November 21, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Seth Porges
Culture Representation: The documentary film “SantaCon” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few multiracial people), who discuss their 1990s connections to SantaCon, an annual international event that has people in various cities gathering in large goups as they are dressed as Santa Claus and partying in public during the Christmas holiday season.
Culture Clash: SantaCon started in 1994, as a local prankster event from the iconoclastic group the Cacophony Society, but SantaCon outgrew the creators’ original intentions and became a pop culture phenomenon that has often caused violent crimes and other mayhem in various cities.
Culture Audience: “SantaCon” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about famous live events, but this documentary tells only a small fraction of the long history of SantaCon.
Don’t expect “SantaCon” to answer a lot of questions about the complete history of this annual, often-controversial event. SantaCon—which takes place in various cities in numerous countries during the Christmas holiday season—features people dressing up as Santa Claus and gathering in large groups to party in public. This disappointing and incomplete documentary should’ve been titled “SantaCon: The Early Years,” because it mostly covers SantaCon’s events and leaders from the mid-to-late 1990s. The movie leaves out too many crucial and more recent details.
Directed by Seth Porges, “SantaCon” had its world premiere at the 2025 edition of DOC NYC. The movie should not be confused with the 2017 short documentary film “SantaCon,” directed by Austin Peters. The feature-length “SantaCon” documentary (which clocks in at 87 minutes) doesn’t make good use of its feature-length time and is often choppily edited. “SantaCon” quickly becomes a boring and repetitive compilation of footage of middle-aged and elderly people talking about “the good old days” of their rebellious youth, mixed in with archival footage of SantaCon events in the 1990s.
SantaCon began in 1994, as an annual event from local city chapters of the U.S.-based Cacophony Society, a loosely structured group of iconoclasts, misfits and pranksters. Rob Schmitt, a former member of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, is credited with being the creator of SantaCon. Schmitt is interviewed in the “SantaCon” documentary, but the documentary gives the lion’s share of attention to former San Francisco Cacophony Society leader John Law, whose interview commentary serves as the main narrative for the movie.
The movie begins with Law giving a tour of the dilapidated Tribute Tower in Oakland, California. Law works out of the Tribute Tower and shows how climbing up the tower’s narrow and winding staircase can be a challenge. “Everybody is an explorer,” Law says. “Everybody’s done it at some point. And then, it’s beaten out of them, like the spirit gets beaten out of most people. But the people who hang on to that spirit, it’s brilliant. And urban exploration is all about that. You’re really alive when you’re doing it.”
Is this a documentary about urban explorations or SantaCon? It’s an example of how better editing decisions were needed for this documentary, which tends to show a lot of rambling that sometimes goes off-topic. There are also mixed messages about SantaCon’s intentions. Law says Schmitt created SantaCon so Schmitt could “get laid.” The documentary is complicit in glossing over or ignoring many of the sleazy and illegal things that happen at SantaCon and instead presents the “SantaCon” originators as people who were persecuted by uptight or overzealous law enforcement.
On the one hand, the people in the documentary try to make it sound like SantaCon was originally intended as harmless fun, and they blame “other people” for coming along and ruining the fun. On the other hand, you can’t pretend to be a group that’s about “harmless fun” when many of the Cacophony Society’s other activities involved shooting guns at people (even if it’s in remote parts of a desert), or throwing meat at animal-rights activists during an otherwise peaceful protest. It’s like listening to people who say they lit matches near gasoline for “harmless fun,” and then they try to pass the blame when the lit matches cause a catastrophic fire that gets out of control.
Law, by his own admission, has tried to live his life like a counterculture hippie from the 1960s. News coverage of Law has reported that he was born in 1959, so he was a bit too young to participate in 1960s counterculture. However, he says he brought that left-wing, counterculture spirit to the Cacophony Society, a collective that was founded in San Francisco in 1986. The Cacophony Society eventually grew to have local chapters in other U.S. cities. Past members of the Cacophony Society’s chapters in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Portland, Oregon, are interviewed in the documentary.
According to Law and other people interviewed in the documentary, the first SantaCon (which took place in San Francisco) was conceived as a freewheeling prank event, where a bunch of Cacophony Society members (and other like-minded people) dressed up at Santa Claus and showed up unannounced and uninvited at various public places. The documentary has footage from this first SantaCon, which includes the rogue Santas crashing a party at the Hyatt Regency Hotel (one of many places the SantaCon revelers invaded that night) and eventually getting kicked out. Not surprisingly, many of these Santas were intoxicated.
Public intoxication is the main reputation that SantaCon has. It’s a reputation that has stuck from the beginning of SantaCon. Although SantaCon is now an event that raises money for charities, that purpose is overshadowed by the often-correct perception that people’s main interest in SantaCon is to see what a bunch of intoxicated people dressed as Santa Claus will do when they get together and party in public places. The “SantaCon” documentary doesn’t really address either of these purposes but instead is a flawed showcase for people to give their opinions about how they think SantaCon was much better in the 1990s.
