I was thinking of writing a Christmas horror story for nanowrimo a couple of months ago, but I never thought of anything that would make a good story. I tried to think of books that were that theme, but came up empty.
And when I turned my thoughts to movies, all I could think of was slasher fics where some creep dressed as Santa kills pretty, stupid, people…which is basically the same plot as any slasher movie, except for costumes and christmas lights.
What would turn the happy holidays into a horror? Can you think of anything in folklore or legend that’s seasonally appropriate for such a tale? Oh, either sort of Christmas setting, religious or secular.
Am amateur historian discovering the “true” origin of the Christmas tradition (pre-christianity). Good old Saint Nick ain’t really a fairy tale, and he ain’t really a benevolent feller. He’s the demon (dressed in red, anyone?) responsible for handing out disease to all us folk, which he does once a year in the ides of winter. Canker sores for you this year, hodgkins for you my friend but you won’t know it for several years to come). And for you my special friend, it’s the big “C”, of the intestinal kind. It’ll start “manifesting” in a few months. Good luck with that.
But hidden in the traditions of the past (mistletoe, bells, pine trees) are some of the wards against this demon…
An estranged family re-unites for a Christmas together to try to patch things up and they rent out a cabin in a remote area as “neutral ground” for the gathering. But the 20-something daughter, victim of abuse and neglect in her childhood, has other ideas. One by one, family members get knocked off in bizzarre, horrific accidents. Or are they? It’s up to the youngest family member to figure out the meaning behind 20-something’s strange gifts to everyone, and thus figure out the pattern to the killings, and perhaps bring them to an end…
Terrifiel is right. The Old World, unadulterated Santa is pretty horrifying.
I would go, however, for “edgy” and write about a Hebrew couple two thousand years ago giving birth to a being of supernatural origin in a manger-- not only that, but weird people and supernatural beings start appearing…
Why not stick with the classics. I bet someone could rework A Christmass Carol into a serious horror. Serioulsy, Marley draging around chains and three ghosts. Forget about the nice ghosts, make every one of them terrifying. I bet you could get really spooky with it.
There’s a small newly created community where everyone knows each other, and everyone knows ____(protagonist Rookie Cop or authority figure I’ll call him X for now), and all is well and it’s the Christmas spirit and all that jazz. X moved there in January of the year, and loves the town, and has watched the town grow throughout the year. X is Jewish though, and his is one of 9 new Jewish families in the small developing community that get together and pray with one another and all and they’re preparing for their first Hanukkah together in this community, but one the first day of Hanukkah. one the family is has their house a lit afire with several dying in the blaze. X is investigating the arson, and comes upon the clues suggesting that this will happen again tonight. X then goes around trying to figure out who would do such a thing, from the community- and of course there are plenty of suspects, and people who’ve been kind to the newcomers all year long, but as X-mas rolls around, you can see some are a bit more Xenophobic towards those not celebrating X-mas, with some saying they deserved it and all. So X has to deal with that sort of bias as he goes around trying to prevent the next crime- but again that night, another family this time is harmed perhaps in a more brutal way.
Basically for 8 days the family’s are all held in terror, and X comes to realize that though this town may have been friendly throughout the year, sometimes when the holidays roll around the worst in people comes out. So this would be a Serial Killer/Mystery sort of a novel with the protagonist trying to solve the mystery as the stakes grow higher, and he begins to worry that his own family will soon be targeted.
That’s what scares me more than monsters or demons and supernatural shit. It’s when normal situations and people go into twisted/warped extreme things that could STILL be plausible that REALLY scare the crap out of me…
The Grinch, only done as serious horror: someone is determined to ruin Christmas, with as much theft, vandalism, arson, kidnapping and murder as it takes.
Gremlins kind of works. It’s not really that scary, though. But Phoebe Cates’s character’s story about why she hates Christmas has stayed with me for a while.
Christmas = winter, winter = snow, bad snow = isolation. Being trapped by the elements or stuck in the middle of nowhere is a staple of classic horror.
Using the 12 days of Christmas as a device to build tension could work too. Small things happen getting increasingly worse building towards some kind of conclusion on the 12th night.
I seem to vaguely recall that one of Saint Nicolas’ miracles was restoring to life two children who had been chopped into bits and pickled in brine. That’s pretty horrific.
I think it would have to have a fear-of-God, supernatural, “fall on your knees” kind of vibe. Something like The Prophecy or Constantine, where even the “good” guys are Good (with a capital G) but not necessarily Nice.
(not necessarily "Twe12ve " but the Christmas horror subgenre in general.)
I actually have part of a story I began in 2007 on my hard drive called “The Advent Murders,” the idea being that the killer leaves an object commonly associated with an advent calendar at each of the murders he commits one December…not that I’ve gotten very far with it. That’s more of a thriller than horror movie, though.
Mall Santa is really a hypnotist (real or supernatural, take your choice).
“You want a pony for Xmas Wendy? Santa will get you one, but you have to promise to drink the funny tasting stuff under the kitchen sink. The one in the bottle marked bleach”
A CHRISTMAS CAROL- because of Scrooge Tiny Tim lives. TO BECOME THE ANTICHRIST… HAH HAHHA HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! (Turns out the Ghosts of Xmas Past, Present and Yet to Be were really just Satanic Charlie’s Angels.
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Here’s a creepy one:
An embittered horror writer living in Maine (don’t most horror novels start that way?) receives a special delivery on Christmas Eve. There’s no return address of course, only a zip code that means nothing to him. Inside is a DVD of his Christmases as a child- in fact pretty much every Christmas he’s ever had. Home movies in which he addresses the camera.
The problem is that neither he nor anyone in his family or their friends ever had a video camera or camcorder at Christmas, and yet the videos are undeniably legitimate: his dead relatives are on the tapes (when they were alive obviously, though the other has possibilities as well) or his living relatives when they were much younger, he sees things like the plate on the wall in his grandmother’s house or the PLANET OF THE APES board game he got for Christmas when he was a kid that he hasn’t even thought of in 30 years, and yet he has no idea where on Earth these videos came from. Then he gets another package: the exact same gifts he got in one of the videos- not the same items, but the same gifts (i.e. the PLANET OF THE APES board game has the tic-tac-toe game he and his brother wrote on it in pen one day, etc.) even though the gifts were destroyed in a fire/ thrown away a quarter century before/sold at Yard Sales/etc…
And then…
Work in Nellie Oleson, Lyme disease, and an ostrich somewhere for real terror.
