Creepy Santa gif montage

Only the best.

Creepy Santa compilation

What's better (or worse) than one creepy Santa? A bunch of creepy Santas! I put this together from a whole lot of gifs, from a whole lot of videos of my favorite Santa Smackdowns. I couldn't quite get them all onto one gif, so had to split them. With a hey, and a ho, and a - creep out!

Scary Santas

Some of these Santas aren't even human. I am not sure what they are. Many should not still be at large. And why is it we ask our children to go sit on the lap of a man they don't even know, a big obnoxious man covered in fur who keeps going "ho, ho, ho"? The rest of the time we tell them not to even TALK to strangers. No wonder so many of the little kids in these pictures are screaming with terror.

A scary litttle Christmas

W'all, w'all, w'all (Jimmy Stewart festive stammer), usually this time of year I make gifs of weird, creepy or disturbing Christmas videos. Just the good bits. But not everyone likes gifs, and they don't always even run smoothly. They're being replaced by mp3 videos which are infinitely more sophisticated. But from the format of this blog, I think you can gather that I hate infinitely more sophisticated.

This year I'm posting whole videos. There's always the risk my zillions of readers won't bother to watch them (and with gifs, they don't have much choice: there they are, repeating, and repeating, and repeating). But some of these things cry out for context.

This is a harmless enough stop-motion video from the 1950s, and it used to run every year on public television. Kids looked forward to seeing it. The elves are cute enough, though Hardrock seems oddly named. Is there a cafe named after him, I wonder, or is he a hard rock musician, or what? The mystery is never solved.

But the reason I'm posting it under this Festival of Creepy Christmas Videos is that the Santa in this thing WON the First Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown in 2014 (which included gifs from all sorts of bizarre old cartoons and puppet shows from the '50s). That is, he won it in the first year. In the second year (link below), I found a whole bunch of new shit. I might re-run the whole post, which I don't like to do, but Lord-oh-Lord did it take a long time to make all those gifs!

(I just went back and looked at the actual post. He won in the second year, too.)

You're not going to believe or even comprehend the Santa in this thing. Why were so many children's programs so creepy back then, or were they maybe not creepy at all and our standards have changed?

You decide.
 

Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

(Read at your own risk.)

Creepy Santas. . . OK, this is the last one

It's just that there are so MANY of them! I feel as if I'm walking through the Louvre. The Louvre of bad Santas in really bad cartoons/Christmas specials. This one is from a monstrosity called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, rumored to have Pia Zadora in it (and whatever happened to - ?) This scene is as inexplicable as all the rest of it.

Worst of all. . . Santa is SMOKING!

Bondage. From the Howdy Doody Christmas Special, 1957.

Clarabelle and The Man in the Stripes. And incidentally, why was a male clown called Clarabelle?

From an insane puppet Christmas special, 1950. The marionettes in this thing are Stepford-esque. Santa has a manic quality about him.

Not "ho-ho-ho", but "heh-heh-heh-heh-heh".

Santa's boogaloo.

Not a show exactly, but an artifact, a battery-powered moving Santa with death rays coming out of his eyes. But it's even worse when he's turned off.

Creepy Santa Smackdown!

Yes, it's here again - the competition of a lifetime, or at least this week. Back when I could make really great gifs on the new program, Gifsforum (I mean last night), I did some kick-ass weird Santa ones from old cartoons and childrens' programs. Oh, and then guess what? The whole thing shut down. It stopped working. I can't find anything on the internet to explain this, as it does not seem to happen to anyone else. There should not be a quota! Gifsforum, when it worked (last night!), would do a 15-second video of pristine quality in less than half a minute. Well, back when it was working. Now it has stopped.

