As the holiday season approaches, the world is often filled with warmth, cheer, and festive gatherings…for some. But what happens when things take a darker turn? The holidays, with their cozy atmospheres and cheerful traditions, provide the perfect backdrop for stories where everything goes wrong—where the lights flicker, the joy turns to terror, and the celebrations take a sinister twist. Let’s explore some holiday horror media that put a terrifying spin on holiday festivities. From the mischievous creatures of Gremlins to the deadly home invasion of Better Watch Out and the chilling atmosphere of Black Christmas, these films, along with their literary and TV counterparts, remind us that the most festive time of year can quickly become the deadliest.
Imagine a Christmas advent calendar that doesn’t hold chocolates, but sinister surprises luring you into a dark, supernatural pact. In The Advent Calendar (2021), each door you open pulls you closer to a chilling fate, with every gift revealing another piece of a terrifying puzzle you can’t escape.
What to read after The Advent Calendar The Ritual by Adam L. G. Nevill – Four old university friends reunite for a hiking trip in the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle. No longer young men, they have little left in common, and tensions rise as they struggle to connect. Frustrated and tired, they take a shortcut that turns their hike into a nightmare that could cost them their lives.
Lost, hungry and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, they stumble across an isolated old house. Inside, they find the macabre remains of old rites and pagan sacrifices; ancient artefacts and unidentifiable bones. This place of dark ritual is home to a bestial predator that is still alive in the ancient forest. And now they’re the prey.
As the four friends struggle for salvation, they discover that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees…
What to watch after The Advent Calendar: Channel Zero, Season 2, Ep 6: “Piece by Piece” – The No-End House has mysteriously reappeared. Jules goes back inside to rescue Margot, and together, they must finally deal with Seth and The Father to escape before it’s too late.
What if a friendly reunion turned into a horrifying nightmare? In Brooklyn 45 (2023), a group of old friends gathers for a séance, only to find themselves trapped in a room where dark secrets emerge. As their pasts unravel, they awaken a dangerous supernatural force that could bind them forever.
What to read after Brooklyn 45: The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne – The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into mouldering lives and rooms. Written shortly after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style remarkable in both its descriptive virtuosity and its truly modern mix of fantasy and realism.
What to watch after Brooklyn 45: Penny Dreadful (2014- 2019) – Vanessa Ives, a medium, recruits Wild West showman Ethan Chandler, scientist Victor Frankenstein and explorer Sir Malcolm to track down supernatural killers that are haunting Victorian London.
Imagine a desperate priest teaming up with a metalhead and a fortune teller to stop the birth of the Antichrist. In The Day of the Beast (1995), this unlikely trio embarks on a chaotic, absurd, and darkly comedic quest to disrupt the apocalypse, racing against the clock as Christmas Eve approaches.
What to read after The Day of the Beast: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – The Turn of the Screw is an 1898 horror novella by Henry James that first appeared in serial format in Collier’s Weekly magazine (January 27 – April 16, 1898).
A very young woman’s first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate… An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls. But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.
What to watch after The Day of the Beast: Constantine (2014 – 2015) – John Constantine, a demon hunter and dabbling master of the occult, must struggle with his past sins while protecting the innocent from the converging supernatural threats that constantly break through to our world due to the “Rising Darkness”. Balancing his actions upon the line of good and evil, Constantine uses his skills and a supernatural scry map to journey across the nation to send these terrors back to their own world, all for the hope of redeeming his soul from eternal torment.
A family on a Christmas Eve road trip takes a wrong turn that leads them into a nightmarish labyrinth. In Dead End (2003), every detour pulls them deeper into a dark, supernatural trap, where escape seems impossible, and the horrors defy explanation.
What to read after Dead End: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski – A young family moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
What to watch after Dead End: Supernatural (2005 – 2020) – This haunting series follows the thrilling yet terrifying journeys of Sam and Dean Winchester, two brothers who face an increasingly sinister landscape as they hunt monsters. After losing their mother to a supernatural force, the brothers were raised by their father as soldiers who track mysterious and demonic creatures. Violent memories and relationship-threatening secrets add additional burdens on Sam and Dean as they investigate all things that go bump in the night. As old tricks and tools are rendered useless and friends betray them, the brothers must rely on each other as they encounter new enemies.
What if a simple babysitting job on Christmas Eve became a fight for survival? In Better Watch Out (2016), a babysitter finds herself trapped in a house with her young charge, facing what appears to be a home invasion. But as the night unfolds, she discovers the true terror is far closer—and far more twisted—than she ever imagined.
What to read after Better Watch Out: Final Girls by Riley Sager – Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout’s knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media’s attempts, they never meet.
Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.
That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy’s doorstep. Blowing through Quincy’s life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa’s death come to light, Quincy’s life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam’s truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.
What to watch after Better Watch Out: Marianne (2019) – This French horror series follows a famous horror novelist who returns to her hometown, only to confront the terrifying demon that inspired her stories. As the lines between fiction and reality blur, she must face the horror that she thought was just imagination. In Marianne, the unsettling, supernatural terror grows as a writer is haunted by the very creatures she created.
Spending the holidays with friends in a cozy sorority house takes a deadly turn in Black Christmas (1974). Festive cheer is shattered by eerie phone calls that escalate into a deadly game of cat and mouse. As a mysterious intruder lurks in the shadows, watching their every move, the sisters must fight to survive the nightmare unfolding around them.
What to read after Black Christmas: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.
What to watch after Black Christmas: Slasher, Season 1 “The Executioner” – In Slasher season one, titled The Executioner, a masked killer wreaks havoc in the fictional Canadian town of Waterbury. This new murderer, adopting the same medieval garb as the original killer, “The Executioner,” begins a new spree of killings after the arrest of Tom Winston, the man responsible for the 1988 Halloween murder of Sarah Bennett’s parents, Rachel and Bryan Ingram. Tom had used the Executioner disguise to gain entry to their home. Now, years later, a copycat killer emerges, targeting individuals who have committed one of the seven deadly sins. Sarah Bennett returns to Waterbury with her husband, Dylan, hoping to start fresh, but quickly finds herself drawn into the deadly cycle of murders.
Picture it – a cozy Christmas dinner with family and friends, and for dessert, an unexpected and violent end to the world? Is survival is worth sacrificing the holiday spirit. In Silent Night (2021), a group of friends gathers for a final Christmas dinner, unaware that a catastrophic event is about to destroy everything they know.
What to read after Silent Night: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin – New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake, orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.
Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and besieged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
What to watch after Silent Night: The Walking Dead (Literally, start anywhere) – In the wake of a zombie apocalypse, various survivors struggle to stay alive. As they search for safety and evade the undead, they are forced to grapple with rival groups and difficult choices.
What if a cute Christmas pet turned into a malicious creature when fed after midnight and exposed to water? Imagine you just heeded the instructions instead of hoping to survive the madness. Gremlins (1984) rounds out our holiday horror list by simply being the best ever.
What to read after Gremlins: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher – When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.
When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother’s house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?
Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.
Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.
What to watch after Gremlins: Tales from the Crypt (again, literally start anywhere)– Based on the EC Comics series of the same name, this campy and stylized anthology series recounts a string of horrific yarns introduced by the show’s moldering host, the Crypt Keeper.
NightTide Magazine 
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