KRAMPUS Director Michael Dougherty on Making an Amblin-Inspired Family Horror Film
I recently had the opportunity to attend a press conference with Krampus director Michael Dougherty, who has directed both a Halloween movie with Trick 'r Treat and now a Christmas movie. After joking that the next holiday horror film he would be making would be set during Passover, he got into talking about his fantastically fun new film, Krampus.
One of my favorite aspects of the film was the terrifying creature designs. There were so many wonderfully horrific holiday monsters in it, and the design for Krampus himself was particularly nightmarish. When asked about coming up with the design for the character, the director shared that he got his start in the business doing traditional animation for Nickelodeon and MTV. He explained that when it comes to creating these films and developing the script and story, he dives into sketching things out:
“When I was working with my co-writers Todd Casey and Zack Shields, a lot of times we’d just be bouncing ideas around and I’d be in a sketch book drawing Krampus or creatures and things like that. One of the first get-togethers we had, we went to a bar in Hollywood and we were just chewing the fat and trying to figure out the story, and that's where the first sketch for Krampus happened. Then it became kind of an evolutionary chart from that really rough octal napkin sketch all the way to 3D model to eventual final creature. But I love doing visual development while writing, it’s really important.”
His love for visuals really shows in this movie, and if you’re a fan of horror, I think you’re going to love the stuff that he came up with. He went on to talk more about animation and says that he’d like to get back into it and make an animated film if someone would let him do something really dark. There’s actually an animated section in Krampus that was created to give us a backstory for the grandmother in the story, who is one of the main characters. The animation was created by Weta and was done in CG, but it was made to look like the stop motion animation from holiday films like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. When talking about his reason for doing the flashback scene in this style, he explained:
“It’s important to me that this movie is seen by kids. That it is meant to be a family horror movie, dark fairytale. One of my fondest memories was seeing Gremlins with my family. So if we’re going to teach kids or families about Krampus, it felt like it should be told by a grandmother as if it was an old fairytale. Because to me you're paying tribute to the source material, which is that’s how Krampus’ legend was told for centuries, was probably a grandmother telling it to her family around the fire.”
I loved that he made this film for families. It may be dark and disturbing, but it also has a positive message that people can learn from it. He went on to discuss his inspiration for the movie, and why he wanted to make this a family horror film. He also explains why it's good to give kids a healthy dose of fear now and then:
“It’s not a genre that’s done very often, I don’t think. A lot of horror movies are squarely aimed at teenagers which is why most horror movies involve five dumb teenagers going off into the woods and getting killed off one by one. A lot of the movie I grew up with, again it's that Amblin era, that '80 to '87, '88 where you had Gremlins and Poltergeist, Dark Crystal, there was just a great chunk of time when movies were willing to mix up genres. They were frankly willing to scare kids because I think back then movies gave kids more credit then we do right now. They knew kids were braver and more courageous. We didn’t think to make everything so kid safe. I personally believe that it’s OK to give kids a deathly dose of fear now and then because you teach them how to deal with anxiety and stress and fear. You don’t always have to round all the edges.”
He goes on to explain that movies like Gremlins and Poltergeist are films his family would watch together, and that’s something he wanted to achieve with Krampus. He concluded with talking about the challenge of blending a Christmas movie with a horror movie:
"It’s a Christmas movie at its core. It’s not just a slasher movie or a horror movie or just a monster movie. It was important for us to retain the Christmas spirit and actually have something to say about the state of the holiday. So that meant examining Christmas movies on a sort of their own genre and what a lot of them have in common are families struggling to deal with each other and deal with Christmas… So the idea of letting a horror movie invade that and forcing these families' fear to really come to life in a really different fashion was too tempting to resist.”
I grew up watching these same kinds of films and I get exactly what he’s saying, which is why I loved Krampus so much. It reminded me of those classic '80s films I grew up with. They don’t make movies like this anymore! Thankfully, we have a filmmaker like Michael Dougherty to make them for us. Thank you!
You can read my review for Krampus here.