From Christmas Cheer to Crazy Cult: Zack Imbrogno and Kevin Lewis on ‘Christmas at the Kringles’

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We’re celebrating Christmas early this year with our favorite festive neighbors – the Kringles. Not so fast! All that glitters isn’t a Christmas decoration.

Christmas at the Kringles is a Christmas action-comedy-horror film about the Severson family, who move to a quiet neighborhood and discover that their neighbors celebrate Christmas all year — and harbor sinister plans to hypnotize and indoctrinate them. The film follows Mark Severson (Ron Livingston) as he teams up with a disgraced mall Santa – Drunk Santa (Rob Riggle) to rescue his wife Julie (Rachel Bilson) and son Bobby (Jack Jewkes) from the Kringle cult – especially the patriarch Nick Kringle (Thomas Lennon) and his wife Carol (Arden Myrin).

Screenwriter Zack Imbrogno (Slayers, Save Me) and director Kevin Lewis (Willy’s Wonderland, Pig Hill) discuss their subversive way to celebrate Christmas which has been described as “Hallmark goes to hell.”

Describe your twisted take on Christmas.

Zack: The kernel of the idea originated very organically from the neighbor up the street who never takes the Christmas wreath down.

Are they celebrating year round? Why is the tree still up in March? Then I found myself in a quasi-cult, spiritual group in Los Angeles. I wondered what would happen if I crossed the wires and brought together the idea of this cult that celebrates Christmas all year round and uses Christmas in a way that cults do to control and manipulate people.

Why can’t we feel joy all the time and celebrate Christmas every day? Wouldn’t that be a great thing? There’s something darkly unsustainable about that.

I initially was just having fun with the world building and the indoctrination. That was the initial push that got me excited about exploring this idea.

Kevin: Zack sent me the script and I loved it. I saw it immediately. We had long discussions about it especially the tone. Zack also loved Willy’s Wonderland.

Zack: I was excited to get Kevin to direct. Not a lot of people can pull off that mix of humor, action, horror and world building that you had in that. Those were the kind of ingredients that would really help make Kringles a hit and not just a run of the mill, Christmas horror movie. It needed to ride these different emotional waves and visual elements.

Kevin: The characters did lots of cazy stuff. But I also wanted the heart and the magic of Christmas that makes this a Christmas movie.

Zack Imbrogno. Photo by Dumisani Muraire Jr.

Did you use any comps when you pitched the theme of this movie?

Zack: I might call it Christmas Vacation meets Get Out.

I knew I wanted there to be a psychological journey – another cult movie, much darker, like The Invitation or even the fever pitch insanity of Midsommar. Which is kind of funny because mid summer is the sun festival. The roots of Christmas are kind of a cult. That was way before Christianity.

That’s laying the groundwork, but then how do you shape it? So for me, it was about taking the characters on this journey and a family that’s on the fritz – breaking down.

A lot of the movies in the eighties and nineties that I grew up with were about a fractured family and a dad who’s a workaholic and checked out. I might’ve grown up in a household like that and found that in myself at times as a new dad.

I really wanted to take the stakes of this broken down family and see if we could repair them, or is the cult going to get to them first? Is the cult going to become the answer for the kid who feels neglected or the wife who feels neglected? That’s the family tension that I wanted to explore – but they don’t realize they’re in a crisis until it’s too late. They’re about to lose their family and then have to fight these crazy people to get them back.

Kevin: Getting back to what Zack was saying about the father and the son and being present. That was a very big thing for me. I’ve got four kids.

Movies to me are about empathy and about what we’re feeling for the character. That’s how I pitched to the producers and Andrew Ortenberg who produced the movie with us. Andrew got it immediately. It was an unhinged Christmas movie.

You either get it or you don’t. Zack and I were working on for this for four years and there were a lot of things coming and going. People were trying to change it. It’s exactly what Drunk Santa says in the movie, ‘Changing Christmas to what they want.’

We stuck to our guns and we found a great relationship with Briarcliff. They saw the movie the same way we did.

My pitch was, ‘What would happen if John Carpenter and John Hughes went to Christmas dinner with the Flanders family?’

Kevin Cox director of Christmas at the Kringles

Kevin Lewis. Photo by Brandon Cox

How did you keep Christmas at the Kringles grounded?

Zack: That red line, that North Star.

Going back to what Kevin said about the heart. As long as it’s grounded in what our leads want in terms of getting back together as a family, we can have some agency to go a little crazy. It will be funny, but we will come back to caring about these people. It won’t just be violence for the sake of violence, or exploitation for the sake of exploitation

Anything that’s happening in the movie won’t just feel like a slasher because it will always be motivated by us going on the journey with the characters, wanting them to pull through, and wanting them to escape.

I suppose a few audience members may also be fans of the Kringles and root for them. They’re kind of fun anti-heroes. But at least people have both options.

I always try to understand where each character is, in terms of our leads and in terms of an ensemble, which is a lot of characters to track.

I think the North Star was always being able to live through those characters clearly through the arcs and the changes and what they’re trying to achieve, whether for or against each other.

As long as we had that spine, then Kevin could go as wild visually as he wanted, actors could try improv, and we would always come back to a good landing spot with the arcs.

Kevin: I did a 75-page shot list. I worked with the actors and what they were bringing to the table. I also had a map of the emotion arcs and the narrative points – what they’re going to be here and how they’re changing.

It’s always kind of expanding. And for me as a director, you’ve got to create a safe space for the actors to be vulnerable, to play, and to let loose. I need to make they feel secure so they can explore.

I give them examples from art to movies, to music to show them where I’m going. I always try to have a vision.

Ron Livingston and Rob Riggle in Christmas at the Kringles

Mark Severson (Ron Livingston) & Drink Santa (Rob Riggle)

What did the actors bring to their characters?

Zack: Honestly, so much. I was very humbled by how fantastic they were. Giving them the kind of freedom within the boundary.

Ron and Rachel are certainly playing it straight ahead. But, to make the Kringles work, Tom Lennon and Arden Myrin had to have the license to unleash the crazy. They did that in a way that was true to the characters and that built them out.

I remember being on set and I was totally taken aback by how outstanding the actors were in terms of the improvisation, elevating the characters, and finding these details, nuances and little asides that worked perfectly within the beats of the scene, but were so much funnier, but also lived in.