It’s a Wonderful Knife is out this week and puts a slasher spin on the high-concept behind a beloved Christmas classic. It’s a movie that shares its influence’s heart and uses Christmas effectively. It also has a fantastic performance from Justin Long as a corrupt and deadly Mayor.

ComingSoon’s Senior Editor for Horror, Neil Bolt, spoke with the film’s director, Tyler MacIntyre, about Long’s performance, how experiences with editing  Christmas Movies of the Week helped with this movie, mixing heart with horror, and mulling over what other Christmas classics could work with a horror spin. 

Neil Bolt: When creating a festive horror movie, what other holiday touchstones did you have for It’s a Wonderful Knife apart from the obvious influence in the title and story itself? Was it a mixture of horror ones and more traditional ones?

Tyler MacIntyre: Yeah, I definitely looked at a lot of movies that had a bit of a nightmare reality, alternate reality, you know, something like Back to the Future Part 2 where they go to that alternate version of 1985, and it’s much worse. That was one we talked about a lot because they did a great job of setting up the world very organically, and things like Mr. Destiny, a Jim Belushi movie if you remember that, with Rene Russo as well. 

Anyway, I love that movie; I think it’s super interesting, but it is itself a riff on It’s a Wonderful Life, and of course, It’s a Wonderful Life borrows a lot from A Christmas Carol, so I was trying to do something that wasn’t particularly beholden to It’s a Wonderful Life, but then bringing in more classic ones and those with darker stories, so stuff like A Christmas Story, but I leaned more into something like Scrooged and A Nightmare Before Christmas and stuff like that. I wanted to do something that had the spooky flavor, but also the heart.

You’ve got some great support for your leads in the form of Justin Long, Katherine Isabelle, and Joel McHale. With Justin, he seems to be enjoying a run of being a bit of a git in horror movies of late. Did you envisage him playing that role quite the way he did?

He was an early pick on my list because he has a bit of a nice guy assumption about him. I really want to see how dark he could go, and definitely, he has a darker side in some of his other stuff. He has a bit of an edge, but I like the idea of playing him like the Baby Boomer that he is, the Gen X character that chose the older crowd, chose the corporate lifestyle. 

We talked a bit about Michael Douglas in Wall Street as an influence, and I think he pulled from Joel Olsteens (a televangelist) and stuff like that. We worked together on a voice that went with the look, and I was really supportive of going big with it, and he was really excited about that because, with this kind of story and its fantastical conceit, there’s an opportunity to go bigger. And you know, a lot of Christmas classics, like Die Hard, for instance, has big Villains, and that’s a fun thing to do, especially as we had Jane Widdop in there, who’s very grounded, very empathetic, so Justin’s character makes for a great foil.

I noticed quite a few of your cast have previous Christmas movie experience as well as horror experience. Was that just a happy coincidence or something you were looking for? 

I mean, hey, there’s a lot of Christmas movies! I think every actor’s got some Christmas movie experience, and I include myself as a filmmaker. I love Christmas, and I love Christmas movies, but it’s probably less coincidence and more that you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who’s had some Christmas movie experience.

That’s a fair point! Was there any sharing of those experiences and advice between the cast and crew?

Yeah, yeah, and I definitely used mine. Straight out of college, I edited a number of those Christmas movie of the week movies, one of which is actually in the movie. It’s in the part where they’re around the TV and watching  one called A Gift-Wrapped Christmas, which I really liked. I’ve got a lot of respect for the craft that goes into those. I know it’s in vogue to make fun of how sincere those movies are, but the reality is they work, and they have an audience and a huge and dedicated audience. There’s not a lot of genres that do. I mean, horror is one of them, but I really wanted to do a satire of that, but I have a very deep respect for it.

It’s a Wonderful Life, which is part of the influence here, is a story about giving hope and reason to someone who doesn’t see how important they are to the small world they inhabit, and you naturally take the same idea but approach it from a different perspective. Not just because there’s a killer running wild, but with how you frame that lesson this time around. 

Was it important to you to keep that message intact even with a more grisly backdrop?

For sure, yeah, we definitely wanted it to have that kind of heart. When I first came on, Michael (Kennedy, the writer of It’s a Wonderful Knife) and I had some very long discussions where we said, ‘’What are we after here?’’ and I always thought of a story about survivor’s guilt, you know someone who does the right thing and made the right call, but now there’s people in her life who are no longer with her and she’s not able to get the support she needs and it pushes her to this dark place where she thinks things would be better off if she didn’t exist. 

I thought it was a good way of getting to a similar place because there are those suicidal themes in It’s a Wonderful Life, and I wanted to keep those things intact, but without making it a beat-for-beat remake. It doesn’t have the same structure; it just shares in that high-concept twist that it has, which is again a riff on A Christmas Carol. So I was looking at movies like that had similar beats in them like those ones I mentioned earlier. We wanted it to be this very human, empathetic message about being there for each other, and we wanted it to be a movie people could watch around the holidays and feel good about and feel comfortable about revisiting year in and year out. People who are horror fans, but horror fans have Christmas too!

What other festive favorite do you think would work well with a horror twist?

Ooh, when I saw they were gonna remake A Christmas Story, and it was a sequel, and I always thought that would be fun if they went super dark with it. I mean, I haven’t seen the remake/sequel they made, but I was like, ‘’What did this guy grow up into?’’ 

I also think it would be great to do a very pitch-black version of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Where a guy is trying psychotically hard to have the perfect family Christmas, but there’s already some dark things in that movie anyway.

You also had a hand in writing another recent horror movie with Five Nights at Freddy’s. Are you a fan of the games or, indeed horror games in general?

Oh yeah! Big fan of the games. When we started working on that, I had the first game on my phone and I followed the huge explosion of people learning the love and joy of the jump scares and the complex lore in those games. We were on for a few drafts of that, and some of that’s stayed in the final film, so I’m excited to see what Emma (Tammi) and the team have done with it.

It’s a Wonderful Knife is in theaters November 10, 2023, with a Shudder release in the near future.