A couple years back, ABC News ran a piece about holiday-set horror movies. I presume it was at least partly in response to a Fox News clip in which two reporters were losing their minds over holiday-themed slashers playing in theaters, with the reporters asking why the depraved sickos of Hollywood are determined to ruin the holidays. The ABC piece was a little more measured, though it retained a not-insignificant whiff of the pearl-clutching found in the Fox News clip.
So when the reporter tried to lob a soft gotcha (“Is it subversive to release these movies during the most wonderful time of year?”) at Sam Zimmerman, Shudder’s wise and handsome VP of Programming, I was delighted to see Sam’s response: “For whom is it the most wonderful time of year? A lot of other people are feeling stress or anger or grief… and that’s what a lot of holiday horror confronts.”
Though ABC didn’t miss an opportunity to show old news clips of the hand wringing that got the Santa slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night pulled from theaters back in the day, the very inclusion of those moments alongside Sam’s thoughtful response (in a seven-minute news segment devoted to the topic, no less) showed just how far we’ve come in terms of accepting and understanding the role that horror can play in exorcizing some of the real-world darkness that, for some of us, is always peeking just around the corner of the Christmas tree.
Sam of course went on to further justify Christmas-set horror, describing the holiday’s spooky-adjacent vibe and explaining the centuries-long tradition of melding scary ghost stories with Christmas (from A Christmas Carol on down to Inside No. 9), but his point that Christmas can be a pretty dark time of year continues to resonate with me today. There are reminders everywhere I look: the Toys for Tots collection box at my gym, for kids whose families will not be able to afford gifts; the epic line of cars, driven by my neighbors who don’t have enough to eat, queued up at the local church’s food bank. Things are very hard every day for many people; of course that pain is more deeply felt around the holidays. That this is somehow news to, well, the news, is distressing and depressing.
The holiday can bring other, more bespoke miseries. My dad once memorably huffed at me, “I hate Christmastime. People tend to die around the holidays, and then you start using the holidays as benchmarks: ‘that was the Christmas this person died;’ ‘this is the first Christmas without so-and-so.’” At the time I thought he was just being a grump, but in a debate win for the ages, my dad then proved his point a couple years later by dying four days before Christmas. (And in a ‘hold my beer’ moment, my big sister one-upped him in 2012 by dying on Christmas night.) Every year, my dad’s “people die around the holidays” rings in my ears like a Salvation Army bell, and I’m sure it’s just some sort of magical thinking, but I can’t help but notice how every December indeed seems to carry the dark weight of a culling. It genuinely feels as if the Grim Reaper is batting cleanup for the year — both on folks we know, and on individuals who’ve touched our lives through their art. It can be absolutely soul-crushing, and it’s a challenge to not associate the lights and music of the holidays with heartbreak for years afterward.
Yet the news machine predictably latches onto easy targets like horror movies, daring to suggest that these 90-minute pleasures are somehow “ruining” a sacred tradition. But one person’s holy rite is another person’s blood sacrifice, and it shouldn’t take some supernatural amount of empathy to realize that having a bunch of forced joy and merriment shoved in one’s face for several weeks at the end of the year might sharpen any pre-existing despair.
More words than I can imagine have been written about how watching horror movies is a survival mechanism for victims of trauma and abuse, and that’s certainly a valid and well-documented phenomenon. But this Christmas, let’s raise a glass to using whatever we need to survive the universal suffering that we all experience: the personal loss, the seasonal depression, or even just the garden-variety holiday blues. And let’s thank our stars, our gods, and yes, the makers of horror movies for giving us the strength, tools and diversions we need to get to the other side of December in one piece.
Editor's note: an earlier version of this article originally appeared in the FANGORIA newsletter, The Terror Teletype.)
