12 Movies of Christmas: Rare Exports
The logistics of believing in Santa Claus can be challenging for children, even at the height of their pre-Christmas buzz. My two kids found out the truth a few years ago, but before that eye-opener came a lot of suspicion around the presents. Do Santa’s little helpers just make all this stuff to order at the workshop? Are they also the guys who supply the toy stores? Or do we, the parents, buy the gifts from the shop and ship them to Santa so he can deliver them back to us again? If the presents are from us and their other relatives, what exactly is Santa’s role in all this?
And so on and so on, and we never quite managed to come up with convincing answers to these questions. Then there was the matter of Santa Claus himself. If he was up at the North Pole putting the final touches to toy production ahead of his busy night of deliveries on Christmas Eve, who were all these other Santas hanging around in toy stores, malls, and grottoes?
Finnish film-maker Jalmari Helander came up with a quirky and ingenious answer to the latter question in the mid 2000s when he made two short films: Rare Exports Inc. (2003) and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions (2005). Sending up Hollywood action movie tropes with typically dark and deadpan Scandinavian humour, Helander posited that Father Christmases were actually a rare species of feral old men running around buck-naked in the wildernesses of Lapland.
A classic Voice-Over Man tells us these creatures are dangerous and naughty behaviour such as smoking, drinking, and being too noisy can provoke a lethal attack, although having some fresh gingerbread handy might be enough to save your life. It is the duty of elite Finnish trappers, descended from a long line of Santa hunters going back centuries, to capture and train these wild beasts before shipping them off for Father Christmas duty around the world.
Helmander’s quirky high concept went viral at the time, and the cult reputation of the shorts helped the filmmaker secure funds to make a feature-length action-horror set in this intriguing world. As such, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is basically a prequel to the mock infomercials, tweaking its own lore to show us how three Finnish hunters became global purveyors of “original Finnish Father Christmases”.
We open with the obviously dastardly Mr. Riley (Per Christian Ellefsen), something of an Indiana Jones-style villain by way of Truman Capote, visiting a drill site on Korvantunturi, the mythical home of the Finnish Santa Claus. He’s hired the Subzero research team to excavate and core samples lead him to believe it is now the burial site of Santa. After issuing safety instructions to the contractors (No cursing, no drinking, etc.) he gives them until Christmas Eve to remove what lies encased in ice deep beneath the burial mound.
Overhearing Riley’s megalomaniacal rantings are two local lads, Pietari (Onni Tommila) and Juuso (Ilmari Järvenpää). Pietari is still young and believes in Santa, but their spying adventure prompts him to do a little research and discover the far darker origins of the jolly gift-giver. Some ancient tomes laying around at home reveal that the original Santa was a malevolent horned beast that delighted in torturing and killing naughty children, and this fiend may be what Riley and Subzero are drilling for on the fell.
Worried that Santa will come for him after breaking into the Subzero site with Juuso, Pietari spots footprints in the snow outside his bedroom window. His gruff widowed dad Rauno (Jorma Tommila) is too busy preparing for the season’s reindeer harvest to worry about his son’s childish fears. Living off the land, the livelihoods of these hardy people depend on the reindeer, but Rauno and his fellow hunters are shocked to find that something has slaughtered their entire herd.
Blaming Subzero for their critical loss of earnings, the hunters break into the site to demand compensation. But nobody is home, and it seems that something enormous has been removed from the bowels of Korvantunturi. Meanwhile, children start going missing from their beds, and Rauno captures a wizened old man in his illegal wolf pit. Realising that the wild creature may be what Subzero was searching for, the reindeer hunters unwisely decide to hold “Santa” to ransom.
Rare Exports has such a delightfully twisted premise and Helmander takes a semi-serious approach to something that might’ve easily turned into a goofy killer Santa movie. The film cost less than 2 million Euros to make, and the director evidently spent much of that budget making the movie look and sound as close to a Hollywood blockbuster as possible.
With such limited resources, he does an amazing job. With Norway standing in for Lapland, the crisp cinematography not only captures the harsh splendour of the sub-Arctic landscape, but also every single snowflake drifting in slow-motion through the frame. The score goes big, too, with music by Juri and Miska Seppä providing a touch of epic bombast while staying just the right side of parody.
