Day 342 of the challenge! As confused as I initially was, I totally dug Pooka!, the Christmas “episode” of Hulu’s Into the Dark horror movie anthology series!
Pooka! is a trip of a Christmas horror movie (or episode if that tickles your fancy). A very loose and twisted “adaptation” (for lack of a better term) of A Christmas Carol, Pooka! isn’t exactly scary per say (not even the jump scares do it), but not ineffective.
Instead, Pooka! barrows itself into your head with a disgustingly visceral hodgepodge of craziness and saturated colors. It’s all meant to confuse and disorient you, and that works great because we’re experiencing everything through the eyes of a protagonist that becomes more and more unreliable as the weirdness unravels. That perspective also enhances what is otherwise a pretty predicable story (you can see where the story is going fairly early on).
Outside of the A Christmas Carol elements of the story, the Christmas aspects of the film are more of a wallpaper than anything (you could easily swap out the season and not much would change). I straight up forgot a few times that this was supposed to be a Christmas story, only to be reminded by a random decorated tree or row of lights. So I would have liked the story to do more with actual Christmas. I was also expecting Pooka! to have something to do with the folkloric puca, so that was a bit disappointing. There are SOME loose elements from the folklore if you look at it from a certain point of view, but it’s largely absent.
Regardless, Pooka! is a pretty wonky but fun holiday horror, and a great alternative if you’re looking for something different from the usual holiday specials and movies looping on TV (and Netflix) right now.