Deadly Games aka Dial Code Santa Claus

Probably most famous for being considered the French—and more violent and traumatic—Home Alone (which came a year later), Deadly Games, aka Dial Code Santa Claus, is a wild, visually inventive Christmas thriller that stands on its own. It follows the young and supremely mulleted Thomas de Frémont (Alain Lalanne), who spends his time tinkering with the latest technology in his French mansion, playing ’80s action hero with his dog, and taking care of his diabetic and nearly blind grandfather, while his mother (Brigitte Fossey, best known for her child role in Forbidden Games) is busy running a fancy department store.

Desperate to prove that Santa Claus is real, Thomas and his friend try to contact him on the Minitel (sort of a proto-internet online service), but their message is intercepted by a seriously disturbed man (Patrick Floersheim), who becomes obsessed with finding Thomas. First, he dresses up as Santa to get information at his mom’s store, but is quickly fired after slapping a kid for making fun of his face. When he learns that a van filled with presents is heading to Thomas’s house, he hops in the back, still wearing a Santa suit. Up until this point, we know this vagrant is not well, but because the film is relatively light in tone, it is pretty shocking when he straight-up murders the delivery driver and the groundskeeper and his wife when he arrives at the castle-like mansion. It’s doubly shocking when he pops down the chimney and stabs Thomas’s dog to death in front of him.

What ensues is a series of deadly cat-and-mouse chases through the mazelike home that ramp up the stakes as Thomas’s grandfather is in desperate need of insulin. The film’s tone whiplashes from heartwarming moments between the two relatives to fun ’80s action moments as Thomas sets up traps around the house—employing flaming dart arrows and an IED delivered via toy train—and devastating, traumatic moments like the boy having to bury his dog in the basement as a schmaltzy Bonnie Tyler song plays on the soundtrack. This movie is weird, in a wonderfully French kind of way, and, thanks to the American Genre Film Archive’s terrific 2018 restoration, audiences finally have a better way to see the fabled Christmas movie than on the bootleg VHS copies that circulated for so long.

Deadly Games was impressive enough that Steven Spielberg (who apparently loves the film) handpicked René Manzor to direct several episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and it is easy to see why. Stylish and beautifully shot, with some impressive model work and set design for the mansion, the movie uses the more child-friendly first half to really sell the horror of the second half. It gets extremely dark, and poor Thomas is going to need decades of therapy to recover from this Christmas Eve. Do yourself a favor and add this film to your holiday horror rotation—you won’t regret it.