When it comes to Christmas horror, the obvious titles come to mind; Black Christmas. Silent Night, Deadly Night. Terrifier 3. Gremlins. While all of these Christmas classics certainly deliver on festive feelings, another subgenre of holiday horror focusses more on slower, subtler scares, eschewing twinkling lights and tinsel for disembodied hauntings and existential dread. The great tradition of Christmas ghost stories as we know them stems from the British Isles (because of course it does), harkening back to Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Since then, many movies and shows have adapted some of the most classic stories, most notably with the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas series, which combine the traditional twinge of folk horror with the religious guilt us Brits are so fond of.
Last year, prolific film writer and Severin Films producer Kier-La Janisse (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, House of Psychotic Women) put her many years of research into the genre into practice with The Haunted Season, a yearly series of chilling short form horror tales that follow the classic tradition, starting with Sean Hogan's To Fire You Come At Last. This year, Janisse steps into the director's chair for her first narrative feature with The Occupant of the Room, an adaptation of the short ghost story of the same name by Algernon Blackwood from 1909, which centers on a schoolteacher (Don McKellar, Exotica, eXistenZ) whose late-night arrival at a hotel in the Alps leads to a sleepless night full of uncanny occurrences.
With Severin Films’The Haunted Season: The Occupant of the Room now streaming on Shudder, we sat down with Janisse to talk festive frights, capturing depression on film and her leap from non-fiction into narrative filmmaking.
What's your background with the Christmas ghost story horror tradition?
Kier-La Janisse: In 2017 I edited Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television, an almost 500 page book featuring different essays about the history of Christmas horror and different case studies of specific films, as well as a huge compendium at the end, so it was something I'd already spent quite a long time thinking about. Also, just the idea of winter as a time for ghost stories, whether or not it has a Christmas connection. A lot of the stories we think of as ghost stories for Christmas actually don't have anything to do with Christmas – they don't mention Christmas, they're not set at Christmas. The idea is that the timing of the telling of the tale, and the fact that you are telling it at Christmas, is what makes it a Christmas ghost story.
I think it was 2012 when I first saw the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas. A friend over [in the U.K.] showed me them, and said he remembered seeing them as kids. Every year there'd be a new one and he would watch it with his family, and I was so jealous of this tradition! I would've been all over that as a kid. I then became obsessed with the idea.
At the same time I first saw them, I was working at FANGORIA with [Senior Vice President of Programming and Acquisitions at Shudder] Sam Zimmerman. We toyed with the idea of making a ghost story for Christmas, every year, but it never came to be. Years later, now Sam's at Shudder, I'm at Severin, and we realized we were in a position where we could actually revisit this and make it happen. It was meant to be.
There's such a vast catalogue of these Christmassy/wintery ghost stories from writers like M.R. James, A.M. Burrage, even Lovecraft – what is it specifically about Blackwood's The Occupant of the Room that speaks to you so keenly?
KLJ: This particular story is one that I've read every year for Christmas since I got into the tradition, so it seemed like the obvious story for me to direct. Part of what I like about it is the set up. It's just a great set up for a story. You've got this isolated location with a hostile exterior and you've got these weird people who work in this hotel. Both the proprietress and the porter, to me, are sort of stock characters from these types of stories. The idea of taking a stock character and hiring these really idiosyncratic actors to see what they can do with the role was very fun. And then, of course, the idea that there's a room – but there's a catch. When you write that in a short synopsis, it's immediately interesting.
But once he gets into the room and he's by himself, that's when we get into the kinds of things that are appealing to me personally. Everything from being unable to sleep because you're in a weird place to hearing these unfamiliar noises, there's a lot of strangeness people can relate to about staying in hotels. And then you have this dread that starts to seep in. That intense feeling of dread, feeling like something bad is going to happen, but not knowing where it's coming from… that's something I have experienced a lot.
The Occupant of the Room gets into a very black, deep depression, and the way the story describes that is something I could really visualize. I could really relate to how personal it gets. It starts off as an almost comedic set up but quickly gets very sad. That's very much me! The most challenging aspect of translating that story to the screen is that so much of it happens inside the main character's head, and I didn't want to just have a narration over the top explaining what he's feeling. So we had to create those associations. Everything that he sees in the room, you have to see him connecting the dots and making the associations himself, so I tried to show that with the painting on the wall, the hair in the sink, the lantern imagery… all of those things are not in the original story.
Speaking of that animation, it's just such a beautiful, eerie and truly unique sequence. You mentioned at [Sheffield horror film festival] Celluloid Screams that you found the artist on Instagram?
KLJ: Yeah. I was really excited to bring that sense of depression to life with the right tools, such as the animation. Specifically the kind of animation where you can crumple, and rip, and use the blackness. I thought I could use that to convey the episode he has in the story. I had a really specific visual look in my head and I was looking for an animator, so I just typed in various keywords into Instagram and [artist and animator] Anna Melina‘s account popped up. When I working on any collaborative project, I'm always looking for people who are already doing what I want, rather than getting a jack-of-all-trades. Anna was already doing exactly what I wanted, I just had to ask.
And if you don't ask, you don't get, right?
KLJ: Exactly.
Severin Films’ The Haunted Season: The Occupant of the Room is now Streaming on Shudder.
