Recently, we spoke with the man behind the merry madness to get in the real Christmas spirit, and to serve as a stocking stuffer to the main present under the FEARnet tree. That's right – in case you haven't already noticed, Jackson's cut of You Better Watch Out/Christmas Evil is now exclusively available FREE on FEARnet On Demand (Viewers with Comcast, Time Warner or Cox can watch now; others, please check your cable provider) and you can even watch online for FREE on FEARnet.com staring December 18th. Check out our chat with Jackson after the jump and get in that evil helliday spirit!

In any other season, his picture would be plastered on telephone poles all over the neighborhood, and he’d be chased from the playground by torch-wielding parents.  After all, consider his obese, unkempt appearance, cookie gobbling, penchant for velvet and his thing for bouncing children on his lap, as he asks them to whisper secrets in his ear. But it’s Christmas folks, and at this time of year, that type of pedophiliac behavior is perfectly acceptable…and encouraged, albeit with shopping-mall photography and magical light shows. That’s why it’s so damn refreshing when guys like Lewis Jackson swim against the eggnog-laced current, dodging fruitcake crumbs as they helm films that embody the real spirit of Christmas, sans the holiday cheer.

1980 saw the release of what’s known as Christmas Evil to the general public or Terror in Toyland to bootleggers, but it was created under the name You Better Watch Out. The film follows a man, Harry Stadling, who loves Christmas, so much so that as a child, when he learns Santa is not real, he focuses for years on making the perfect toys and monitoring children’s behavior to embody the “real” Mr. Claus. But, when the awful cynicism and reality of adults prevail, Harry is shamed and embarks on a holly jolly homicidal adventure.

Since its release, You Better Watch Out/Christmas Evil has enjoyed a good bit of cult success, with even the zany-but-well-revered John Waters’ endorsement as the “greatest Christmas movie ever made.” Additionally, in 2005, it was released on DVD by Synapse Films with an accompanying commentary by Waters, along with deleted scenes and extra goodies. And this year, Jackson is taking his own print of the film across North America to five cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Toronto for special screenings he’s hosting himself! [Note: More details on the screenings are available in the Living in FEAR blog]

Where did the concept for this film actually come from?
My imagination [laughs]. A very long time ago, one dark and dreary evening, under the influence so to speak, I just had a picture in my mind of a Santa Claus with a knife in his hand. I [wrote and] rewrote a script – wrote it, hated it, put it in the drawer, took it out and rewrote it. Finally, seven or eight years later, I finally wrote the script I wanted.

Things like the nutcracker gouging the eye and some of the gorier scenes…
Things that I collected. All the years that I was writing the script, I collected Santa tchotchkes and everything I could find. Sadly, when the film ended, the crew absconded with almost everything, so I lost my collection. I had all these things and I was trying to utilize all these Christmas elements to make jokes out of and use the horror implements.

How many tchotchkes would you say you'd collected over the years?
Oh at one time I had hundreds! Hundreds of pictures, books; people would give me anything that they found that had a Christmas motif. So cups with Santa on them, and you just can't imagine the amount of stuff I had actually accumulated. These days it would be a great thing to show in connection with the film. But my crew…

There are three known titles for the film…
Well, it started with You Better Watch Out, my original title, and then I lost control of the film a bit, and someone took it. And when they started showing it in theaters they changed the title to Christmas Evil, which I had nothing to do with. The third title – the film went into a period where bootleggers were stealing it – Terror in Toyland. I have no idea. That just came about from the lowest.

When we made the restored version for Synapse, we went back to the restored materials, which were my materials. I have a print that has the original title of it. When Synapse took it, the implication was that it was going to be called You Better Watch Out again, but Synapse's parent company thought that people wouldn't know it, so they put both titles on the box. When you look at the film, it is called You Better Watch Out. The version that you're showing on FEARnet is basically my version.

Do you prefer your original title?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Christmas Evil never really conveyed what I wanted the thing to convey which is kind of black humor.

Had the title stayed You Better Watch Out, do you think the film would have been perceived any differently?
Well, the whole perception of the film has changed over the years, and there's a lot of misunderstanding about it. I got a lot of very bad reactions, because people took it way to seriously and thought it was insulting, this and that. For some reason the humor, which now seems pretty well accepted, was not readily accepted then. The film had no predecessor at the time. It comes out of influences that are very diverse, whether it be Fritz Lang or Hitchcock, it was an amalgamation that was particular to me and not to one genre. Now, as time has gone on and a lot of things have changed and society has become much darker in tone to say the least – I have a lot of screenings of the movie and show it at a lot of places and people just accept it. It's just entertainment, it's funny. Nobody gets offended, and they don't understand why there were any problems to begin with.

The DVD from Synapse actually includes some of the screening cards from audience members, and they're predominantly pretty negative…
People didn't get it. It was a sneak preview that played with The Elephant Man, and basically we thought putting it on a bill with David Lynch would work, but people found it very difficult. It still has a certain kind of audience. The sneak preview was at night in Pittsburgh, and it was skewed much older, so that was a factor. It's a film for a younger or, if older, a hipper audience to say the least.

Now there's a huge cult following with people like John Waters as huge supporters of the film…
Yes, he saved the film actually.

