Horror has spent decades making the vampire someone you’d want to be bitten by. Ilja Rautsi went the other way. His Finnish horror comedy Red Snow puts a vampire in a Santa suit and gives him the body of abalding middle-aged man. Then it aims him at a teenage girl who has been waiting for a Twilight romance.
Rautsi talked through that setup in a press-day conversation at Fantastic Fest, where Red Snow had its world premiere. The Santa suit is the hook everyone will remember. What he kept returning to was the part of vampire lore the genre usually dresses up as romance.
Invited In
The idea started with the costume. Rautsi said it arrived years ago on a Christmas drive to see family, when he was trying to come up with a film and vampires popped into his head for no clear reason. The logic came almost immediately. “For a vampire to be able to enter your home, they have to be invited in, like that’s the tradition,” he said. “And then if the vampire works as a Santa Claus, he can get invited in and meet whole families in one go.”
From there he started poking at the other rule everyone knows. Vampires stay whatever age they were when they turned. “What if you turned into a vampire when you’re a fat balding middle-aged Finnish man?” Rautsi asked. That means the film’s vampire will be “going through midlife crisis forever,” which may be the cruelest immortality joke anyone has pitched in years.
Putting the Predator Back
A joke still needs someone to care about. Rautsi found his lead in a teenage girl who dreams about a “Twilight, Robert Pattinson type of vampire.” Putting her in the same house as his midlife crisis Santa gave him the clash he wanted. It also gave him something riskier: “The power dynamics there are interesting and feel kind of dangerous also to go poking into.”
He didn’t back away from that danger. “There’s always the aspect of a sexual predator in a vampire,” Rautsi said. He decided to bring “the grooming aspect” of the myth to the front and to test how far he could push the predator idea. “It turns out pretty far,” he said.
For the Kid Who Stopped Believing
Asked who the freaks are in the film’s pitch as a Christmas present made by freaks for freaks, Rautsi pointed at himself. “Just kind of trying to do a film that I would have loved at 16,” he said. He described being a teenager in December, too old for the magic and not yet an adult, when “Christmas quickly becomes like a tedious exercise.” His lead is meant to live in that gap while being “really far from a perfect person.”
Horror found him early. Rautsi said he was scared of everything as a kid, including trolls in children’s books. His brother used to tease him with one troll book he knew Rautsi couldn’t bear to look at. Rautsi looked anyway, and he thinks that push and pull is why “horror becomes your comfort zone in a way.” Admitting fear to one person leaves you exposed, he explained. A horror screening flips that, because “everyone’s there to admit that they want to be afraid and they experience that communally.”
Red Snow, written and directed by Ilja Rautsi, had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026. Shudder has acquired the film and will begin streaming it December15, 2026.