Ultimately, Helmander can’t quite make the most of his brilliant idea. He creates a suitably ominous atmosphere around something ancient and not-so-dead buried in the ice, evoking John Carpenter’s The Thing early on, and he pulls off a sustained piece of suspense as the guys figure out what to do with the ferocious old man they’ve got locked in Rauno’s abattoir.
Beyond these moments, however, Rare Exports feels a little thin even at a lean 82 minutes. The whole business of the safety rules is mentioned at the very beginning but hardly touched upon throughout the rest of the movie, which feels like a missed chance to do something like Gremlins with feral Santas. Helmander does his best to pull off a rousing finale, but it ends up feeling a little anti-climactic when he shies away from revealing the final boss in action.
That may have been a budget thing, but I would’ve been happier with a shoddier-looking movie that explored the concept to its fullest potential rather than a pristine film that leaves the possibilities half-baked. This is not the kind of story that requires subtlety, so a few kills wouldn’t go amiss to highlight how dangerous these bad santas are – unfortunately, much of the violence happens off-screen and the violence is implied rather than shown.
All that said, Rare Exports is still an offbeat curio that would make a decent double-bill with Krampus. Both movies tap into the folkloric European origins of the Santa Claus myth, and Rare Exports also hints at Finland’s proud claim in recent decades as the true home of Father Christmas.
If you’re raised on American Christmas movies, you might automatically think Santa’s workshop lies at the North Pole. This concept came along during the mid-19th Century at a time when American writers were establishing many of the modern Santa tropes we know today, such as in Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (a.k.a. “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”). Then in the 1860s, cartoonist Thomas Nash took inspiration from recent Arctic expeditions that had captured the public’s imagination and chose the top of the planet as his spot for Santa’s workshop in a series of illustrations. The idea proved so popular that the North Pole has largely stuck as Santa’s home in American children’s books and Christmas movies since.
Meanwhile in northern Europe, the Finnish version of Santa evolved from more sinister pagan Yuletide festivities when nuuttipukki, or men dressed in fur and scary horned masks, would go door-to-door demanding handouts and frightening the kids if they weren’t appeased. When the Finns got wind of kindly St. Nick in the early 19th Century, he merged with the older tradition and became Joulupukki, or “Yule Goat”, who lived in the remote Korvantunturi region near the Russian border and gave gifts to good children rather than terrorising them.
Four years before Coca-Cola standardised the popular image of Santa as a cheerful bearded fellow in a red suit fringed with white fur, Finnish radio personality Markus Rautio went on air and told listeners that Santa’s workshop had been discovered in Korvantunturi. From that point on, the Finns took the notion of Santa living in the distant wildernesses to the north of their country to heart.
The idea gained further traction in the mid-’80s when Santa Claus Village opened just outside Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland. The city has since been marketed as Santa’s official home, with a Santa available to meet-and-greet visitors all year round and the elves at the post office handling over half a million letters to the boss annually.
Finland made further claims to Santa in 2017 when Joulupukki was included in the National Inventory of Living Heritage, laying the groundwork for potential inclusion into UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage. Ilkka Länkinen, CEO of Rovaniemi’s SantaPark Arctic World, even pooh-poohed the Americanised idea of the North Pole as Santa’s home: “Even though Santa might keep an office at the North Pole, he can’t live there, because reindeer can’t survive there. In Lapland, they can make it through the winter.”
While the Finns are generally known to be warm and friendly people, this half-jokingly belligerent attitude towards claiming Santa from the mighty powers of American consumerism runs through Rare Exports. At one stage, young Pietari states: “The real Santa was totally different. The Coca-Cola Santa is just a hoax.” With that attitude, Helmari gleefully appropriates American blockbuster beats and mashes them together with older folkloric Santa legends to create a distinctly non-Hollywood festive oddity. Rare Exports might not fully deliver on its potential, but it’s still a refreshing left-field viewing pick for the holiday season – and one that features way more naked old men than typical Christmas offerings.
