I love the Christmas season. Watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is an annual holiday tradition in my household. So, it was a pleasure to stumble upon a series of trailers that find Christmas Vacation recut as a horror picture. It’s always amazing to me how subtle editing changes and a bit of musical restyling can completely change the tone of almost anything. Another great example that did the inverse of what the clip below does is the viral video that saw The Exorcist recut as an ’80s sitcom.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation sees the Griswold family staying home for the holidays and hosting their relatives for a Christmas dinner that they won’t ever forget. In typical Griswold tradition, everything Clark tries to do backfires and everything that can possibly goes wrong does. But somewhere along the line, and important lesson is learned…sort of.
Check out the clip below and let us know what you think. There are a horde of these recut trailers for this film alone available on YouTube but this was our personal favorite of the bunch. It does the most effective job of shedding the comedic elements that the film is so well known for and making everything seem eerie and atmospheric.