Sleigh: A Brusque Christmas Slasher

MK Kopp’s Christmas slasher Sleigh contains the essentials of its genre, packed snug into a 10-minute runtime: the story of a young woman’s homecoming to her small town and the legend of a benevolent figure turned cold-blooded killer it knows only too well. 

As a Christmas eve horror, Sleigh understands that the most important element, even more than the female victim (Trish, played by Sarah Noelle, a great casting choice for the name itself), is the group that gets together for the story—Mason Mecartea as the jock coded storyteller in chief, and his audience cum prompters played by Tabatha Gayle, Hunter Romanillos, and Julie Kashmanian. And so, for Trish’s first evening back in her hometown, her friends get her down to the local bar and they recount a story she has managed to never hear until this night. 

Narrating as though witnessed first hand, the group tells Trish the chilling story of how a well-meaning mall Santa is condemned to a brutal death by an inept man in power and complacent bystanders on Christmas Eve. They cleave the tale in two parts and an epilogue: Santa’s death in 1975 and six mysterious murders on the same night in 2000. Now, twenty-five years to the day, the stage is set, Trish’s friends reveal ominously, in wait for the third installment. 

The morbidness of the whole affair is really the relish with which the group, separated from history by time, tells the story (something shared by true crime). After fifty years, and despite the deaths attached to it, it is barely more than an urban legend. The film combines this mythical quality with the awful incident at its root and the childlike pleasure Trish’s friends gain from scaring her to make itself into an illustration of the ingredients that go into making a Christmas themed slasher. Of course, this red lit scene is only one of three acts. The other two reliably come with golden, gooey sweetness and gory violence in heaping portions. Go in with an empty stomach.

Watch Sleigh Horror Short Film