10. I don’t know why everyone always assumes the whiskey anecdotes are about me. I’m old enough to do my holiday drinking in the bathroom with a bottle I have hidden there, like a normal person.
11. There is a non-zero chance that Ralphie wakes up on December 26th from uneasy dreams and finds himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
12. Lucky for us, we live in a marvelous digital age where all spelling mistakes can be blamed on ducking autocorrect.
13. I might be the only person who interprets Ralph and Randy’s parents leaving them alone at Higbee’s department store to have their nightmarish visit with Santa Claus as the desperate act of parents who hope their children are abducted so they can start new lives.
14. Ending the Age of Pure Imagination and beginning the Age of Experimenting with Grain Alcohol.