Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Have you ever noticed how frightening the absurd can be? The less something holds with what we regard as the operating standards of reality, the more it troubles us, especially when the situation is personally, rather than communally, affecting. We can’t readily talk about it to others because they don’t share a frame of reference. We’d first have to give them an idea of this foreign, unconventional, seemingly illogical thing, and then they’d need to understand, believe us, and attempt to empathize. Good luck with that.

Christmas isn’t a stranger to the absurd, because it’s a period of melancholic joy. The greatest joys in life have a touch—call it a lining—of sadness and the unknown. But consider what we bring off with Christmas and Santa: we help children believe in something beyond themselves. The same goes for us as adults—in terms of what Santa represents, which is how and when Santa is most real—if we’ve made a point of working to become wise as did the Magi.

You’re unlikely to see anything so absurd as pertains to Christmas as the 1964 film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, directed by Nicholas Webster as a service to… people who can’t sleep come the Yuletide in their not-a-mouse-was-stirring living quarters. This isn’t to suggest that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians will send you off to dreamland; rather, you’ll feel boisterously alive while repeatedly asking yourself, “How did people who walked this earth come to make such a thing?”—and that question will burn inside of you like the undying fires of Christmas itself. Nightmares are likely as well, for there is no unseeing this moving after chancing upon it, which resonates as an act of God in a prankish mood.

Here’s the setup: Chochem (Carl Don) is an 800-year-old Martian who is pissed off about the short attention spans of the Martian kids on account of the rigors of Martian society, which sounds backwards to us with our completely unstructured society and nonexistent attention spans. But we get where Chochem is coming from, if not the logic of his solution: kidnap Santa (John Call) from Earth, have the Martian kids fixate on him as Earth kids do, and there you go, attention-span problem solved.

Had you told someone who didn’t know about this film that you accidentally encountered it on Christmas Eve at two in the morning and watched the whole thing, wondering if this was really happening, they’d think you were putting them on. And you might begin to wonder if that’s what you were doing to yourself as well. The cold light of winter morning won’t help. Back-checking the TV listings may give you peace of mind in this season of peace. But mostly, you are on your own.