How did that relationship come about?
It came about not because of me. It came about because of the movie. He saw the movie and he loved it and wrote about it in an article called "Why I Love Christmas?" which first appeared in Rolling Stone and then in one of his books. He wrote this great piece about it and called it "a cinematic masterpiece" and then came up with this great line "if I had kids I would force them to watch it every year and if not I would punish them." Basically that got it going. Then years went by and I had written him a note saying thank you, and what I didn't know was that he would have these annual Christmas parties and would show the film every year at the parties, these tremendous parties in Baltimore. Years later (now, John does fine art as well as movie stuff) he was having an art show that was traveling around the country, and he invited me to screen the movie at several stops. I went to Pittsburgh to the Andy Warhol Museum, He had just happened to be there that weekend, and we met for the first time. That's when I asked him to do the commentary, and he agreed to do that. He's just been this force who has pushed the movie until it had a profile of its own.

The commentary is very funny. His whole take on the movie being about cross dressing has led to this whole other thing. I'm showing the movie at a big screening in Toronto at Christmas and Gay Magazine is going to do a big piece about it because of John and that tie. It's just a very funny thing, and all these other avenues have opened up. The screening is going to be at the BLORE THEATER on the 23rd of December. It's going to be a big thing. And I'll be there. It's my print.

[NOTE: For more screening information in Philadelphia, Toronto and Los Angeles please check out FEARnet's Living in FEAR blog for details.]

You Better Watch Out was released in the midst of this horror-Christmas craze, several years between Black Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night…
Black Christmas came out a few years before, but Black Christmas didn't have a Santa theme, it had a Christmas theme. Films like Silent Night, Deadly Night were made after my movie but because of all sorts of financial entanglements, they were released first. The release of this was held up, and when it was ready for release it was tainted with all the controversy of films like Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Do you think that this fascination with Christmas horror films had anything to do with the religious horror craze of the 1970s that brought out The Exorcist, The Omen etc., or did it grow out of something different?
I think that it actually started with horror movies made for holidays like Halloween. I wouldn't have gotten this movie made if not for Halloween, even though I wasn't going to make a movie where somebody went out and killed non-virgins. It didn't matter what the holiday was, the plot of the movie was that if the girl, or the boy, had sex he/she would be murdered. I wasn't going to do that but somehow or other, because Halloween had been so successful, I was able to slip under the radar. The film actually had a very strange life because it played for seven or eight years, and had an annual life on 42nd street.

You Better Watch Out has definitely seen some cult success. In a world of remakes and sequels, if you found that someone wanted to remake your film what would be your reaction?
They did want to remake the film and I reacted – "Show me the money." But, as it turned out, they kiboshed it. What they were going to do wasn't really a remake of the movie, it was going to [pay] homage to the movie without really remaking the movie. To tell you the truth that was okay to me, because I would hate to see someone remake my movie, but I wouldn't care if someone played off of it or riffed off it…and I got residual payment for my work – since this has never been the most financially rewarding movie. It's history is so checkered.

The real success of the movie is only within the last few years. It existed in a cult, but so under the radar that even I wasn't aware of it. Now every Christmas it gets to be a bigger and bigger deal, culminating in this Christmas where I'm showing it in five cities.

If you were to make You Better Watch Out today. Would you do it any differently?
When I first wrote it, it was bigger. There are a couple of moments in the film I would like to make more ironic and more elaborate. One is the murder in the bed where he slices the guy's throat. I would have liked to do that in a bigger and more outrageous manner. The crowd stuff, chasing him with the torches – when I wrote the scene it was mammoth in my imagination. I had hundreds of people running through the streets with torches, which you saw from the air, that looked like a bloodstream running through the streets – like blood going through veins. That, I would have loved to do.

Any reason aside from budgetary why you decided not to make those scenes as large as you originally imagined?
Just money. I had some money to make it, but we did go over budget. It's relatively cheap. The conceit that I did was… There was this cameraman in Europe who was very famous, and had worked with some of the best directors in the world, and I was dying to get him to do the movie. I wrote him a fan letter and asked him, "Would you do my movie?" and he said, "Well, sounds interesting. Why don't you come over." So I took a plane over to Vienna where he was shooting a movie, and I had storyboarded the entire film. I showed him the storyboards and he thought it was great and wanted to do it, which was really shocking. The only downside was that we had budgeted a certain amount of money for the film, and when he flew over and gave his lighting order to my production manager and they went to get the lights, I got this phone call and saw these two grim faces in the doorway to my office. They said to me, "His lighting is going to almost double the budget." I was very naïve about it, and he saw what I told him and went to town on it, because he's used to working on bigger movies. I had to go hat in hand to my producers and get more money, which, thankfully, they came up with. That's why the film looks so great.

Was there any reason why the deleted scenes on the DVD ended up getting removed from the final cut?
Basically, at the time, the scene with the brother at the office, which I think is kind of an important scene, it just didn't fit into the conception of a horror movie. People wanted the film to be swifter and move faster, they still think it moves slowly. In the end, most people watch the movie and watch the extras so they get that point anyway. If I was doing it today, I might find a swifter way to tell those details.

If you ever had to make another horror film about another holiday, what holiday would you choose?
That, you can count me out on! You won't believe this, but I was offered to do a horror movie about the Easter Bunny. I couldn't believe it. And when I finally got the script it turned out that it was about an Easter Bunny killing non-virgins, so I wouldn't do it.

What is your biggest fear?
Being buried alive, it just freaks me out. That claustrophobic thing, and it has gotten worse over the years. I went for an MRI and I had to get out.