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If you are crawling around Frizz looking for something to add a little scare to your seasonal display, you may have noticed The haunted season– a new anthology series by showrunner Kier-La Janisse, a gender expert whose many works include a book on film theory House of psychotic women and a recent folk-horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.
The first entry, To Fire You Finally Comesis written and directed by Sean Hogan; it’s about a group of men carrying a coffin to be buried who are haunted (literally) by past misdeeds as they make the journey. To learn more about The haunted seasonthat will bring a new entry to Shudder in the next few years, we spoke with Janisse on video chat.
Cheryl Eddy, io9: I read your book Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror in Film and Televisionwhich gives a wonderful history of the genre and the traditions behind it. But for people who haven’t read it, I’ll borrow one of the chapter titles and ask, “Why the Christmas Ghost Story?”
Kier-La Janisse: It’s interesting because Derek Johnston, who wrote that chapter, years ago wrote a book called Infested seasonsthat my title is completely ripped off (laughs). When I did the Christmas terror book, there are hundreds of movies in it, but most of them are very obviously connected to Christmas in some way. It’s either about Christmas, or Christmas, or there are Christmas decorations visible so you can justify it as a Christmas movie.
But a lot of the BBC A ghost story for Christmas (episodes) from the 1970s had nothing to do with Christmas. And so, when I included it in the book, I thought, the North American audience isn’t going to understand why these movies are there because they’re like, “What do they have to do with Christmas?” I asked Derek if he would write a chapter talking about where this tradition comes from, of telling Christmas ghost stories and the idea of Christmas programming, not necessarily the programming itself, but the fact that it is chosen to be programmed in that time.
Going back centuries, it comes from the oldest tradition of telling winter stories. (When) people gather around the fire or around the fire, and they come with fun to pass the time while trying to keep warm. The tales of winter were what they were called because they would be these spooky tales that say (when) the days are so short and (the season is) transforming into a new year. There is this idea of liminal boundaries between one state of being and another. They told these ghost stories and after time, once we started to write literature, you started to see references to them in (places like the works of) Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Then, of course, in the Victorian era, you have Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carolwhich was massively important, not just for the idea of the ghost of Christmas story, but just for Christmas in general. It was part of Queen Victoria’s mandate to re-popularize Christmas. Charles Dickens who wrote that story when he did was a big part of not only cementing this idea that Christmas is the time when we tell ghost stories, but that this is the time of year we have Christmas – because before the queen Victoria, had a kind of fall as a popular holiday. A Christmas Carol it became important to create many of these ideas and mythology we have around Christmas-decoration Christmas tree and all these accouterments that we associate with Christmas that came from that period.
The story of the ghost for Christmas has been very strongly associated with that period – and yet, there was so that so many writers of ghost stories in the Victorian era… there are just tons and tons of them. And so, when radio came in, they started doing radio adaptations A Christmas Carol and other kinds of ghost stories around the party. So, that turned into television.
So the BBC was still up and doing ghost stories for Christmas in one form or another. In the 1970s, Lawrence Gordon Clark, who was a director, proposed this idea of - he did not foresee it being a series. He proposed a film adaptation of MR James’ story The Barchester Stables. He used a previous adaptation of an MR James story as evidence that this could be popular; Jonathan Miller had done a so-called adaptation You whistle and I come to you in the late 60s, which is great. And it wasn’t done for Christmas. It was made for a different time of the year, a different program.
But Lawrence Gordon Clark took this to him and said, “Look how good it is, and imagine if we could do something like that for Christmas.” So he did The Barchester Stables. It was a great success, so he got permission every year to continue doing another one. And so it became a series; throughout the 70s, there would be a different episode.
And so that’s what my series The haunted season is based on this idea of an annual ghost story movie that premieres every year. And I know that for the North American audience, using the word “series” to describe something that has only one episode for a year is strange, but it is based on that tradition. It’s basically an ongoing Christmas special where there’s a new installment every year. This tradition still exists in the UK. So this series is just one part of that larger tradition.
io9: How did you decide To Fire You Finally Comes as the first entry? How did writer-director Sean Hogan get involved?