Law says that he thinks the first SantaCon was the best SantaCon and a “perfect memory” for him. He adds his thoughts (with a trace of bitterness in his voice) about what happened to SantaCon: “It sort of took on a life of its own, like a Frankenstein Santa.” Law and the other people in the documentary all say that they have nothing to do with what SantaCon became in the 21st century. You won’t hear any perspectives from the current leaders of SantaCon because they aren’t interviewed for this documentary.
The documentary focuses mainly on 1990s SantaCons that happened in San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York City. It’s mentioned that law enforcement was the most hositle to SantaCon in Portland, while law encorcement was the most welcoming to SantaCon in New York City, which had its first SantaCon in 1998. Law enforcement in San Francisco was caught off-guard with the first SantaCon in 1994, when San Francisco police made some arrests, and reportedly warned and advised Portland’s law enforcement when SantaCon went to Portland for the first time in 1996. At the first SantaCon in Los Angeles in 1998, there wasn’t much of a fuss because many bystanders thought the hordes of Santas were part of a movie or part of a tourist group.
Chris Radcliffe, who is described by several people in the documentary as one of the biggest troublemakers in Cacophony Society history, was interviewed in the documentary when he was in the late stages of cancer. Radcliffe (who was born in 1957 and died in 2024) had the dubious distinction of being the first person arrested for doing something illegal at SantaCon. He was arrested for taking a velvet rope and simulating it as a phallic symbol. It was considered to be a lewd public act.
At the first SantaCon in Portland, in 1996, several people in the Portland Cacophony Society made joke Christmas gift boxes that had nude photos glued to the boxes. Later in the documentary, it’s mentioned that Law was arrested at Portland’s first SantaCon for being the event’s chief organizer and because an unnamed SantaCon participant “accidentally” gave one of these nude photo boxes to a child. The criminal charge was distribution of obscene material to a child. The documentary doesn’t mention the outcomes of these arrests, but it can be presumed that the charges were dropped or the only punishment was getting fined.
It all sounds like non-violent violations not worth getting too upset about, when it comes to illegal things that SantaCon participants did at SantaCon. The problem with this “SantaCon” documentary is that is selectively chooses which SantaCon crimes that it mentions for any length of time. The documentary leaves out details of all the vicious assaults, robberies, sexual abuse, and other crimes that have been publicly documented as being done by SantaCon participants during SantaCon. There are too many of these crimes to consider SantaCon as a consistently “peaceful” event.
SantaCon alum Law and other people in the documentary say that the Cacophony Society eventually imploded in many ways, primarily due to all the volatile personalities involved. This was not a counterculture group intent on spreading “peace and love.” Several former Cacophony Society members who are interviewed in the documentary openly admit that this was a group intent on spreading chaos.
One of the attendees of the 1996 Portland SantaCon was Chuck Palahniuk, who is best known as the author of the 1996 novel “Fight Club,” which was turned into a 1999 movie directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Palahniuk attended Portland SantaCon in 1996 as a journalist. The documentary has archival footage of this 1996 Portland SantaCon, showing a suspicious Law demanding to see Palahniuk’s photo ID, to prove that Palahniuk wasn’t an undercover cop. When Palahniuk shows his ID and insists that he’s a journalist, not a cop, Law looks relieved and lets Palahniuk stay with the other SantaCon participants.
Palahniuk, who is interviewed in the documentary, was also a member of the Portland Cacophony Society. He comments, “The Cacophony Society changed my life. It was pretty clear that it was a cult you could step into and have a great time, and step out of.” Palahniuk also says something that the documentary fails to properly explore: SantaCon was born out of (mostly) male rage and disllusionment.
Law essentially admits the same thing, but he doesn’t take full responsibility for what that rage unleashed. Law says in the documentary that he was emotionally hurt as a child, when at 9 years old, he found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real, and this disillusionment deeply affected him: “When I realized that Santa was baloney, I did start to hate Christmas. I didn’t let the cynicism destroy my life or love of other people, but it was hurtful knowing that [Santa wasn’t real].”
SantaCon, says Law, was a way to disrupt the fantasy image of Santa Claus, and shock people into seeing rowdy Santa Clauses descend en masse on the public. The problem with this concept is that it will inevitably attract troublemakers (often intoxicated) with bad intentions that can result in terrible crimes or other ways that people get hurt. There’s no right way to downplay this ugly fact, but this documentary definitely tries to irresponsibly downplay it.
The “SantaCon” documentary includes a clip from the “Fight Club” movie where Pitt’s Tyler Durden character tells his group of underground fighters: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day, we’d all be movie gods and millionaires and rock stars. But we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very pissed off.”
Palahniuk comments on how this “Fight Club” scene related to why SantaCon was created: “I think that [scene] summarized what we felt. So, there was an enormous amount of unexpressed emotion that had to be vented in these periodic explosions.”
The “SantaCon” documentary also doesn’t really address that for all of its “counterculture” image that SantaCon tried to project, it was operated like an old-fashioned “men’s club,” with almost no women and almost no racial diversity in leadership positions in SantaCon’s early years. This lack of diversity is seen in the archival footage, which shows the early SantaCon events looking like people wanting an excuse to act like drunken fraternity boys. The documentary doesn’t question why SantaCon wasn’t as “inclusive” as the originators would like to say it was.
