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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Kier-La Janisse Brings Horror Home For The Holidays With “THE HAUNTED SEASON”

Wednesday, December 25, 2024 | Exclusives, Interviews

By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT

There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago…

Dating to Victorian England, the grand tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas has, sadly, fallen by the wayside, supplanted largely by the “feel-good” tales and entertainment of the season. In the United States, this spooky practice never really got off the ground. For many – and horror fans especially – holiday horror is largely limited to Krampus (welcome proof that the older, darker legends of the season can survive and even thrive in the 21st century) and an endless succession of cinematic killer Santas. 

Although the custom waxes and wanes with the times, in Great Britain yuletide ghost stories live on, thanks largely to the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas broadcasts. Originally airing annually from 1971 to 1978, with occasional revivals and gaps since, regular yearly installments have returned in full force, thanks to writer-producer-director Mark Gatiss (Sherlock, Doctor Who). As was the case with the series’ original run, Gatiss’ redux has mostly stuck with adaptations of the works of England’s grandmaster of spectral yarns, author M.R. James

Author, scholar and documentarian Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror) gives holiday ghost stories a foothold in North America with THE HAUNTED SEASON (now streaming on Shudder). Created by Janisse, who also serves as showrunner, and produced by Severin Films, the series will present a single commissioned original production annually each December, beginning with 2024’s offering, To Fire You Come at Last, written and directed by Sean Hogan.

Janisse recently sat down with RUE MORGUE Online Managing Editor William J. Wright to discuss the show and provide insight into why the holidays are the most wonderful time of the year – and the spookiest

Ghost stories were once a popular Christmas tradition, and they seem to be making a comeback with the BBC’s revival of A Ghost Story for Christmas and of course, THE HAUNTED SEASON. However, many in the States are not familiar with this custom. Why are scary stories such an integral part of the season? And why do you think that, culturally, we’ve lost touch with it for so long?

Horror scholar Kier-La Janisse, creator of “THE HAUNTED SEASON”

In America, I don’t know if it was ever a big thing. It’s always been Halloween that’s the time to sort of tell ghost stories … That’s kind of considered the period of renewal that people celebrate leading up to the Day of the Dead. In the U.K. – and to a certain extent, in Canada. I found out recently that Robertson Davies used to tell a Christmas Eve ghost story in person at his school every year in Toronto, so this wasn’t just a U.K. thing. 

People who have researched this have found, going back several centuries, documentation of there being winters’ tales as an oral tradition. And we don’t know how far back it goes. We know that it goes back as far as the Middle Ages because there are references in texts from the Middle Ages that refer to winters’ tales, which implies that it’s already an old tradition by that point. 

The best explanation for why these stories would be popular at that time of year [is] really just that the days are so short. A lot of the time during mid-winter, you’re spending in increased darkness. It’s cold, so people gathered around the fire, and telling stories became a way of entertaining each other at this cold time of year. As for why some of those stories would be ghost stories, as opposed to other types of stories, I think it’s partially connected to the darkness and people’s natural fear of the dark, but it’s also connected with, as I said, Halloween – this period of renewal where we’re going into the new. It’s going to transform into the new year, and we’re going to have spring, and things are going to be renewed again. 

In the 21st century, I don’t think many people realize how connected Halloween and Christmas are in their traditions and how much overlap there is.

There’s a scholar named Derek Johnston who wrote a book called Haunted Seasons, which is partially where the title of my show comes from. I was talking to him because his book is specifically focused on that exact thing. It’s focused on horror that’s made for Halloween and made for Christmas in the U.K. He sort of contrasts these two traditions and also finds the links between them. So, if people are interested in exploring that idea more, I highly recommend Derek Johnson’s book.

1910 illustration from Charles Dickens’ “A CHRISTMAS CAROL” by Harry Furniss

It started as this oral tradition and became very popularized during the Victorian era because Queen Victoria was just trying to repopularize Christmas in general as a tradition. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol right around that same time, [and] it fed into this bigger idea of Christmas as a certain annual type of seasonal celebration, and the ghost stories became very intertwined with that. So, the ghost stories were already popular at that time of year. They became associated with Christmas because A Christmas Carol was written around the same time that the government was trying to popularize the idea of Christmas. These two things sort of fed into each other. 

Once we get into the 20th century, we start seeing some of these ghost stories appearing on the radio. In their radio broadcasts, the BBC would have writers on, talking about ghost stories. And so, doing adaptations of Victorian Christmas ghost stories at Christmas on BBC Radio would be a popular thing. Naturally, they brought that tradition to television as well. In the 1970s, Lawrence Gordon Clark initiated the series A Ghost Story for Christmas. Initially, it was just one film that he had proposed, but it did well. And so, he was able to keep doing them all throughout that decade. That’s what we would call the “original canon” of A Ghost Story for Christmas, which are all on Shudder now as well, so in addition to my THE HAUNTED SEASON that’s premiering this year, they have all the Lawrence Gordon Clark Ghost Stories for Christmas from the ’70s, as well as Jonathan Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You, which was an earlier adaptation of an M.R. James story that gets very associated with the series. It’s not an official Ghost Story for Christmas because it was not broadcast at Christmastime, but it was kind of the influence on the series. It has been kind of informally adopted into A Ghost Story for Christmas.

That brings up the inescapable name of M.R. James. Would you say James’ work and A Ghost Story for Christmas influenced THE HAUNTED SEASON?

