A few years ago, producer P.J. Starks brought us the horror anthology Volumes of Blood, which was made up of five segments, each one from a different director. The sequel Volumes of Blood: Horror Stories increased the number of segments to eight. Now Starks has sent another horror anthology out into the world, and this one has even more segments – so much that the Christmas-themed film goes beyond the “12 Days of Christmas”. It’s 13 Slays Till X-Mas! And there’s actually fourteen different stories in there.
Like the Volumes of Blood movies, 13 Slays Till X-Mas takes place in the town of Owensboro, Kentucky... which happens to be a real place, but I have to assume (and hope) that the version of Owensboro presented in these movies is much more dangerous than the real town. The Owensboro of 13 Slays Till X-Mas is a very scary place, plagued with murders and disappearances. The story begins with a group of people gathering together in a bar during the Christmas holiday season, drawn there by a mysterious email. They’re going to be at the bar for a while before they figure out why they were told to come here, so they decide to pass the time by telling two horror stories each. Telling Christmas horror stories is a family tradition for one of the men in the bar, and telling scary stories actually was a Christmas tradition in Victorian England.
Before we dive into the stories these people tell each other, it has to be addressed that the very first horror segment we see, before we even meet the people in the bar, is a faux trailer for a non-existent movie called Dear Santa, with the R written over to become a D. Written by Shane Bitterling and directed by Robert Kern III, this story about the consequences of a man’s childhood letter to Santa Claus would have fit in as a full segment, but is still fun to see as a two minute trailer.
William Capps and Julie Streble wrote and directed the first proper segment, Like a Family, with Streble also starring in the segment as Sam, a woman whose sister asks her to come over and help decorate their family home. Sam is reluctant – something bad happened to their late mother in that house, she “gave into her demons” there – but she goes to the house to make her sister happy. This turns out to be a bad idea, as there are indeed demons to give into in that place... but the segment is a bit too quick and the evil is too easily dealt with.
The second segment, The Devil’s Due, also deals with the tragic loss of a mother. In this one, directed by Carlos Omar De Leon and scripted by Vorasine Vince Phrommany, a father and his young daughter are about to celebrate their first Christmas without the girl’s mom, who died in a car accident that they both survived. The girl questions why they lived and her mom didn’t. And by the end of this short segment, we’ll have the answer. The Devil’s Due is very dark and downbeat.
Written and directed by Blair Hoyle, the segment One More Gift focuses on a gift exchange between two roommates that starts off seeming like lighthearted Christmas fun, but takes an unnerving turn. There’s not much to it, but the set-up and “punchline” work.
Writer/director John Mason’s It’s a Wonderful Death is next in line. As the title indicates, this segment puts a horror twist on the concept of the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life... and the twist is quite twisted. Here a suicidal man is visited by a fallen angel who is able to give him visions of what will happen to him and his loved ones if he doesn’t die.
The fifth full segment is called Don’t Kill Santa on Christmas, which I would consider to be very good advice. But killing Santa is exactly what a man who breaks into the home of a mall Santa intends to do – finishing a job he started when he killed the man’s wife and child in a drunk driving accident. There are a lot of tragic family situations in this movie, and we’re not even halfway through the segments yet. Written and directed by Sean Blevins, Don’t Kill Santa on Christmas has an interesting set-up and a fun payoff.
Writer/director Jed Brian creates new Christmas mythology with the segment Kringles the Christmas Clown, telling of a homicidal clown who makes sure kids continue behaving while Santa is making his gift-delivering rounds. Clowns are very popular in the horror genre, so it almost feels like a requirement that an anthology like this would have some kind of creepy clown action. Brian delivered it.
Brian cast family members in the Kringles segment, and writer/director Drew Marvick did the same for the segment Santa Claws, which is similar to Kringles. This time we learn that Santa has an evil twin brother who murders naughty children, and this killer Claus (played by Marvick himself) shows up to do his thing. Placing Kringles and Santa Claws back-to-back felt a bit awkward, but they were both fun.
The segment The Scarionette comes from producer Eric Huskisson (who also produced Volumes of Blood: Horror Stories with Starks), and since one of the most popular killer doll stories of all time was told in an anthology – the Zuni fetish doll segment from Trilogy of Terror – it’s very fitting that we get a killer puppet story in this anthology. Unfortunately, we don’t see a bloodthirsty little puppet running around like we saw in Trilogy of Terror, but it’s understandable since that would have been very difficult to attempt on the budget this movie had to work with. Huskisson found a way to get around the challenge of puppetry, and it works for the segment.
Alex Clark directed the segment A Christmas to Dismember from a script by Starks, telling a serial killer / slasher story with cameos from Starks and Final Destination writer Jeffrey Reddick. There are some bloody kills in this segment, but unlike most slasher stories it deals with the emotional aftermath of the killing spree. And it isn’t pleasant.
The lead character is the unpleasant thing about the segment Dead Air, which was written by Starks and directed by Brittany Blanton. The story centers on a foul-mouthed radio DJ who has a bad night at work. The guy is deeply unlikeable, but Starks wrote some fun dialogue for him, with lines movie fans will recognize as references to classics. My personal favorite of the bunch was “Not a finger!”
When there’s only person in the bar left to tell a story, we head into the segment called Jingle Bellz, written and directed by Shawn Burkett. Again we get some deadly new Christmas mythology. Apparently there are supernatural creatures that go around marking dwellings with “the blood of the bells”, then hacking up the people inside to make them pay for their sins. That’s what happens at a Christmas party in this segment, and while I’m not quite sure what the Keeper of the Bells or the blood of the bells are supposed to be, the creatures who crash the party are a pretty cool-looking pair.
For years, Kevin Smith has been saying that he’s going to make a movie called Moose Jaws, which is simply described as “Jaws with a moose” instead of a shark. While we continue to wait for Moose Jaws to go into production, John Hale wrote and directed a bit of an appetizer for that film, making The Killer Caribou. Since I’ve been eager to see Moose Jaws for a long time now, I was glad to see killer caribou show up in this movie.
And with everyone having told their two spooky stories, we head into the final moments of the wrap-around segment, which was written and directed by Starks and titled Digging Up the Ghost. We get a twist I did not see coming before it all wraps up with an entertaining bloodbath.
Like any anthology you’re likely to see, 13 Slays Till X-Mas has its ups and downs. I really enjoyed some of the segments, I was underwhelmed by others. I was impressed at times, I was a bit confused at times. But overall, this movie made for a good viewing experience, just like Volumes of Blood and Volumes of Blood: Horror Stories did. The directors did a fine job bringing the stories to the screen, and there’s a good amount of variety in the sources of horror. It does lean toward the supernatural for the most part, but that seems appropriate for the holiday.
If I were to pick a segment to call my favorite, I would probably go with Dead Air due to the performance delivered by Wes Barlett as the awful radio DJ, the dialogue, and the unexpected ending.
We’re far from Christmas at the moment, but if you need another Christmas-themed horror movie to add to your watch list this December or if you just keep watching Christmas horror movies all year long, 13 Slays Till X-Mas is worth checking out. It's available on Blu-ray, Amazon Prime, and Tubi.
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