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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Rare Exports
2010 · Film · 83 min
Directed by Jalmari Helander
Young Pietari lives with his reindeer-herding father in arctic Finland. On the eve of Christmas, a nearby excavation makes a frightening discovery and an evil Santa Claus is unleashed…
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5 comments on Hacker News
If you're into horror comedy movies, be sure to check out Rare Exports [1]. It combines some of the folklore with the commercial father christmas.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Exports:_A_Christmas_Tale
I watch Rare Exports every year and it never occurred to me it was supposed to be a horror film.
> Those are excellent points, but keep in mind that a lot of people define christmas movie as something that both adults and children can watch together
Rare Exports is undeniably a Christmas movie. One that you should definitely watch, but only after the little ones have gone to bed.
Coincidentally, in looking for Christmas movies for the holidays, I stumbled across "Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale[1]". I won't go into spoilers, but a) it was an unexpectedly smart horror film , and b) seemed to be rooted in actual mythology. Of course, as I knew nothing of the Saami people of Lapland, I started delving into them, their associations with Santa and Christmas, etc., and learned that they've been treated with a great deal of disrespect[2], which actually help to put some parts of the movie in context.
Particularly disturbing to me was this passage in the Wiki:
The genetic makeup of Sami people has been extensively studied for as long as such research has been in existence. Ethnographic photography of the Sami began with the invention of the camera in the 19th century.[137] This continued on into the 1920s and 1930s, when Sami were photographed naked and anatomically measured by scientists, with the help of the local police—sometimes at gunpoint—to collect data that would justify their own racial theories.
[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1401143/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_people#Discrimination_against_the_Sami
Not quite, but close: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1401143/ (Rare Exports)