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Synopsis
Bloody Merry Christmas is a comedy-horror film short that depicts 12 former high school friends attending a reunion party on Christmas Eve. Holiday cheer fear breaks out when the former classmates are murdered one by one by a masked assailant. The film holds a rating of 7.9 out of 10 on IMDb.
How it relates to the field of psychiatry
The film’s appeal is its myriad of pop culture references to other slasher films as well as works outside of the horror genre. As the allusions are too numerous to count, I believe the most noteworthy is made at the start of the film. The movie opens with two young women who get lost while driving to a party. At 01:15 into the film, the driver, Mary Beth, comments, “We just landed on a Christmas episode of Lost.” The reference is to the TV drama that premiered on ABC on September 22, 2004. Over six seasons, there was no shortage of theories as to “what Lost was really about.” One prevailing conspiracy theory was that there were only two survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815. One survivor was purported to be afflicted with a psychotic illness (the manifestations of which were detailed in each episode) and the other survivor incorporated those psychotic features into their reality through mechanisms defining Shared Psychotic Disorder.
From this perspective, Bloody Merry Christmas forces the viewer to adopt a character’s perspective. Who is this story told by and how is their pervasive paranoia explained? A clinician’s first inquiry is whether there’s any evidence of an underlying medical condition or substance use that can explain their observations. While there is no information provided about the characters’ medical histories, there are two women observed using drugs other than alcohol in the film.
At 08:02, Kathy is accused by Filitsa of dosing “Sasha with a space cake” after Sasha expresses the delusional belief that “the beast is due to come.” A ‘space cake’ alludes to any baked good containing cannabis. As paranoia and panic are common behavioral signs of cannabis intoxication, maybe Bloody Merry Christmas is a case study of cannabis-induced psychosis.
At 13:47 into the film, Sarah snorts cocaine after she takes a nauseous Kathy to the upstairs bathroom. As paranoia and panic are also common behavioral signs of cocaine intoxication, maybe Bloody Merry Christmas is a case study of Sasha’s cocaine-induced psychosis.
The time difference between the above two scenes is 5:45. What’s interesting is that at 05:45 into the film (I learned this maneuver from my deep dive into The Shining), the above two characters (Kathy and Sarah) accuse Scarlet of having had sex with Sarah’s high school boyfriend, providing one of two incidents in the friends’ shared experiences that explains their maladaptive interpersonal relationships. As for the other prior incident, I don’t want to give away the ending of the movie!
