Batman may be the Dark Knight, but in 1992’s Batman Returns, much of the Caped Crusader’s typically shadowy aesthetic gives way to the bright, rainbow-hued glow of Christmas lights. The film opens with the wintry birth of Oswald Cobblepot, who will grow up to be the villainous Penguin (Danny DeVito), and features a disturbing scene in which a caged baby Oswald grabs — and presumably eats — a house cat right in front of an elegant white Christmas tree.
From there, Batman Returns continues to juxtapose the merriment of Christmas with the unsettling darkness of a Batman story, using Gotham’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony to establish the character of the sinister Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), and later, interrupting the same scene with an attack by the Penguin’s minions, who burst out of a gigantic red-and-green-wrapped present. Batman Returns also makes sure to insert Christmas into the background as often as possible, in the form of Christmas decorations, characters carrying gifts and trimming trees, a baby dressed in a Santa suit, and a character named “the Ice Princess” who dresses like a bedazzled, fur-lined snowflake in a candy cane-striped dressing room. To top it all off, we know that even Batman himself has caught some of the Christmas spirit when he speaks the closing words of the film, “Merry Christmas, Alfred. And good will toward men … and women.”
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