To get myself in the holiday spirit, I’m watching All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018), a direct-to-DVD horror comedy.

In the frame story, a first date to a strange theater performance (also called “All the Creatures Were Stirring”) becomes weirder and weirder. Each piece in the theater performance is a minimalist version of the full movie short we get to see.

Previews (because I’m going to rate the previews)

The trailers covered a number of holidays. There was a Krampus ripoff for Christmas (“A Christmas Horror Story”), a Halloween horror movie (“All Hallows’ Eve 2”), and a movie set around the Fourth of July (“The Evil in Us”).

Christmas-themed Deaths

The first death occurs at an office Christmas party, when a Yankee swap gift shoots a participant in the face. The party quickly devolves into a Saw-type situation and is a bloody slash-fest. The deaths mostly involve guns and noxious gas, but since they’re coming out of presents it counts as Christmas-themed, right?

There’s also a reindeer murder, as in a reindeer that gets hit by a car gets revenge on the driver. Lots of stabby antlers.

Christmas-themed Moments

So, not as many deaths as I’d imagined. But, there were some fun Christmas references.

One of the shorts involved a “Christmas Carol”-style story in which a Scrooge-y character is changed not by the visitation of three ghosts, but by creepy ghouls.

Another short involved a Twilight-Zone-esque tale of two people forced to endure a bizarre Christmas held hostage by aliens who only seem to know the holiday from old Christmas movies. Weird, though not necessarily scary.

Overall, not as many Christmas-themed deaths as I had hoped. And many of the shorts had happy endings! What is the Christmas horror movie genre coming to?