Lots of people have anxiety about the holidays, forced to confront stressers like family issues, credit card debt, and general social pressure. Now there is a whole new batch of holiday terrors to freak out about… sort of.
Holidays is the latest in a run of modestly budgeted horror anthologies that I’ve reviewed for this blog. I won’t bore you by extolling the virtues and drawbacks of anthologies for the nth time, but suffice it to say that this particular format makes it harder to achieve real greatness and also easier to avoid outright disaster. Holidays, predictably, slides right down the middle. To me, the film’s biggest failure is setting up a simple, compelling framing device for its storytelling, and then kind of failing to follow through with it. Each of the eight stories is titled for a specific holiday, but only a few of them seem to use that holiday for inspiration. Easter and Father’s Day, for sure. There are two that seem uniquely tied to Mother’s Day, but one of those is inexplicably assigned to St. Patrick. In perhaps the most egregious case of squandered opportunity, the Halloween story directed by Kevin Smith has nothing but the thinnest veneer of association with Halloween. Instead, he opts for a gross revenge parable about a scummy online porn operation, making the one feature without any traditional horror elements or even an attempt to be scary. Perhaps not surprisingly, the shorts that are truly holiday-themed stuck with me much more than their more generic counterparts.
The best of the bunch is centered around a woman receiving a mysterious package on Father’s Day, years after her father disappeared when she was a child. The package consists of a cassette tape and player, ostensibly from her dad, leading her on what amounts to a creepy scavenger hunt with the promise of answers at the end. The climax doesn’t really fulfill on the idea that has been setup, but the journey is fantastically tense and engaging. The Easter short hinges on the absurdity of the intersection between secular and non-secular readings of the holiday. I don’t know that it has anything really trenchant to say about the topic, but I’ll never forget the insane creature design that it introduces to tie those elements together. The other highlight is Mother’s Day, which explores the mirror-image anxieties about unwanted pregnancy and the inability to have children. This story is unique for the set in that it is written and directed by a woman, which is somewhat surprising considering that if you stripped away the superficial references to holidays, you could make a much stronger case for the theme of the collection to be horror from a woman’s point of view. I have no desire to make any assertions about who gets to create art about what, or stack rank the wokeness of individual contributors, but it definitely felt awkward to have only one female creator behind such a lady-centric crop of tales.
I will probably never watch Holidays again. It isn’t a particularly fun experience, and once you’ve absorbed the many genuinely bizarre and discomfiting concepts and images, there isn’t much to go back to. Still, it was an interesting watch, and helped a lot by some more-than-competent direction. Many of these anthologies are happy to include any warm body that knows how to turn on a camera, but there seems to be an effort here to cede airtime to young directors of real promise. Oh, and Kevin Smith.
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