As it has been part of Shudder’s line-up since the start of December, you’ve had plenty of time to view The Advent Calendar. The film, written and directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Patrick Ridremont, screened earlier this year at Arrow Video FrightFest. It was very well received, and for many will now form a staple of their festive viewing. It’s obviously not a traditional Christmas pick, what with all the horror and gore, but it is an inventive and interesting tale that plays like an instant classic. The story begins on 3rd December when Eva, a former dancer who has been living in a wheelchair since a nasty accident, is given an advent calendar for her birthday. The calendar is unlike any other however, as along with candy, it comes with the promise of a miracle, but only if its rules are strictly adhered to.
When you consider how many Christmas movies exist, both horror and otherwise, it seems mad to think that the premise of a creepy advent calendar hasn’t been explored before. Ridremont has tapped into something fresh and it is a great choice for a Christmas Eve movie if you haven’t gotten anything else lined up yet. With the idea being so clever, and the execution so well crafted, we caught up with the mind behind The Advent Calendar to find out just how the film came to be.
You’ve been an actor for a number of years, what prompted the shift from in front of, to behind the camera?
I made a movie ten years ago and that movie was called Dead Man Talking, and this is my second one and I’m already fifty-four. So I’m a lazy director. I want to have a good screenplay to make a good movie. I’ll take my time. I love to be an actor because, I don’t say it’s easier, but you know, people are taking care of you and you have money to do things. That’s so comfortable. Sometimes you have to break that routine. I really like writing stories and directing stories, but it’s more than two or three years of work. It’s two or three years of sacrifice. I love that suffering. If I have to choose between being an actor and a director, I would definitely choose directing movies. I love that.
What inspired the idea for The Advent Calendar?
My step-sister loves advent calendars. Every 1st December she receives more and more calendars. In the beginning it was just her mother, then her mother and sister, then mother, sister and father, now it’s friends too. She receives every year something like four or five advent calendars and she never respects the rules. If you offer her a chocolate advent calendar, she eats all the chocolates on 1st December. For me, that’s a sin. She doesn’t respect the rules. Sometimes if you offer her a calendar with something she doesn’t like, for example, tea – twenty-four teas in it – well she says, “who wants my present?” That’s a sin for me too. She must be punished for that. Slowly the idea of making a horror advent calendar where people could be punished if they don’t respect the rules of the calendar was growing and growing.
With 24 days to cover how difficult was it to plan the repercussion of each candy?
That was the biggest difficulty of the movie. It’s the first film of the advent calendar so I had to explain everything. I had to explain the rules, and I have to show every candy, every opening of the windows. That was the most difficult thing. Something I wanted to avoid was the repetition of bloody windows; every midnight with a bloody candy, making her do something bloody. It was going to be boring. So every window has a different reaction. Candies look the same, but what she does when she eats them is different. Sometimes it’s really kind, sometimes it’s romantic, the day after it’s gore, the day after nothing happens, but wait three days and you’ll see something happen. Everything is different and in the end that difficulty becomes a pleasure. I realised when I watched the edit that my movie was an advent calendar itself. Twenty-four different scenes.
So many Christmas time set films ram the holiday and its decor down the viewers throat, what prompted your decision to not conform to this convention?
We don’t have much snow in Belgium and the film was shot in Belgium. I just decided to make a horror movie about the advent calendar, and all the iconography of Chritsmas… I don’t really need it. I don’t need red hats and snow everywhere, I don’t care about that. I was not making a movie about Christmas. But it still remains a movie about Christmas because of the setting. It was supposed to be released in December 2020, but then because of Covid we had to delay it. They asked me if I wanted to release the movie in April. I said no, it’s not an Easter movie. We have to respect the period. Sometimes it was difficult. For me, the most important thing is the object of the advent calendar, the monster inside it – well, it’s not exactly a monster, but you will see what it is – there are some rules in the movie and there are rules as a director that you have to respect.
Christmas is happy because we decided to make it a happy period. Even for Easter it’s happy, we decided in our religion to make every big event of the Bible a way to have fun and have a party, to see your family. But we don’t have to forget that Easter is a bad story in the story. Poor Jesus Christ, he suffered a lot. Even Christmas is not fun. It’s not really about a feast. Just remember poor Mary and Joseph and the donkey. It started badly, the day before there was a king called Herod that decided to kill all the babies born that day because he didn’t want another King. He wanted to be the only King. Everything in the Bible is really bloody. Because all those feasts are family feasts you celebrate with family, so when you’re making movies about Christmas you have to make family movies. Everything is going good. If two people are getting divorced on 1st December, they will be back together on the 24th, that’s the miracle, everything is romantic, everything is nice. You can watch a Christmas movie alone though and that can be a horror movie, with bad things happening.
A horror film is only ever as good as its bad entity. How did you create the look and feel of Ich?
When I was doing some internet research, I discovered that the advent calendar was invented by a German priest at the end of the 19th Century so I said, “let’s start from this”. It must be German. Don’t write things in Italian on it, write things in German, so it is German. What kind of German creature can we have? I was looking at the monsters that they have the German stories. They have trolls, they have many things and I wasn’t interested. I invented a backstory of a German priest working in the German army and who died in France during World War One. It’s not shown on the screen, it’s just in my head. He exploded with a bomb and half his face was destroyed. The day before dying, someone, something, maybe God, maybe the devil, came and asked him if he wants to live forever in an advent calendar. I thought that was a good backstory but even if it’s not really good, no one will hear about it. I sent that backstory to the guy who made the creature itself. With that he decided to make the costume of a priest. If you look in the movie, the creature inside has a kind of priest dress. He is wearing a mask. That mask is a German gas mask from WWI. So everything has to make sense. It was fitted by my backstory to create that guy. When we see Ich we said that’s the one we’ve been imagining. That was inside my imagination.
The Advent Calendar is available on Shudder, the streaming giant that covers all facets of genre cinema, how do you feel about that inclusion?
I think Shudder was the first one interested in the screenplay. We didn’t know who was going to pay for that movie, who was going to see that movie, who was going to be our audience, but we knew that Shudder was in the game. It’s a kind of partner since the beginning and we were so happy. I didn’t know Shudder so I went on the internet and I said, “oh my God, are you serious?!” That platform is fantastic. On Hollywood Boulevard you have all the stars, for me, having my movie on that platform was like that. It was really huge for me. I’m so proud. I’m not saying I deserve it. The people who have been fighting for my movie deserved it. I’m just proud and happy.
What’s next?
I still don’t know what movie I will do. If I have the chance to make another Advent Calendar, “okay, let’s go for it”, but I know the next movie will be like the others with the common point being a story that doesn’t exist. They’re always in a land far, far away, once upon a time a monster. With a horror movie you know it doesn’t exist. Not just horror movies, sometimes you have a horror movie with a human psycho and a mask. It can happen, In The Advent Calendar with an entity in that box, in that calendar, you know it doesn’t exist. My third movie will also be a movie where the land doesn’t exist. I love imagining that it begins with once upon a time, it’s all about fiction.
The Advent Calendar is available on Shudder now.