Janice: Sean Hogan is a filmmaker, a book writer, a playwright – he does all kinds of things. He’s incredibly talented, really great with period dialogue. And so I proposed – and he can do a lot with a little, which is important because we have a very low budget for these things – if he would make a short film originally for the folk horror box of Severin Films. Let’s make our new box, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume Two. The first box set had my documentary (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched) about it – he had a new movie about it. And we were like, “We don’t have an equivalent of that for the second box.” So we asked Sean if he would make a movie about it.
I have given a couple of suggestions for this. The idea of being set up on a road of corpses was something that came from one of the suggestions I gave him.
But before he even finished the movie, I came back to this idea that Shudder’s Sam Zimmerman and I had over a decade ago when we worked together 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 wouldn’t go. But we wanted Sean Hogan to do that movie.
So when Sean was making this film for me, before it was even finished, I said to David Gregory (Severin Films’) “What if we could pitch this to Shudder as part of an ongoing series of ghost stories for Christmas ?” And David was like, “Sure, go for it.”
And so Sam and I had a conversation, and it was amazing because it was this idea that we had that wasn’t approved years and years ago. We were so excited about it, like, “Let’s do it now!” And that was really how it happened. It was in some ways a very long project, but then it was like everything clicked, where it was like, this whole thing could really work, you know? I’m super glad Sean Hogan did the first one because he was the filmmaker we talked about doing Fangoria all those years ago.
I like the movie. It turned out so well. He did it with a small team in the UK and takes care of, you can’t tell from watching the film, but it was freezing and raining while they were doing it. They were in very adverse conditions, but I think it turned out really well.
i9: To Fire You Finally Comes it’s very traditional, very much in the style of older movies. Is that something we’ll see as the series continues?
Janice: I don’t know if they will be black and white, but they will all be periods. They will not necessarily be the same period, but they are supposed to engage with the past in some way. The guide I gave to the filmmakers is that definitely nothing after, like, 1960. You can go back to the Middle Ages if you want, or you can go all the way to the 50s, you know, but it has to feel ( like a piece period). That’s what the tradition always was.
It’s interesting, when A ghost story for Christmas First played in the ’70s, the last two episodes, they did modern stories – they didn’t fit like older Victorian ghost stories. They made new stories, modern stories set in modern settings. And the audience at the time revolted – many of them had negative reviews. Now people love these episodes because now they’re vintage, now they’re period pieces. But at the time when they were new, people were like, “You’re ruining the tradition!” So I decided that I would keep the settings. It is (a fairly broad time frame), but they will still be period pieces of some sort.
io9: Can you tease anything about any other entries?
Janice: The only thing I can tease is that I made one of them (as my first narrative film). I asked other people, they are writing their scripts now – Tease (more) when the time approaches.
io9: I’m a big fan of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitchedyour folk horror documentary. Are these Christmas ghost stories part of the folk horror tradition?
Janice: Of course, it comes through because of that aspect of the oral tradition. Like many of the BBC’s Christmas ghost stories, you’d probably call them more gothic horror than folklore, but it depends. Something like A Warning to the Curious and You whistle and I come to you You could call it folklore because I’m definitely digging up an artifact from the past that carries all this baggage with it. There are definitely folk horror elements to some of them, but some are definitely more in the gothic realm. But I think that the ghost stories of Christmas, just because they are linked to this oral tradition, which makes it a little more connected with folklore.
io9: And you mentioned a couple of titles, but for people who see the first episode of The haunted season and you want to see more in this vein, what do we recommend looking for?
Janice: Well, Shudder fired Jonathan Miller’s You whistle and I come to you. Absolutely start with this. And they fired Lawrence Gordon Clark’s A ghost story for Christmas from the 1970s. These are the ones that my series refers to, so I recommend you take in all of them – there are nine different choices of what they can watch. I don’t know if they have The stone tape on Shdder (editor’s note: they do!) but The stone tape it was broadcast for Christmas. It has nothing to do with Christmas, but was broadcast as part of Christmas programming, as a Christmas ghost story. And that’s great too.
Look at it To Fire You Finally Comesthe first episode of The haunted seasonin Shudder now.
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