Montague Rhodes James (1862 – 1936), the grandmaster of the English ghost story

It’s the major influence. It’s the primary influence and the big reason for that is that it was through watching those films that I first became aware of this tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. So, not only was it the inspiration for the series, but it also informed somewhat how I’ve approached the series because one of the things about the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas is that all kinds of people grew up with them in the ’70s and are now filmmakers who would love to make [an episode of] A Ghost Story for Christmas, except you can’t really pitch them to the BBC. It’s not really like an open pitch process for that show. Mark Gatiss does all the Ghost Stories Christmas, and they’re brilliant, but just like in the ’70s, it’s led by one director’s vision. When Mark Gatiss brought it back, it was kind of his vision. 

I just thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own version of A Ghost Story for Christmas over here? But we could also open it up, so every year, it could be a different director, and it could be a different writer whose work is being adapted. We could even open it up internationally, which is why I avoided the word “Christmas” in the title of the show. People who don’t celebrate Christmas, who celebrate other holidays, could also be a part of it.

How did you go about picking stories for THE HAUNTED SEASON? Are these all going to be original stories? 

They’re not all going to be original stories. A lot of them are going to be adaptations of existing stories. I’ve been pushing people to sort of look at stories outside of the Victorian era. There are tons and tons and tons of Victorian ghost stories because they were just hugely popular in that time. There are so many things to pick from. But there are also Belgian ghost story writers and Austrian ghost story writers and Japanese ghost story writers. So, I’m also trying to push people to branch out and look at things beyond the Victorian. 

Still, I do want it to have a very literary vibe to it. So, Sean Hogan’s film To Fire You Come at Last,  which is the first one, is not based on a pre-existing story or book, but Sean Hogan is an author. He is probably an author just as much as he is a filmmaker. He writes books, he directs plays. He’s multi-talented, and so I still consider [his work as] coming from a literary source in a sense. I feel as though many of THE HAUNTED SEASON episodes are going to be adapted from pre-existing stories, but there is the opportunity for somebody, if they are primarily an author, to write an episode. So if somebody like Ramsey Campbell wanted to write an episode, I would not say no! I do want them to kind of retain that idea of coming from a literary source because that’s one of the things I think is fun about A Ghost Story for Christmas – how much it makes people go back and read M.R. James’ original texts. I like the idea that there’s that interchange between the different media formats.

Why did you choose to begin this tradition with To Fire You Come at Last? What makes it a great story for the season? 

It’s dark, but also, it was really important to me to start it with Sean Hogan for a few reasons. Sean Hogan was the person who introduced me to the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, so he’s how I heard of them in the first place and became obsessed with them. Secondly, years ago, when I used to work at Fangoria – Sam Zimmerman from Shudder and I used to work there. We were the web team – the editors of the website. We had this idea that we should make a ghost story for Christmas for the Fangoria website, and we’ll premiere it on Christmas Eve, and we’ll ask Sean Hogan to direct it. We both really liked his work, and we wanted him to make it. We pitched it, and we figured out how we would pay for it with an ad scroll beforehand and everything. And the publisher of the magazine just wouldn’t go for it. He just thought, “There’s no way for me to make money on this, so I don’t want to do it.” This is like three or four publishers ago at Fangoria, so it was not the best time. 

 

We were just like, “Oh, that’s too bad.” And then in 2017, I made a book called Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television. It’s kind of like an encyclopedic book about all kinds of depictions of Christmas in horror film and TV. There are essays, but then there’s also like, hundreds of movies that there are capsules for.  I asked Sean Hogan to make a ghost story for Christmas that I could include as a DVD in the back of this book, So I produced a very low-budget short that he did called We Always Find Ourselves In the Sea. And it turned out great. I loved it. 

Fast forward a few years, and I’m working at Severin, and Sam Zimmerman’s working at Shutter, and I asked Sean if he would make another low-budget film for me for the folk horror box set. I gave him a couple of prompts of some things that it could be about. I said I wanted it to be based on some sort of real folk tradition or custom or ritual. And I threw out a few ideas. I said, “You know, like something to do with a corpse road…”  So that was the idea that he kind of latched on to. He was like, “Oh, I’m actually already interested in corpse roads. So I’ll write something in that vein.” He submitted that to me, and I loved it. And before he was even finished shooting the film, I said to David Gregory at Severin, you know, “Why don’t we try to pitch this to Shudder, as like an annual thing, where we make a film like this every year and have it be like A Ghost Story for Christmas. He approved me pitching it to Sam, and so I did, and it was just kind of like this idea that we had fifteen years ago finally coming to fruition.

Do you have the future installments planned?

Yes, but I can’t say what they are because they’ll be announced as they get closer. There are a few in the works right now. There’s one that’s in pre-production, and there’s one that’s still at the script stage … We’re probably going to have another one in production in the spring, and then have another one in production either in the fall or the following spring. So yes, the next couple of episodes are well on their way.

William J. Wright
William J. Wright is RUE MORGUE's online managing editor. A two-time Rondo Classic Horror Award nominee and an active member of the Horror Writers Association, William is lifelong lover of the weird and macabre. His work has appeared in many popular (and a few unpopular) publications dedicated to horror and cult film. William earned a bachelor of arts degree from East Tennessee State University in 1998, majoring in English with a minor in Film Studies. He helped establish ETSU's Film Studies minor with professor and film scholar Mary Hurd and was the program's first graduate. He currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his wife, three sons and a recalcitrant cat.