Every year brings dozens of Christmas movies promising warmth, nostalgia, and family. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale offers those things. It also adds a naked, ancient Santa who stalks disobedient children; a horde of elderly, unclothed elves running across a frozen wilderness; and a young Finnish boy who realizes that everything he thought he knew about Santa was a corporate creation.
For a movie whose plot centers on grave-robbing, slaughtered reindeer, and the attempted resurrection of a monstrous legend, Rare Exports has genuine charm. Director Jalmari Helander, who also created the Sisu films, combines chilling suspense, grim satire, and a snow-blanketed wonder straight out of earlySteven Spielberg. The result is an oddball Christmas horror film that’s fresh, unsettling, and, somehow, a little magical.
‘Rare Exports’ Is a New Twist on the Santa Myth
Rare Exports opens with an American drilling operation digging into a remote Finnish mountain, guided by a smug CEO who insists that the “grave” beneath the ice holds untold riches. The local villagers aren’t sure what the company is after until young Pietari, a boy who still believes in the power of stories, starts researching the old legends. What he finds is not the kindly, red-suited figure from Coke commercials and holiday movies but something closer to Krampus: a sinister creature who punishes naughty children with ruthless efficiency.
Soon, strange footprints appear on rooftops. Children begin to disappear. Livestock is found mutilated. When Pietari’s father, a local butcher, traps a naked old man in a wolf pit, the pieces start coming together. The man seems catatonic, but as soon as Pietari steps near, his eyes flash with recognition. The villagers haven’t captured a confused drifter. They’ve caught one of Santa’s helpers — and the real Santa, frozen in the mountain, may be stirring. It’s definitely one of the more interesting movie takes on Santa Claus.
Helander takes these folklore elements seriously enough to make them menacing, but he also has fun with the mythology. Pietari reading his ancient Santa research with the grave sincerity of a kid decoding a mystery gives the film the kind of youthful earnestness that powered Amblin adventures like The Goonies and Gremlins. This blend of sincerity and dread makes Rare Exports distinctive among Christmas films.
Santa’s Naked Little Helpers
Though Rare Exports is often lumped in with Christmas horror films, it’s actually more of a fairy tale. The violence is mostly implied, the atmosphere is heavy with snow and silence, and the central scares come from mood. Helander makes the Finnish landscape a character itself, filled with wide, empty fields of white; skeletal trees; and the constant low growl of winter. Against this backdrop, even an elderly man standing motionless can feel unsettling.
When the movie goes big, it goes big. The climax unleashes hundreds of Santa’s “elves,” revealed to be an army of naked, bearded old men sprinting through the snow. It’s ridiculous, but Helander plays the spectacle straight, which makes it even funnier and eerier.This isn’t Krampus, with its frantic creature design and chaotic set pieces, or any number of cheesy evil Santa movies. Rare Exports finds its horror in the uncanny: the sight of fragile-looking men behaving like relentless predators, and the knowledge that the real terror, a giant ice-encased Santa, hasn’t even thawed yet.
Rather than dark horror, Rare Exports leans into the warm look and sincerity of an Amblin adventure, a scary movie that lets a child take the lead. Pietari is the film’s moral center, the one who senses the truth before the adults. He’s the one willing to make the hard choices. And in the film’s final minutes, he evolves into a tiny action hero, a kid who recognizes the monstrous history behind Christmas and chooses to take control of it.
A Christmas Critique of Capitalism
Beneath all the folklore, Rare Exports also has something to say about how American culture reshapes and commodifies traditions it barely understands. The film’s opening minutes introduce the Americans as arrogant disruptors, ready to dig up a sacred mountain because they think it hides a profitable specimen. Their complete ignorance of Finnish folklore sets the tragedy in motion. As Pietari tells his friend early on, the real Santa isn’t “the Coca-Cola Santa,” both a warning and a wry joke. As with Krampus, the danger comes from misunderstanding or belittling the warnings of the ancients.
But the movie doesn’t let its Finnish characters off the hook entirely. When the villagers finally defeat the monstrous Santa and capture the aging elves, they decide to turn capitalism back on itself. The film’s ending transforms Santa’s helpers into shippable, obedient mall Santas, branded as “Rare Exports.” With a few adjustments and a lot of cleanup, these formerly feral old men can now be packaged and sold to shopping centers around the world. It’s a sly gag that also works as commentary: in protecting their folklore from outsiders, the villagers still reshape it into something profitable and palatable.
Rare Exports is another Christmas horror movie that critiques capitalism, and an illustration of how ancient mythology gets processed and repackaged like any other holiday commodity. It’s funny, uncomfortable, and a little too close to reality.
A Weird, Wonderful Christmas Classic
Part horror, part adventure, part satire, and completely its own thing, Rare Exports shouldn’t work as well as it does. At just 80 minutes, it moves with brisk confidence, balancing its grim imagery with dry humor and genuine affection for childhood imagination. It never becomes overly cartoony, like Violent Night, in its retelling of the Santa myth, nor does it take itself too seriously, like Fatman. It never condescends to its protagonist or shies away from the creepiness of the myth, and never forgets that all Christmas stories need a sense of wonder.
Rare Exports manages to be both deeply strange and genuinely entertaining, a great companion piece with Gremlins. How many movies can offer a heartfelt coming-of-age arc, a critique of cultural exploitation, a monster Santa buried in ice, and a stampede of nude elves? It’s a bizarre little gem, and a reminder that holiday classics can come from unexpected places.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is available to stream on Tubi in the U.S.
- Release Date
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October 3, 2010
- Runtime
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82 Minutes
- Director
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Jalmari Helander