Not surprisingly, most of the people interviewed in the documentary are men, who mainly just brag about how they were part of SantaCon when they were young. The majority of these interviewees are Cacophony Society alumni, including Dennis Borawski (from the Detroit chapter); Rev. All Ridenour, Heather Vescent and Linda Williamson (from the Los Angeles chapter); Chris Hackett and Julia Solis (from the Brooklyn chapter); Sam Frangiamore and Scott Beale (from the San Francisco chapter); Marci Macfarlane and Rev. Chuck Linville (from the Portland chapter); and William Abernathy (from the New York chapter). Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere, is one of the few people interviewed in the documentary who is not identified as being a past member of the Cacophony Society.
All of this reminiscing proves is that there are people in every generation who think their generation did things the “coolest” and the “best,” compared to other generations. And by not having a well-rounded group of people interviewed about SantaCon (an event that is now very international and spanning generations), it just shows that this documentary is lazy or had an agenda to just limit the perspectives to mainly Cacophony Society people who haven’t been involved with producing SantaCon for decades.
And even then, the documentary somewhat brushes aside the in-fighting in the Cacophony Society. For example, Macfarlane describes notorious incendiary Radcliff this way: “He was kind of an asshole.” Linville is described as a gun fanatic who would do a lot of mentally unhinged things that would genuinely threaten people and make them fear for their safety. A toxic culture with people who enjoy breaking laws usually means sexual harassment or sexual abuse, but the documentary erases any hints that these problems happened in the Cacophony Society and at SantaCon.
Some of SantaCon’s 1990s leaders, such as Law, co-founded Burning Man in 1986. Burning Man is another annual live “counterculture-turned-mainstream” event marred by violence and controversy. Since 1996, Law has distanced himself from what Burning Man has become and has no current involvement in Burning Man. After all, it would look very hypocritical if Law and his anti-capitalist cronies actually profited and got rich from these events, which have become big money-making businesses.
Burning Man is mentioned several times in the documentary as a comparison event to SantaCon. SantaCon is a very urban event in various cities. Burning Man is held in the isolated Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada.
The locations of SantaCon and Burning Man are very different, but both events have reputations for being large gatherings where people are expected to get intoxicated and do things that they wouldn’t do in their everyday lives. And that often leads to violence and other crimes. The violence and other crimes at SantaCon over the years are never thoroughly examined in Porges’ “SantaCon” documentary, which tones down this disturbing aspect of SantaCon by just showing quick montages of SantaCon violence from archival news clips.
As an example of how this documentary is skewed and poorly made, “SantaCon” gives a lot of screen time to people complaining that SantaCon isn’t what it started out to be, but not once does the documentary mention who actually owns the SantaCon name as a business entity. The brand name of SantaCon is currently owned by Participatory Safety Inc., a New York-based non-profit group. Don’t expect the documentary to give any details about how recent SantaCons have been planned and produced, because those details are not in the documentary.
The last 10 minutes of the documentary are just rushed and crammed-in footage from 2022 of SantaCon in New York City. Law and Schmitt (both dressed as Santa Claus) are shown attending this SantaCon, with Law frequently expressing out loud his reluctance about being there. (In other words, it wasn’t his idea, and their attendance was staged for the documentary.)
The documentary’s 2022 footage of SantaCon in New York City also depicts the event as non-violent and fairly wholesome. There is no drunken mayhem in sight. And there’s a lot of diversity at this 2022 Santa Con in New York City, with some underage kids in attendance. As time goes on—and because some off-camera documentary producer obviously told the SantaCon attendees who Law and Schmitt are—several young adults are seen praising and thanking Law and Schmitt for being among the founders of SantaCon. After they receive these compliments, Law and Schmitt seem to be enjoying themselves, despite inital skepticism about being at this SantaCon.
Law says to the camera: “I hope you guys are catching my ambivalence about all this. Some of it’s great. Some of it is horrifying. The kids are having fun. And that’s a good thing.” He also says that as he’s gotten older, he’s become less judgmental about things, including what SantaCon has become.
Law takes no credit for starting SantaCon and and gives Schmitt all the credit for creating SantaCon. Schmitt and Law are both modest by saying that they don’t own SantaCon because SantaCon now belongs to the people who attend. Actually, SantaCon is not a “public doman” event, but the documentary fails to mention this basic fact because the documentary ignores mentioning who owns the Santa Con brand name and doesn’t give a behind-the-scenes look at recent SantaCons.
That’s not the story that this “SantaCon” documentary wants to tell. Instead, this “SantaCon” documentary is just a misguided and myopic forum for people who used to be involved with SantaCon in the 1990s, as they talk about how their 1990s SantaCons were the best SantaCons. The 1990s are only a short part of SantaCon’s history, which is why this “SantaCon” documentary is misleading and deficient in presenting itself as a complete chronicle of the SantaCon story.
