Holiday horror is all about twisting the familiar traditions, iconography, themes, and décor of the holidays into nightmare fuel. It’s plain fun for the horror fan watching classic fixtures of Christmas – like Santa, snowmen, or Christmas trees – transform into homicidal maniacs, or for decked halls in snowy December to become ground zero for a slasher. Sometimes, though, holiday horror extends far past the recognizable hallmarks and motifs, creating something so far removed from tradition that it defies explanation or even logic.
That’s certainly the case with Blood Beat, a Christmas-set horror movie steeped in absolute bonkers weirdness and unlike anything resembling the holiday norms and traditions.
Sarah (Claudia Peyton) accompanies her boyfriend, Ted (James Fitzgibbons), home to rural Wisconsin for Christmas to meet his family. Mom Cathy (Helen Benton) is an eccentric artist who detects something psychically amiss with Sarah. The rest of the family, however, are far too preoccupied with the deer-hunting season. When Sarah finds a trunk filled with samurai armor and a sword, she becomes possessed by a samurai spirit with murderous tendencies. Yes, this holiday horror movie is a supernatural slasher featuring a killer samurai ghost.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg for the strangeness here.
Written and directed by Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos, his only feature directorial credit, Blood Beat begins with a solid base for Christmas horror. Meeting your partner’s family for the first time over one of the most family-centric times of the year is intimidating. It provides fertile ground for genre exploration, yet Zaphiratos approaches it most peculiarly in this French/U.S. coproduction. Sarah’s shyness is clear from the outset, a fish out of water city girl type uncomfortable with the eager deer-hunters in Ted’s family. When he immediately pushes for sex, she’s reserved and closed off. Enter the samurai armor that possesses her- any time the ghostly warrior kills, Sarah writhes in bed and appears to orgasm.
The more the body count rises, well, the less the narrative makes any sense.
Psychic battles ensue, music cues get idiosyncratic, and Zaphiratos’s French sensibilities injected at every possible level ensure that Ted’s family presents the most European vision possible of a rural midwestern family. Blood Beat‘s experimental aspect extends beyond what’s on screen, likely to no one’s surprise. At only twenty years of age and traveling through the U.S., Zaphiratos met and developed a relationship with a Wisconsin girl. She happened to have money, and they decided to make a movie together. The film’s title came to them while high; it was a nod to their accelerated heartbeat while stoned. The odds that more than just the film’s title was written while stoned are also quite, well, high.
Having no real experience directing, Zaphiratos and his crew made much of the production up as they went. There was no post-production VFX or even stuntmen. They had to come up with effects on the spot and perform stunts themselves. In the scene where a character throws themselves out the window, that’s the director, literally throwing himself out of the window. The deer being gutted upon Sarah’s first introduction to Ted’s family was a dead one purchased for cheap from a nearby farm. Many of the actors, most noticeably Benton, weren’t professionals and hadn’t acted before.
Yet, for the lack of know-how, the financial backing afforded cinematographer Vladimir Van Maule, then twenty-five, to shoot on 35mm Panavision, a luxury. Zaphiratos’s father, filmmaker Henri Zaphiratos, served as a producer and handled distribution- Blood Beat wound up at the Cannes’ market in ’82. That’s the critical component that transformed a young filmmaker’s whim into one of horror’s strangest holiday offerings of all time.
Zaphiratos preferred aestheticism and style over story, and that’s abundantly clear in Blood Beat. He made directorial choices for drama’s sake, no matter how illogical or unlikely the action. There’s zero hand-holding or explanation of why or how this angry samurai spirit came to unrest in rural Wisconsin or why the farm area is so heavily populated to provide plenty of bloody fodder. Christmas becomes all but forgotten in the battle of psychic energies. It’s so gonzo that it doesn’t matter; it’s hard not to fall under the film’s peculiar and entertaining spell.
In a year where nothing feels routine whatsoever, Blood Beat offers the perfect, atypical antidote to traditional holiday fare. Thanks to Vinegar Syndrome’s unearthing of this hidden holiday horror movie, it’s more widely accessible than ever on streaming services Shudder, Tubi, and Prime Video. If you’re tired of Santa Claus and his elves hogging the yuletide spotlight, maybe it’s time you spend the holiday season with the Samurai Ghost of Christmas Past.
There’s only one. And you’ll only find him in Blood Beat.