If you’ve been crawling around Shudder looking for something to add a little shock to your seasonal look, you might have seen The Haunted Season-a new anthology series from show creator Kier-La Janisse, a genre expert whose many works include an outstanding book on film theory House of Mental Women and the latest human horror documentary The Woodlands are Dark and the Days Are Enchanted.
First step, The Burning Comes Finallywritten and directed by Sean Hogan; it’s about a group of men carrying a casket for burial who are haunted (literally) by their past mistakes while on a journey. To learn more about The Haunted Seasonwhich will bring a new entry to Shudder in the next few years, we chatted with Janisse in a video interview.
Cheryl Eddy, io9: I read your book Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror in Film and Televisionwhich gives a fascinating history of the breed and the culture behind it. But for people who may not have read it, I will borrow one of the chapter titles and ask: “Why a ghost story at Christmas”?
Kier-La Janisse: It’s interesting because Derek Johnston, who wrote that chapter, years ago wrote a book called Seasons of the Yearmy article is completely removed from it [laughs]. While I was doing the The Yuletide Terror The book, there are hundreds of movies in it, but most of them are connected to Christmas in some way. Either it’s about Christmas or takes place during Christmas, or there are visible Christmas decorations so you can justify it as a Christmas movie.
But many BBCs A Christmas Ghost Story [episodes] of the 1970s had nothing to do with Christmas. So when I put them in the book, I thought, North American audiences won’t understand why these movies are here because they’re like, “What does this have to do with Christmas?” I asked Derek if he could write a chapter about where this tradition came from, of telling ghost stories around Christmas and the concept of the Christmas show—not really the show itself, but the fact that it’s chosen to be aired at that time.
It goes back hundreds of years—it comes from an old tradition of winter storytelling. [When] people gathered around the hearth or fire, and they came up with entertainment to pass the time while they tried to keep warm. Winter tales were called that because they would be scary tales that they told [when] the days are too short too [the season is] we are turning into a new year. There is this idea of limited boundaries between one life state and another. They would tell these ghost stories and later on, when we started writing the books, you would start seeing references in them. [places like the works of] Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Then in the Victorian era, you have Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carolwhich was very important, not just in the sense of the Christmas story, but about Christmas in general. It was part of Queen Victoria’s mandate to reinvent Christmas. Charles Dickens writing that story when he did that was a big part of not only reinforcing the idea that Christmas is a time when we tell ghost stories, but that this is the time of year we have Christmas – because before Queen Victoria it came out as a popular holiday. A Christmas Carol they were instrumental in creating many of these ideas and legends that we have around Christmas time—Christmas tree decorations and all these things that we associate with Christmas that came out of that time.
The story of the Christmas ghost became very much associated with that era—and, it was so many ghostwriters in the Victorian era … there are just tons and tons of them. Then when the radio came in, they started making changes to the radio A Christmas Carol and other types of holiday ghost stories. Then, that changed to television.
So the BBC was always active and did ghost stories at Christmas in one form or another. In the 1970s, Lawrence Gordon Clark, who was the director, proposed this idea that he did not foresee that the series. He proposed one film based on the story of MR James Places to stay in Barchester. He used an earlier version of MR James’s story as evidence that this could be popular; Jonathan Miller made an adaptation called Blow the whistle and I will come to You late ’60s, which is good. And it’s not made for Christmas. It was made for a different time of the year, a different program.
But Lawrence Gordon Clark took that and said, “Look how good this is, and think we can do something like this for Christmas.” So he did Places to stay in Barchester. It was a big hit, so he got permission every year to keep doing another one. And so it became a series; in the ’70s, there will be a different episode.
And so that’s it for my series The Haunted Season is based—on this idea of an annual ghost story film that premieres every year. And I know for a North American audience, using the word “series” to describe something with one episode a year is weird, but it’s rooted in that culture. It’s basically an ongoing Christmas special, with a new installment every year. That tradition still exists in the UK. So this thread is part of that larger tradition.
io9: How did you decide? The Burning Comes Finally as the first entry? How did writer-director Sean Hogan get involved?
