12 Days Of Christmas Horror (Day 6) -Home for the Holidays (1972 TV)

Little seen ABC television movie Home for the Holidays is up next on our alternative 12 Days of Christmas countdown here at The People’s Movies. This early slasher celebrates the worst of Christmas from family feuding to er… pitchfork murders.

Penned by Joseph Stefano (who famously adapted Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho into the iconic Hitchcock flick), Home for the Holidays follows a wealthy father who requests that his four estranged daughters spend Christmas with him. As the girls arrive at their father’s mansion, he reveals his fears that his new wife is slowly poisoning him and asks that his daughters murder their stepmother. However, the arrival of a mysterious pitchfork-wielding killer in a striking yellow raincoat puts these plans on hold as the family gradually find themselves picked (or pitched) off one by one.

Long-time TV movie director John Llewellyn Moxey (Horror Hotel, A Taste of Evil) directs a plethora of familiar genre faces in this snappy seventy-three minute ABC Movie of the Week – produced by super-producer Aaron Spelling. Whilst it’s light on gore and the sort of horror that would be unlikely to give viewers a tough time sleeping, there are several unsettling moments of highly-strung tension and well-crafted atmosphere. Part Gothic family melodrama, part cat and mouse slasher, Home for the Holidays is low on production value but packed with entertainment.

Moxley’s version of Christmas is filled with torrential rainstorms, earth-shaking thunderclaps, and darkened woods – presenting this as far more of a conventional horror tale, never trying to make a gimmick out of the festive theme. With this bleak Gothic atmosphere, Moxley lets the nasty events going on within the house unfold with a gleeful energy, some of which makes surprisingly grim viewing for a Christmas tale. Murders in bathtubs, brutal pitchfork implements woods-set chase scenes, and corpses sticking out from beneath the soil, all fill this grisly tale. The yellow raincoated killer also adds a touch of giallo-style horror to the proceedings, with close-ups of leather gloved hands furthering these similarities.

It’s clear this is an Aaron Spelling production, emphasizing the whodunit angle with a soapy giddiness. Unfolding like a terrifically far-fetched episode of Dynasty, Spelling and Stefano chuck plot twists at us one after the other – all presented in glorious soap-opera style with sweeping camera glides, zooming close-ups, and shaky, fuzzy panning shots.

A young Sally Field steps into the role of the youngest of the daughters – an earnest college graduate, whilst the outstanding Eleanor Parker is on hand to add some glamour and gumption to the role of her Father’s new wife. Fellow character actresses Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth!), Jill Hayworth and Julie Harris are on hand to give some top-notch supporting turns.

Home for the Holidays may not have the shocks or gratuitousness of some of the other film’s on our festive countdown, but it’s an impressively crafted piece of horror-themed melodrama packed with a brooding atmosphere and soapy goodness.