Midnight Screenings 2011 / Sint / Netherlands 2010
Children and their parents anxiously await the evening of December 5th to celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas. Of course, few know of the secret strictly guarded by church and government: St. Nicholas was in actuality a heretic and mass murderer. Every December 5th when the moon is full he rises from the grave with his infernal minions....
Who doesn’t know St. Nicholas? The onetime bishop – precursor of Santa Claus – survives in European culture as a symbol of goodness. But only a handful of the initiated know about a secret closely guarded by church and government: St. Nicholas is, in fact, a heretic and mass murderer. Moreover, every December 5th when the moon is full an ancient curse causes him to rise from the grave with his infernal minions and wreak bloody havoc. This over-the-top action horror film, which became Holland’s greatest box office success, employs a teenage slasher aesthetic to turn the beloved pre-Christmas legend on its head. Pulp king Dick Maas’s fresh approach subverts the code of the slasher movie through a brazen disruption of its generic scheme – and then he lets the narration run wild. When the disfigured St. Nicholas’s demonic spree moves beyond a core group of teenagers to the city at large, the film becomes a more circumspect B-quality action adventure full of chases and shootouts.
88 min / Color, 35 mm
European premiere
Director Dick Maas
/ Screenplay Dick Maas
/ Dir. of Photography Guido van Gennep
/ Music Dick Maas
/ Editor Bert Rijkelijkhuizen
/ Producer Tom de Mol
/ Production Tom de Mol Productions
/ Cast Huub Stapel, Egbert-Jan Weeber, Caro Lenssen, Bert Luppes, Escha Tanihatu
/ Contact EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Film Factory Entertainment, Tom de Mol Productions
Dick Maas (b. 1951, Heemstede, Netherlands) debuted with the black comedy Rigor mortis (1981), but his second feature, The Elevator (De lift, 1983), earned him international recognition; the B horror flick, with a murderous high-rise elevator as its absurd premise, became popular rental fare. In 2001 the director reformulated this audience hit into the coproduction remake Down starring Naomi Watts and James Marshall. Before that came Flodder (1986), a scatological community farce about a confrontation between a suburban family and the upper middle class, which gained cult status at home and spawned two sequels and a successful TV series. The peak of Maas’s filmography is the horror-action thriller Amsterdamned (1988), which makes use of Amsterdam’s canals to offer an original spin on the mass murder genre.
EYE Film Institute Netherlands
IJpromenade 1, 1031 KT, Amsterdam
Netherlands
Phone: +31 207 582 375
E-mail: [email protected]
Film Factory Entertainment
C/ Lincoln 11, 2º 4ª, 08006, Barcelona
Spain
Phone: +34 933 684 608
E-mail: [email protected]
Tom de Mol Productions
Cornelis Krusemanstraat 25hs, Postbus 76866, 1070 KD, Amsterdam
Netherlands
Phone: +312 067 277 07
Fax: +312 067 277 25
E-mail: [email protected]
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