Saint

Colour, 35 mm
Netherlands, 2010, 88 min
EP – European premiere
Section: Midnight Screenings

Synopsis

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.

About the director

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.