Janisse: Sean Hogan is a filmmaker, novelist, playwright—he does all kinds of things. He is amazingly talented, he is really good at timing conversation. And so I suggested to him—and he can do a lot with less, which is important because we have a very low budget for these things—if he could make a short film at the beginning of the folk horror box set for Severin Films. We were making our new box set, All Haunts Be Ours Volume Two. The first box set had my documentary [Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched] in it—it had a new film in it. And we were like, “We don’t have anything like that for the second box set.” So we asked Sean if he could make a film of that.
I gave him a few instructions about it. The idea of it being placed on the road of the corpse was something that came from one of the instructions I gave him.
But before he finished the film, I came back to this idea that Sam Zimmerman from Shudder and I had ten years ago when we used to work for Fangoria magazine. At the time we were trying to get Fangoria to do a ghost story for Christmas that we could premiere on the website, and the publisher didn’t want to pursue it. But we wanted Sean Hogan to do that movie.
So when Sean made this film for me, before it was finished, I said [Severin Films’] David Gregory, “What if we talked this into Shudder being part of an ongoing series of Christmas ghost stories?” And David said, “Sure, go.”
And so Sam and I had a conversation, and it was amazing because it was this idea that we had that wasn’t allowed years and years ago. We were really excited about it, like, “Let’s do it now!” And that’s exactly how it happened. In some ways it was a very long project, but then it was like everything clicked, when it was like, this can all really work, you know? I’m so glad Sean Hogan did the first one because he was the filmmaker we talked about doing Fangoria all those years ago.
I love the movie. It was very good. He won with a small group in the UK too – you can’t watch the film, but it was freezing and raining while they were doing it. They were in a very bad shape, but I think it went very well.
io9: The Burning Comes Finally it’s very traditional, very old movie style. Is that what we’ll be seeing as the series continues?
Janisse: I don’t know if they will be black and white, but they will all be seasonal. It won’t necessarily be the same time, but they must share the past in some way. The instructions I gave to the filmmakers were that there was nothing after that, like 1960. You can go back to the Middle Ages if you want, or you can go up to the ’50s, you know, but you have to feel it. [like a period piece]. That’s what culture always is.
Interesting, when A Christmas Ghost Story they started playing in the ’70s, the last two episodes, they did modern stories – they weren’t as familiar as the old Victorian ghost stories. They make new stories, modern stories set in modern places. And audiences at the time rebelled—many of which received bad reviews. Now people love those pieces because now they’re classics, now they’re period pieces. But when they were born, people said, “You are destroying the culture!” So I decided to keep the parameters. That’s right [a pretty broad time frame]but they will be period pieces of some sort.
io9: Can you tease something about any of the other entries?
Janisse: The only thing I can tease is that I do one of them [as my first narrative film]. I’ve asked other people, they’re writing their scripts now—I’ll play [more] when the time is approaching.
io9: I’m a big fan of The Woodlands are Dark and the Days Are Enchantedyour horror documentary of the people. Are these Christmas ghost stories part of folk horror culture?
Janisse: Definitely skipping because of that aspect of oral traditions. Like most BBC Christmas ghost stories, you probably call it gothic horror rather than fantasy, but it depends. Something like Warning to the Curious again Blow the whistle and I will come to You you can call it legends because they are actually digging up an ancient artifact that carries all this baggage with them. There are human horror elements in some of them, but some of them are in gothic settings. But I think that Christmas ghost stories, just because they’re integrated into this narrative tradition, that makes it more connected to the myth.
io9: And you mention a few topics, but of people who watched the first episode of The Haunted Season and want to see more on that channel, what do you recommend they look for?
Janisse: Well, Shudder is licensed by Jonathan Miller Blow the whistle and I will come to You. Definitely start with that. They are also licensed by Lawrence Gordon Clark A Christmas Ghost Story since the 1970s. Those are the ones my series is referring to, so I would recommend taking all of those—there are nine different options for what they can watch. I don’t know if they have Stone Tape to Shudder [editor’s note: they do!] but Stone Tape aired on Christmas. It has nothing to do with Christmas, but it was broadcast as part of a Christmas program, like a Christmas ghost story. And that’s great, too.
Look The Burning Comes Finallythe first episode of The Haunted Seasonon Shudder now.
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