12 Days Of Christmas Horror (Day 7) - American Horror Story: Unholy Night

Back in 2012 American Horror Story: Asylum earned a place on this list with a particularly gruesome little Christmas episode in which Satan unleashed Santa on Sister Jude. Like most of Asylum ‘Unholy Night’ is a diabolically good piece of narrative expansion, but a great little horror story, in itself, centring around Ian McShane’s killer Anti-Clause, Leigh Emerson.

McShane is hamming it up like mad and steals the show from all of the series’ incredible regulars, who get plenty of great scenes in the episode too. He isn’t sticking out like a sore thumb though, in an episode that also contains a wonderful alien abduction Emerson fits in nicely. His is a quiet Santa, damaged and neurotic, capable of the darkest sentiments and oddly charming. It feels like he owes a lot of his neurosis to Brandon Maggart’s Santa, but he owes his beard to Charles Manson.

The prologue documents one of Emerson’s crimes: breaking into an idyllic suburban home, befriending the little girl who lives there, then tying up her parents and threatening them with a gun. McShane perhaps shines best when he purrs the most horrific lines, at one point asking a woman, “What do you say we blow this pop stand, go savage a few elves, and then suck on each other?”. With the garish set of his crimes, killer Christmas decorations, and the after note that Emerson killed some 18 people in one night is nostalgic for the kind of Christmas bloodbaths largely relegated to remakes now. Unsurprisingly the episode’s writer is James Wong, famed X-Files scribe and producer of the 2006 Black Christmas remake, perhaps this is why the episode’s Christmas related violence works so well, because its in tasteful moderation.

Like any good Christmas episode ‘Unholy Night’ is packed with grizzly presents, moments of shock and wonder to wow the viewer, assaults with Christmas Tree decorations, alien abductions, shock revelations, betrayals, and attempted rapes. Sister Jude’s gruelling attack is the sort of total nihilism we expect of festive horror, her survival and the capture of Zachary Quinto’s deranged Oliver Threadson are welcome relief granted rarely in such a bleak narrative. After all, it is Christmas.