The first thing that hits you is the absurd grandeur of it: a long, unbroken shot of hundreds of Santas sprinting across a deserted Venice Beach like a battalion in a lost war film. Red suits flapping, beards flying, boots sinking into the sand—they surge forward in a chaotic waves, half comic, half epic. The camera doesn’t cut. It just wanders with them, absorbing the mad logic of the moment. You can almost hear the Cacophony Society cackling behind the lens.
This 45-second uninterrupted take—rescued from a treasure trove of ‘90s home videos—sets the tone for Seth Porges’s new documentary SantaCon, which premiered this week at the Doc NYC film festival. Before the event became a worldwide bar crawl and seasonal shorthand for holiday debauchery, it was something stranger, funnier, more imaginative: a piece of anarchic street theatre engineered by the Bay Area prank-art collective that helped seed Burning Man and energized the cultural DNA that would later surface in Fight Club.
For Porges, a Beacon-based filmmaker known for chronicling the allure and limits of chaos (see Class Action Park), the archive of early Cacophony Society antics was a revelation. “It’s the greatest archival stash I’ve ever encountered,” he says. “You’re just seeing these scenes play out basically uncut. There’s a two-minute shot of [Cacophony Society primary member] John Law talking to a police officer without cuts. And even the shot of the Santas storming the beach—it feels like an epic war film.”
The early Cacophonists weren’t trying to build a tradition. They were trying to shake people awake. Their Santa interventions—flash mobbing shopping malls, serenading Michael Moore, climbing the Brooklyn Bridge—were designed to rupture the membrane of normalcy for a few minutes at a time. Before the internet, before brand activations, before viral marketing made every surprise feel like a pitch, there was joy in simply confusing strangers.
Porges says what struck him most wasn’t the actions of the Santas—they were always, as he puts it, “a little drunk, a little naughty”—but the expressions on the faces around them. “Back then, nobody had ever seen anything like it,” he says. “They didn’t know how they were supposed to respond. You see joy, awe, wonder, some disgust, some terror—but surprise above all else.”
Roots in Cacophony
SantaCon began in 1994, launched by the Cacophony Society’s San Francisco chapter. As Porges discovered, its founding wasn’t just mischievous but collaborative, participatory, and deeply rooted in a belief that “fun unto itself is an end worth pursuing.” This came from a pre-monetized culture of pranks, interventions, and happenings—creative acts that existed for their own sake.
What was equally startling to Porges was just how well the early participants documented themselves. A friend of Porges, Scott Beale, casually mentioned that he had filmed several early SantaCons. That opened the vault. “Even then,” Porges admits, “I was thinking, this is too stupid a topic. You can’t make a movie about Santa Claus, can you? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it wasn’t just about drunk Santas—it was about bigger ideas.”
Those ideas include authorship, entropy, cultural mutation, and how the most potent creative acts outrun their makers and grow outward in unpredictable directions.
When the Monster Walks
As with everything the Cacophonists touched, Santacon slipped the leash. “It was never a piece of property anybody owned,” Porges explains. “It was an idea.” As the early internet matured, SantaCon jumped from San Francisco to Portland to New York to dozens of cities worldwide. Without a central organizer, it became—inevitably—whatever new participants wanted it to be.
Over time, the chaotic whimsy hardened into ritual. A performance-art flash mob became a civic stress test. Cities now brace for the annual alcoholic crimson surge like a weather event. The original Cacophony members watch with a mix of bewilderment and resignation.
“It’s a Frankenstein story for sure,” Porges says. “Dr. Frankenstein has to meet his monster at some point, recognize that creation is a reflection of them but also a reflection of the world around them—and understand that they no longer control it.”
John Law—who helped start Burning Man before stepping away in 1996—has lived this cycle more than once. The culture he helped spark grew beyond him, and in directions he couldn’t have predicted. But instead of bitterness, Law embraces a kind of creative stoicism. As Porges puts it: “Stuff’s going to lose its cool eventually. Every nightclub stops being cool. What do you do? You make something else that is.”
This is the heart of the film: the acceptance that ideas evolve, mutate, get co-opted, get corrupted. The only constant is the urge to keep making.
The Cultural Drift
Viewed through a Marxist lens—Santacon follows the classic capitalist cycle: an oppositional act is absorbed, neutralized, and returned to the world as commerce. The Cacophony Society set out to parody consumerism; within a decade, their parody was feeding it. The avant-garde becomes the available; the anti-capitalist gesture becomes holiday inventory. “It stopped being a reflection of its original creators,” Porges argues, “and instead became a reflection of our greater populist id.”
Today, the response to Santacon is scripted: annoyance, dread, maybe a resigned shrug. But back in the ’90s, when hundreds of people in Santa costumes flooded into a public space, a provocation might also be a revelation. “They were showing people something they’d never seen before,” Porges says. “And as a result, it jolted them out of their daily routine.”
This is a lost art. The early Cacophonists believed fun itself was sacred. In the hustle culture of 2025, where every human gesture seems like an engagement strategy, that worldview feels downright revolutionary.
More Than Cosplay Pub Crawl
In the end, SantaCon isn’t really about a cosplay pub crawl. It’s about how to keep living when the world you helped create no longer resembles the one you came from. It’s about aging into a landscape shaped by your own ideas—only refracted, distorted, and enlarged beyond recognition.
“I hope it’s a movie about living a good life in the rubble,” Porges says. “About filling your life with creativity, exploration, collaboration, and fun in a world that seems designed to squash those instincts. About building your own reality. And about how doing that with your friends may be the key to a good life.” A holiday message, in its way. One even a monster in a Santa suit might appreciate.
SantaCon screens on November 15 at 9:30pm and November 20 at 9:10pm at Village East by Angelika in Manhattan, part of Doc NYC. Tickets available here.