Like my mouse. Something supernatural is happening with my mouse. Or mice. A few mices ago, my mouse just conked, and I finally had to put a new battery in which seemed to solve the problem. A week or so later, it conked. Bill gave me a brand-new one, I put a battery in, and a week later it conked. On the THIRD mouse I began to suspect supernatural forces, or a batch of bad batteries. My son the computer genius, who has NEVER been stumped by a problem, has no idea what this is. Like people who can't wear a watch because it stops, I get huge, searing, visible electric shocks off car doors, and I don't know of anyone else who does. I have to literally ground myself with my elbow when I get out. What the fuck?

Perhaps that's the price of toying with supernatural forces. Never mind, here are the few I made before this disaster took it all away from me again.

The first Santa looks like something from the Third Reich: the Hitlerian gestures, swaggering and head-shakes. This was part of an archaic Punch and Judy show that was indescribably violent.

And this one. Just what is Santa doing under the bedclothes? At one point he appears to give himself a narcissistic kiss. I don't think children should see things like this.

Santa in blackface, looking menacing during his yearly break-and-enter. In the old cartoons, his bag always has patches on it. Obviously he is from the Al Jolson school of chimney-sliding.

Santa burns his ass off.

Ummm. . . 

The strangest video, a movie shot in 1898 when most movies lasted a minute or so. Here Santa is wraithlike, carrying something like a bush (a Christmas tree?) This was one of the 15-second ones that I'll never make again because it has all STOPPED WORKING.

And here he is. . . winner of the 2013 Creepy Santa Smackdown! Are those his teeth that he is baring under his moustache? If so, he also wins the Evil Santa award. The things you find on the internet. Until Gifsforum stopped working.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

The horror, the horror. . . let's ring in the Christmas season!

It's already the goddamn start of December, and at this point I hate Christmas, as so many people have come to hate it.  I hate it cuzzadafact that it's now almost exclusively a retail opportunity. The sight of people knocking each other over and trampling one another on Black Friday has been enough to put me off it forever. And we don't even have Black Friday in Canada: more like Brown Friday, or maybe off-white.

But then, I found this!

I don't think I have ever watched this video all the way through, because it's so interminable. The violence in it, even puppet-show violence, is horrifying and makes me gasp.The children sit there helpless, not knowing how to react, as Santa presides over the whole thing like some creepy forerunner of the Grinch.

 

He has no warmth or Christmas cheer at all, but intones his phony greetings in a nasal Brooklyn accent that is freaky and utterly repellent. Santa is borderline creepy anyway: most small children scream in terror when their turn comes up at the mall, and no wonder! Haven't they been warned not to talk to strangers? And here they're being asked - expected - even commanded not only to speak to a stranger, but to sit on his knee!

Through most of this video the children look frozen in fear. Fake squealy noises that sound like they are on a continuous loop have been added to the soundtrack, resembling nothing more than a pack of coyotes on a frosty December night.

Numerous animals pop up from this magically-appearing stage, but my favorite, around 5:00, is something called a Golliwog: an incredibly racist doll, a Little Black Sambo-type of thing, more animal than human. One can imagine it eating watermelon and singing "I'm coming, Mammy".

I vaguely remember Punch and Judy from the hand puppets we had as kids. Like most puppets, they were creepy. Marionettes are even worse, with bodies like skeletons held together with bolts and string. Those jerky, dangly, macabre movements are anything but "lifelike" unless you are referring to something from Edgar Allan Poe. I don't know where Punch and Judy came from, but probably they're some bloodthirsty medieval thing like the Commedia dell'Arte (and how the fuck DO you spell that anyway??).

The very essence of Punch and Judy is violence, which makes one wonder why it was considered acceptable for children. In remote corners of the world, such as Etobicoke, it may be acceptable still.

The last shot in this remarkable artifact is a sweep of the mantlepiece on the Nght before Christmas. Withered empty stockings, probably about three feet long, dangle like immense dead worms, and the tinsel looks like something scrounged from a 1940s brothel.

Anyway, this should set you up nicely for the season and remind you of the True Meaning of Christmas: bashing the living shit out of each other. No-hell!