Trivia

Tormod Lien, who plays the serial killer in the film, actually had to walk out during the first press-screening because some of his own scenes got to intense. Tormod Lien is a religious man who works as a churchwarden, and the extreme contrast to playing such an evil person fascinates him. He has led a very interesting life with a lot of these kinds of contradictions: he has worked in a prison and been an inmate, he has worked in mental health care and been a patient himself. Tormod now tries to help and inform people using his own experiences in orations and in his work.

"O'Hellige Jul!" is the first effort of directors Magne Steinsvoll and Per-Ingvar Tomren to make a real full-length film and they wanted to use this experience as a private film education. In order to grow as much as possible as filmmakers, they wanted to make the production as challenging as they could. This included never using CGI, working only with amateurs, children, animals, not having a finished script during production and building the entire film out of pieces that ordinary films wouldn't have used. One of the concepts for "O'Hellige Jul!" is that it would be like if the film makers came over a trash can filled with footage that an ordinary Christmas slasher had thrown away, because they were either too brutal or mundane, and decided to edit these scenes together. Making a coherent and entertaining story only out of pieces normal films would reject seemed like a perfect challenge for the daring filmmakers.

Lead actress Eline Aasheim is the daughter of explorer, author and adventurer Stein P. Aasheim. So from the time Eline was born she has been taken to exotic locations all around the world, experiencing lots of challenges and adventures that the great outdoors have to offer, including spending a winter in the unforgiving wilderness of Svalbard among polar bears and other fascinating wildlife when she was only 13 years old. This has made her extremely tough and brave, which both are qualities needed for this role and the "O'Hellige Jul!" production.

Director Per-Ingvar Tomren is probably one of the world's first stuntmen with Brittle Bone Disease (Osteogenesis Imperfecta). The reason why this combination is so rare should be pretty obvious: during the shooting of "O'Hellige Jul!" Per-Ingvar fractured two ribs, a lot of fingers, toes, small bones, his jaw and sustained a skull fracture - which led to internal bleeding and a permanent brain damage.

While researching serial killers for the film, the filmmaker came over an interview with Tommy Lee Sells. Sells claimed he committed his first murder at age 16, and that he killed upwards of 70 people. When he tried to explain what was going on in his head he said it was like his brain was filled with broken glass. "O'Hellige Jul!" wanted to reflect this in the filming and editing style of the scenes where the story follows the killer. The editing in these sections is extremely chaotic, jumping from real life, to how the killer sees the situation, fantasies, to flashbacks. Having jump cuts and pieces that don't really fit together emulating shards of glass.