Rare Exports: Santa's Coming To Town, And He Is Not Jolly
On Thursday, December 17, BG Horror Club digs up the oldest Christmas secret in the world and screens it at 7:00 PM at the Capitol. Consider this your official warning to be good this year. For goodness' sake. Literally.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale comes to us from Finland, a country that looked at the jolly old elf and asked the only reasonable question: what if the original Santa was a monster? Not the Coca-Cola kind. The old kind. The kind your ancestors scared each other with around the fire, back when Christmas had teeth.
The setup is storybook simple. An American research company drills into Korvatunturi, the mountain Finnish legend calls Santa's home. Reindeer start turning up slaughtered. And a resourceful little boy named Pietari starts doing the math on all those old songs about Santa watching you while you sleep. Folks, this is a movie where being nice is a survival skill. The stakes are disciplinary.
Stocking Stuffers: Fun Facts From The Fell
- 🎅 This feature grew out of two short films, Rare Exports Inc. (2003) and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions (2005), where hunters trap wild Santas and export them. That's right, the title is a business model.
- ⛰️ Korvatunturi is a real mountain in Finnish Lapland, and Finnish folklore has long billed it as Santa's official home. The film simply wonders what else might be buried up there, about 500 meters down.
- ❄️ For all its Lapland setting, much of that spectacular frozen landscape was actually shot in Norway. Finland's feelings remain diplomatic.
- 👨👦 Onni Tommila and Jorma Tommila play son and father on screen and are son and father in real life, which makes every Pietari and Rauno scene land a little harder.
- 🏆 The film swept Sitges in 2010, taking Best Motion Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography, and it won the Variety Piazza Grande Award at Locarno.
- ⭐ Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars and called it "a rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking." When Ebert compliments your lump of coal, you frame it.
- 🎬 It was Jalmari Helander's feature debut. He later made Big Game with Samuel L. Jackson and the one-man-army delight Sisu, so yes, the club-approved career path checks out.
Sleigh Bells And Warning Bells
What makes Rare Exports a modern classic rather than a novelty is that it never winks. It plays its ridiculous premise completely straight, in deadpan Finnish, with a straight face so flat you could land a sleigh on it. The horror is played for real, the laughs come from everyone treating ancient Christmas evil like a reindeer-herding logistics problem, and the result is a holiday movie that works in July.
It is also, hands down, the best Christmas horror film of its decade. Better than Krampus. There, we said it. Come at us, gingerbread men.
So come thaw out with us on Thursday, December 17 at 7:00 PM. Admission is free, the Santa is not, and we strongly recommend leaving out nothing on Christmas Eve this year. Nothing. Absolutely leave out nothing.
"This Christmas everyone will believe in Santa Claus."