Ho ho hello! And welcome to this year’s Hypnogoria Advent Calendar! And this year we are entering a world of festive frights and winter chills, for as this Yuletide we are going to trace the history of Christmas horror on the big screen! And hence every day up to Christmas we will open a new door revealing another helping of holiday horrors, and there’s also a podcast version of every door too!
Now while it is the season of goodwill to all, there has long been a tradition of telling spooky tales at Christmas time. Indeed, this eerie custom is enshrined in one of our most popular Yuletide songs. For in “It’s the most wonderful time of the year” by Andy Williams, first released back in 1963, one verse tells us -
There'll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And carolling out in the snow
There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago
Furthermore, the most famous Christmas tale of them all, after of course the one about a baby in Bethlehem, is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - a tale about ghosts and spirits that visit Scrooge on Christmas Eve.
Indeed there is a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas and you can trace its history back from the likes of modern masters such as MR James, down to Dickens and right back until the 14th century, with the strange tale of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. Written by an unknown poet, this eerie story told in verse, tells how King Arthur and his knights are gathered to celebrate Christmas and we are told that the legendary King “would never eat upon such a dear day before he was told an uncouth tale of some adventurous thing, of some great marvel that he could believe”.
However before he gets to hear such a tale, a mysterious knight wreathed in leaves arrives, the titular Green Knight, who wants to play a rather macabre game… And instead of hearing a strange winter tale for Yuletide, the King and his court find themselves experiencing one for real, complete with a giant of a knight who can survive a beheading! But as Arthur remarks after the now headless Green Knight’s departure “Well becoming are such tricks at Christmas”.
Now if you want to learn the full history of ghost stories at Christmas in literature, may I direct you to HYPNOGORIA 80 - The Christmases of Ghosts Past for the full lowdown on the tradition. Likewise in another festive special, HYPNOGORIA 105 - Christmas Visitants I investigated the accounts of Yuletide hauntings in folklore, and discovered that Christmas is is indeed a favourite time for all manner of spooks and spectres to walk abroad.
Now when mass media such as radio and television emerged in the early decades of the 20th century, the tradition of telling ghostly stories at Christmas time, made the leap to these new mediums, firstly with readings of eerie tales around Christmas on the radio, and later full cast adaptations and new radio plays and television dramas being made especially for the season.
And of course there are a plethora of yuletide horror movies too, with more and more being added to the canon of Christmas chillers every year. And indeed now there’s something for nearly every taste. Want a tale of vampires at Christmas? Try Red Snow. Fancy a flick about a killer robot Santa? Christmas Bloody Christmas has you covered. What about Santa as an ass-kickin’ vigilante? Check out Violent Night. Or do you fancy a Christmas classic reimagined as a slasher movie? Then It’s A Wonderful Knife is for you!
However, while it seems now traditional for a fresh crop of holiday horrors to be unleashed every year, things were not always so. Indeed you may be surprised to learn that this annual delivery of fresh festive feature length frights is a relatively new phenomena, and in fact, this cinematic tradition only really emerged in the 2010s. For before then, somewhat weirdly, cinema was very, very slow to embrace the Yuletide tradition of serving up Christmas chillers. And therein lies the tale that we will uncover day by day in this advent calendar!
So folks, be sure to come back tomorrow to begin the history of Christmas horror on the big screen!
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