Review: All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018)

Call me an ungrateful wretch if you want, but I would rather have my two months of Halloween, skip Thanks-for-nothing all together, and go straight straight into two months of Christmas. Not sorry.

It’s not surprising to anyone who knows me that I’m already mixing Christmas music into my playlist in the car, thinking about where I’m going to put the tree in my cluttered living space, and scouting this season’s new and new-to-me Christmas horror movies. All the Creatures Were Stirring is a new-to-me film that was actually released December 2018. Let’s all pretend I’m not disgustingly behind the times and move on.

I knew nothing about this movie going into it. By the illustration on the cover, I thought I was in for a rehashing of Gremlins. Serves me right for assuming! All the Creatures Were Stirring is the most hilarious holiday horror anthology since 2015’s A Christmas Horror Story (which isn’t a true anthology, but it does involve several stories woven together into one film, so the comparison works if you don’t fight it), and that movie involved zombie elves. Writer-director married duo Rebekah and David McKendry deliver an entertaining flick with better-than-expected acting, good use of practical effects, and some fresh takes on Christmas horror.

All the Creatures Were Stirring sets you up for the anthology format with a couple of hapless people meeting up together at a fine arts theater on Christmas Eve. Through dialogue, it’s revealed that they’re acquaintances, have no family, and would rather suffer an awkward evening together than be alone on Christmas Eve. From the start, it’s pretty obviously a low budget film, and it doesn’t really try to aim higher than that. I appreciate this kind of honesty in a film so I can recalibrate my expectations and judge it for what it is, not what the filmmakers wish it was.

The next clue that you’re not watching a regular film is the fact that the show being billed at the theater where the characters meet is the same as the movie that we, the viewers, are watching: All the Creatures Were Stirring. Breaking the fourth wall like this is rare in media, unless you’re Deadpool or in season 6 of Supernatural.

Inside the theater, the interior is small, and the audience smaller. The house lights dim and the stage lights come up. A woman who immediately reminded me of Riff Raff and Magenta comes on stage and silently presents a cue card, printed on which are the words “The Stockings were Hung.” She leaves, and a handful of actors come onto a completely empty stage without so much as a backdrop. They’re dressed all in black, as you might expect from a weird little avant-garde troupe, and carry with them only the most minimalistic of props. With comically bland expressions, they begin acting out a scene that lasts a few moments before the movie scene cuts suddenly to a brightly lit, if completely plain-looking office Christmas party.

The shift in scene to a completely new setting with new actors is sudden and jarring at first. It’s unclear whether these new characters are in the same universe as the couple watching the play in the theater, but as the scene moves forward, the viewer gets pulled along with it.

Then the fun really begins.

“The Stockings Were Hung” starts off as innocently as all office parties do, but as it progresses, like all office parties do, things get out of hand. However, instead of kissing the boss in the copy room or puking in a coworker’s file drawer, the employees at this office party are locked in the break room and pitted against each other in a deadly game of Dirty Santa. Their captor? An anonymous madman that only talks to them via speaker phone and intercom. The violence in this scene is disturbing and effective when you keep in mind the real school and workplace violence that happens across the country on a daily basis. If you can handle the super quick elevation of events and, and the frighteningly obvious plot holes in this vignette, then it’s an entertaining installment of the anthology. The acting isn’t too shabby, either.

Flash back with me to the theater, where we see the silent, black-clad actors pantomiming the last bit of the office party scene we just watched. Now it becomes obvious that what we just saw is what the couple viewing the play are seeing the actors do. The scene ends, the actors leave, and the Transylvanian comes back out with a new cue card that says “Dash Away All.”

Rinse and repeat for four more installments to the anthology. “Dash Away All” is probably my favorite story in the movie. While “The Stockings Were Hung” is just another repetition of a familiar trope, “Dash Away All” is a pretty fresh take on a lesser-used idea. The last person to leave a big box store on Christmas Eve just wants to get home to his family, but in his hurry to load up the car, he locks his keys and his phone inside. His is the only car still left in the parking lot except for a lone van sitting across the expanse of asphalt. The two young women in the van are odd, at best, but they let him use a cell phone to call roadside assistance and then his wife. They offer to wait with him until someone can come unlock his car, but they’re hiding something in the back of that van, and it is not what you’d expect. I expected vampires, and I was intriguingly wrong.

The third story, “All Through the House,” is a super condensed, modern version of A Christmas Carol, this one with more drugs, and more laughs. There’s a Scrooge character, a Bob Cratchit, and three ghosts who don’t bother with taking turns and instead just haunt the crap out of the guy all at once, scaring him into being a Christmas enthusiast. While the story itself is old and tired, “All Through the House” breathes new life into it with perfect comedic timing and lines such as “You rosy cheeked sonofabitch!”

“Arose Such A Clatter” is the fourth story. A man driving home on a snowy Christmas Eve gets distracted and hits a large animal in the road. The animal turns out to be a deer. A reindeer. You see where this is going already. After leaving the scene, the man is followed home by a bright red light. One could even say it’s bright enough to guide a sleigh… After all, you can’t run over one of Santa’s reindeer and not expect some retribution.

“In A Twinkling” is the fifth and weirdest story in the five-part anthology. It begins with a man arriving home on Christmas Eve, where he looks out a window at the full moon and vows, “Not tonight!” Already, my werewolf senses are tingling. We watch the guy chain himself up and tell a friend over the phone not to come over. My werewolf senses are screaming. Naturally, his friend on the phone ignores his warnings and comes over anyway, bringing three other friends with her. She goes for a cigarette on the balcony, and this is where it gets weird. She isn’t looking at the moon; she’s looking at the stars, three of which are super bright, arranged in a triangle, and begin to move together. My werewolf senses are confused, because this vignette is not about werewolves, it’s about aliens.

If you’ve stuck with me, I congratulate you, and urge you to watch “All the Creatures Were Stirring.” It’s a little choppy, but the acting is good, the practical effects are solid, and it has more laugh-out-loud moments than it’s probably supposed to. Most of all, it’s fun, and that’s really all I can ask of the Christmas horror genre.

In addition to being available to stream on Shudder, you can own All the Creatures Were Stirring on DVD and Blu-ray.