festive greetings from three stars fine

for the past few weeks now, i have been doggedly - some would say belligerently - texting anyone and everyone i know a screenshot of an item i saw on the goop christmas gift guide; an item which made me feel so simultaneously delighted and yet filled with the milk of human insanity that i have been compelled - nay, duty-bound - to pass it on to every single person in my contacts list like naomi watts copying a cursed videotape to send to all her friends in the hopes that gwyneth paltrow will not crawl out of a television on boxing day morning to skin her alive. priced at an attractive $559, the item in question presents itself as an "upcycled bar cabinet", though what it actually is, if you look closely - which you ought to be doing ahead of spending upwards of half a grand - is an old petrol can with a hole cut in it. you can, i assume, use this hole to put your drinks in what remains of the petrol can, and the designer has thoughtfully installed a miniature shelf to help you achieve this, although if you happened to be in possession of $559 and wondering how most efficiently to spaff this money up the wall, you could perhaps be forgiven for wondering what, apart from a miniature shelf and a hole, you'd really be paying for. should you require further information, a helpful piece of supplementary copyrighting is happy to oblige you: "it's made from an authentic WWII-era fuel can". brevity is, after all, the soul of wit.

i deeply love a christmas gift guide, perhaps because they are so wildly suggestive of desperation, perhaps because they speak of an alien universe where no one knows the person they are buying for but are simultaneously likely to blow hundreds of pounds on a leather-bound wireless travelling handkerchief dispenser for them, just because. i love the slavering insanity of gendered gifts guides, forever shrieking BUY WHISKEY STONES FOR YOUR MAN WHISKEY STONES TONITE QUEEN GET HIM WHISKEY STONES or suggesting you get your wife that pastel coloured pan that is actually six pans in one because presumably you hate her and wish to see her suffer. i love those broadsheet gift guides that aim desperately for relatability like get her an elemis gift set, get her a candle, only to fall off the ledge after three tries like idk why don't you drop six grand on a birkin you fucking deadbeat i'm going to come to your house while you're out and have sex with your girlfriend myself. i love it for its unreason, and its spiralling uselessness, and the fact that no one has ever actually needed a bar cart made from an authentic WWII-era fuel can, but particularly not as a surprise, with no time allotted to figure out where you'll put it, or how to arrange your face when you receive it, or how to reckon with the fact that someone quite close to you was insane enough to buy it, and wrap it, and is in your home right now.

i love gift guides so much, in fact, that i have chosen to write one for you - a list of horror movies either overtly or subliminally festive which i think you should gift yourself, for christmas, in lieu of a fuel can with a hole in it, because you are most likely worth more than that.

the three stars fine christmas gift guide

1. black christmas (1974)

not to be confused with the frankly execrable 2019 remake, via which the filmmakers managed to communicate such palpable disdain both for the deeply superior original and for the horror genre in general that the viewing experience quickly descended into a sort of demented piece of paceless anti-art during which everyone said the words "diva cup" and "bodily autonomy" a lot and yet absolutely nothing happened. i have had cause before now to claim that this movie very obviously thought it was making get out but for women, when actually what it was doing was making black christmas but for idiots, and i stand by that. the original, however, is excellent.

2. the house of the devil (2009)

not a christmas movie, although it is a winter movie and therefore deserves a half credit. the director ti west has gone on to make the excellent X (2022), the deeply overrated pearl (2022) and maxxxine (2024), to which i cannot assign a superlative because i can't be arsed to watch it, but i still think his earliest work is possibly his best.

3. it chapters one (2017) and two (2019)

not christmas movies either (in fact, both summer movies, but i contain multitudes and cannot be hemmed in by such negligible details as sense and reason).

4. terrifier 3 (2024)

obviously. my favourite tweet i saw in a year where i largely absented myself from twitter via executive order handed down by my wife was jane shoenbrun saying going to see the new terrifier the clown movie tonight i am rly hoping he has worked on himself since the last one bc he was out of control.

5. happiest season (2020)

this movie's inclusion on this list is not intended to imply that you should watch it or that i personally ever intend to watch it again but rather just to remind us all that it was in fact a fucking horror movie, however festive or romantic it purported to be

6. krampus (2015)

notable less on its own merit than because it acts as a deeply bewildering precursor to toni colette's obviously far superior turn in hereditary (2018) and also because the ending, in which we zoom out to reveal that all the characters are trapped inside a gigantic snow globe or something, is such a truly hilarious swing and a miss at the concept of "metaphor" that i cannot think about it without getting a headache.

7. the lodge (2019)

a deeply effective, if structurally flawed, movie that was unfortunately beaten to death by the advent of the movie hereditary like a criminal in the night - the lodge stars riley keough as the sole survivor of a suicide cult who gets trapped with her fiance's children in a snowbound lodge for several days as a jack torrance-flavoured psychosis sets in. really excellent, and i still feel badly for the directors who i can only imagine putting the finishing touches to their spooky dollhouse-themed framing narrative, only to be made aware of the hereditary's spooky dollhouse-themed framing narrative and going well that's the end of that.

8. the shining (1980)

duh

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a stray observation:

i find christmas a vaguely melancholy affair these days in the way one inevitably will after certain types of family upheaval, and this is not so much a tragedy as it is a heightened expression of a more universal fact. so much of christmas as an adult is the nagging concern that things are not as they used to be, just as growing older is - at base - little more than the realisation that there is no real factory setting and no neutral state to which all things return. things change, and keep on changing. things do not go back to normal at the end of the hour like they used to do in sitcoms, because the fact of what is normal evolves, and goes on shifting, and in this world there is a kind of painful progress, longing for what we've left behind and dreaming ahead etc. the greater part of being well (or at least, of getting better) is recognising that the act of waiting for everything to go back to how it used to be is futile and something on which a person could waste an entire lifetime. christmas is not what it once was but something different, and in the difference there is a different and a greater kind of joy. what i mean by this, i suppose, is that rolling with the difference is the point and the purpose, and that however things may have been before, i did not always have my wife - who i am obsessed with - or our cat, or our friends, and the movie terrifier 3 did not used to exist, and so for all my melancholy it is difficult not to feel something akin to repeat the sounding joy on top of that.

anyway, this is not to say that if one's festive tradition is to watch silent night deadly night (1984), one should not do that over and over again unto the final ringing of the bell, because the more things change, the more things stay the same, and anyway i'm not the police and i'm not here to dictate to you. merry christmas, sickos, i love you all.