Film writer, producer, and programmer Kier-La Janisse is best known for her nonfiction books (including the scholarly horror tome House of Psychotic Women and the encyclopedic Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive) and her epic folk-horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. But she makes her narrative film debut in this year’s installment of The Haunted Season, an annual series she created last year to bring spooky short films to Shudder at Christmas.
io9 talked to Janisse in 2024 when the first film in the series, To Fire You Come at Last, arrived on the streamer. That entry was written and directed by Sean Hogan and follows a group of men lugging a coffin to its final resting place. It’s an effective and creepy tale, but it doesn’t reference Christmas in any way. Last year, Janisse explained The Haunted Season isn’t that kind of “holiday” series; instead, it’s picking up what the BBC’s popular A Ghost Story for Christmas has been putting down for decades.
Often drawing on early 20th-century tales written by M.R. James and his contemporaries, it taps into storytelling traditions that go back centuries—community building by sharing scary tales around a fire—and became even more popular in Victorian times with the release of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which is obviously stuffed with festive ghosts galore.
“That is what The Haunted Season is based on,” Janisse told io9 last year. “This idea of an annual ghost story film that premieres every year … It’s basically a Christmas special that’s ongoing, where there’s a new installment every year. That tradition still exists in the UK. So this series is just part of that bigger tradition.”
Back then, all Janisse would tease about the future of The Haunted Season was that they will all be period stories, set no later than the 1960s—and that she herself would be directing an upcoming entry.
That film is now here—it hit Shudder December 1—and it’s called The Occupant of the Room, based on Algernon Blackwood’s 1909 short story of the same name, though the film takes place in the early 1930s. It runs 30 minutes and features live-action and animation, plus a mood that escalates from unease to outright despair, helped along by a stirring score by experimental sound artist the Nausea.
From the start, the screws start to turn. A flustered man (Don McKellar) arrives at an isolated mountain inn amid a late-night snowstorm, only to learn his reservation was never confirmed and all the rooms are full. In fact, it’s so close to Christmas, all the rooms in the entire village are full.
The front-desk clerk is politely sending the man on his way when suddenly, the proprietress emerges and offers him lodging that comes with a catch: a room that’s empty only because the guest who rented it went hiking a few days prior and has yet to return. She might appear at any moment and kick him out, in other words. But it’s better than sleeping in the snow, so he accepts the odd offer. He even willingly pays double the going rate.
With this prickly setup priming us for a confrontation or worse, we watch as the man takes stock of the room—the woman’s possessions are still scattered about; most eerily, there’s a strand of her long, dark hair lingering in the washbasin—and settles in for what turns out to be the least relaxing night of his life.
Janisse has clearly watched and studied many A Ghost Story for Christmas episodes; her expertise also includes editing Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television, an anthology book that digs even more broadly into seasonal horror as a genre. And she nails the bleak, grim, ice-cold atmosphere of those old BBC episodes perfectly for The Occupant of the Room.
The traveler’s predicament is so dire he agrees to an arrangement he knows might lead to an awkward situation; there’s also the uncomfortable thought that he’s benefiting from the previous guest’s presumed misfortune. Plus, there’s the feeling of invading someone’s private space, even if they’re not physically present. But beyond his initial misgivings, there’s also a weird vibe in the room. An “infection of melancholy,” as he calls it, and the film plunges us into that mindset with a black-and-white animated sequence that rips through his increasingly horrified perception of what it feels like being there.
If it’s Christmas cheer you seek, The Haunted Season should not be your destination. But if chills delight you the most, you can find The Occupant of the Room and To Fire You Come at Last—as well as some of the classic BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas entries that inspired this new series—on Shudder now.
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