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From Slasher Santa to Ancient Winter Demon: How RARE EXPORTS Rewrote Christmas Horror 

By. Professor Horror

                                                                                      

For decades, Christmas horror was defined by a single, admittedly hilarious question: What if Santa snapped? Beginning in the 1980s, the holiday season became a surprisingly reliable playground for slasher filmmakers who realized that the image of a jolly old man with an axe was, frankly…irresistible. We got killer Santas stalking warehouses, traumatized men in cheap velvet suits, mall Kris Kringles losing their minds, and more fake beards than any genre deserves. But in 2010, a Finnish film quietly detonated this entire tradition. RARE EXPORTS didn’t just give us another evil Santa…it rewrote the subgenre by trading slashers for folklore, turning a kitschy holiday villain into an ancient winter demon with enough mythic weight to reshape modern Christmas horror.

                                                 

Before anyone accuses Finland of reinventing the wheel, let’s be clear: RARE EXPORTS did not invent the killer Santa. Horror has been gleefully corrupting holiday cheer since at least 1980, when Christmas Evil introduced a psychologically frayed toy factory worker who channels his childhood trauma into a violent Santa crusade. Four years later, Silent Night, Deadly Night doubled down, launching a miniature franchise and a decades-long moral panic. In the same year, Britain offered Don’t Open Till Christmas, a sleazy little movie featuring a killer targeting Santas rather than being one. And let’s not forget To All a Goodnight (1980), which may feature the least convincing Santa costume ever committed to film.  These early films carved out a specific archetype: Santa as a slasher, either a deranged man in costume or a psychosexual embodiment of holiday repression. They were outrageous, campy, and often controversial, leaning hard on the shock value of Santa wielding a weapon. And audiences (especially horror fans) ate it up. It’s not an exaggeration to say that by the late 2000s, the “killer Santa” was essentially its own micro-subgenre.

Then RARE EXPORTS arrived…and everything changed.

Rather than building on the slasher tradition, writer-director Jalmari Helander redirected Christmas horror to its older, darker origins. RARE EXPORTS doesn’t treat Santa as an overworked mall employee at the end of his rope, but it treats him as a primordial force buried beneath the Arctic ice, a creature closer to a pagan god than a man in a red suit. The film insists that Christmas folklore existed long before Coca-Cola branding, department store Santas, or Rankin/Bass stop-motion specials. And that older Santa (this horned, towering figure with a taste for punishment) is terrifying. This is where RARE EXPORTS becomes revolutionary. It reframes Santa not as a human gone mad, but as a monster whose mythology predates Christianity. Helander draws from Finnish and Nordic winter traditions in which midwinter spirits were capricious, punishing, and easily angered. The “elves” in the film aren’t cute toy-makers…they’re emaciated, pale, naked old men with sharp teeth and unsettling devotion. And the “real” Santa, glimpsed only as an enormous horned shape preserved in ice, is a full-blown winter demon capable of leveling a village if resurrected. In other words, RARE EXPORTS does what the best horror films do: it looks backward to move forward. 

                            

By connecting Christmas horror to pre-Christian mythology, the film opened the door for a new wave of folkloric holiday horror. Without RARE EXPORTS, it’s unlikely we would have gotten Michael Dougherty’s Krampus (2015), which leans into Germanic folklore, or the anthology film A Christmas Horror Story, which gleefully pits Krampus and Santa in a mythic showdown. These films treat Christmas monsters not as men in suits but as ancient entities with cultural heft. RARE EXPORTS didn’t pioneer holiday horror…it elevated it.

                                           

What makes RARE EXPORTS especially striking is how carefully it builds the mythology around its Santa without ever fully revealing the creature. The film understands that the suggestion of the monster can be more powerful than the monster itself. Santa’s presence is felt through scale, architecture, and ritual long before it’s glimpsed in physical form. The deep excavation pit, blasted open by American researchers; the massive ice block with two curved horns protruding like cathedral spires; the heating coils arranged to thaw something enormous and these images work together to frame Santa not as a character but as an environmental force. He’s treated like a natural disaster waiting to happen, a being whose awakening would rewrite the rules of the world rather than simply stalk victims with a weapon.  Helander’s decision to make Santa’s “elves” the primary antagonists is equally clever. Their pale, naked, identical bodies are uncanny on their own, but what makes them chilling is their purpose. They behave with the precision of a cult, operating in complete silence as they gather children, dismantle fences, and converge around Santa’s icy prison. Their movements aren’t chaotic or violent…they’re reverent. Each action is part of a ritual designed to prepare for their master’s rebirth. In most Christmas horror, elves are an afterthought or a joke. Here, they are the purest expression of the film’s cosmology: ancient servants carrying out the will of a deity who judges children more harshly than any slasher villain ever could. The kidnapping of children adds another layer to the creature’s mythology. Instead of random kills or ironic holiday-themed murders, the disappearances follow a specific, almost biblical logic. Naughty children are taken; substitutes made of straw are left behind as symbolic placeholders. It’s not violence…it’s ceremony. These rituals mirror the woodcut illustrations Pietari studies earlier in the film, blurring the line between folklore and prophecy. The elves aren’t just servants reviving their master, but they’re reenacting a cycle of winter judgment that human beings abandoned long ago.

 

                                    

And when the camera finally shows the truth (that the horned figure the adults captured is not Santa, but merely one of his devotees) the film makes its smartest move. It raises the stakes without needing a full creature reveal. Santa remains encased in ice, but the scale of the body, the size of the horns, and the violent reaction of the elves to anyone approaching him all confirm that this is not a figure who could exist in a slasher storyline. This is a being whose resurrection would mean annihilation. The horror comes not from what Santa does, but from what he is: an ancient god of midwinter whose worldview is fundamentally incompatible with humanity. Ultimately, RARE EXPORTS didn’t replace the killer Santa trope, but it redirected it. Slasher Santas still exist (and thrive), but after 2010, holiday horror had room to breathe. Filmmakers could pull from global folklore rather than relying solely on irony, shock value, or nostalgia. RARE EXPORTS reminded audiences that Christmas hasn’t always been cozy or cheerful. For most of human history, midwinter was a time of cold, hunger, spirits, and rituals meant to keep the dark at bay. In reclaiming that older vision, RARE EXPORTS didn’t just rewrite Christmas horror…it restored its roots. So, if the holiday season already makes you anxious, RARE EXPORTS won’t help. But if you’ve ever suspected that Santa was a little too omniscient, a little too judgmental, or a little too supernatural, this Finnish masterpiece offers a simple reassurance: you’re right. Santa was always a monster. Modern culture just forgot.