Yet another marathon of holiday themed horror movies landed in my lap, and they’re always in season for me. The latest smorgasbord to add to the complete holiday horror page includes Thanksgiving horror, Christmas horror, and a multi-holiday anthology of sorts.
SAY CHEESE (2026)
This 70-minute movie is like some sort of weird, art house holiday horror anthology about an old camera that infects those who get their picture taken by it. The camera seems to be possessed by some sort of demon that occasionally pops up to deliver ominous messages to those infected.
I’m assuming the whole movie takes place in the same apartment building, but I’m not sure. Colors are saturated, there are distracting flashes of light and editing, and Christmas clips, still shots, and music are inserted into tales that take place on different holidays.
Matters are made more confusing by the fact that the tales are essentially chronological by where they land during the calendar year, yet the first tale is set on New Year’s Eve, and the second one hits on Christmas Eve. My aching head.
Chapter 1, New Year’s Eve
This is the longest tale of the bunch, and an exorbitant amount of time is focused on simple dinner conversations between a straight couple stuck in their apartment during a pandemic, with the camera fixed right at the edge of their dining table. The woman scored an old camera at a sale and takes a photo of the guy eventually. Over a course of weeks (so it’s not just a New Year’s Eve tale), the man becomes sick. There’s no definitive conclusion to this tale, because we’re not done with it yet.
Chapter 2, Christmas Eve
After skipping a neighbor’s holiday party, a woman receives a mysterious package…the camera. A connection is made to the first tale (not that I understood it), and eventually the camera infects the woman.
Chapter 3, Valentine’s Day
A lonely guy is set to have a first date, but somehow the camera lands in his hands and things turn tragic for him.
Chapter 4, Labor Day
This is a holiday we don’t get every day…and it’s introduced with “Silent Night” playing. No Christmas music until after Halloween, dammit! Anyway, during a company’s staff photo shoot, the douchebag CEO demands professionalism and speed from the photographer…who now has the evil camera. Don’t expect a company-wide massacre, though. Bummer.
Chapter 5, National Podcast Day
I looked it up—it’s a real “holiday”, and it’s on September 30th. Naturally, I was disappointed that the final story doesn’t land on Halloween, but clearly the film’s creator wanted to be different. In this one, podcasters have learned about the killer camera. One team of podcasters goes to investigate, and we finally learn the fate of the guy from the first tale.
This is actually a very interesting concept movie, it just doesn’t fully come together. The script definitely needed some rewrites to strengthen the narrative.
THE PRIEST: THANKSGIVING MASSACRE (2025)
The director of St. Patrick’s Day Massacre takes on Thanksgiving, and I’ll start off by saying that I picked up the DVD of St. Patrick’s Day Massacre after seeing it, but I won’t be doing the same for this one.
The opener, which takes place way back in the days of the first settlers, is totally intriguing. A reverend who looks like the creep from Poltergeist II is trapped in a cabin with no food during the winter…with a buxom blonde. He locks eyes on her meaty mounds and decides it’s dinner time. Eek! Sadly, we don’t see him snack on the sacks. He does, however, decide he must pay for his sin, so he shoots himself.
Things take a bizarre turn in modern times. A woman who is separated from her husband brings her grown daughter and son to a house in the woods to spend Thanksgiving with the father…and his huge-breasted new girlfriend. What in the dysfunction hell?
This whole setup is just weird. There’s endless back and forth about everyone’s feelings while twangy guitar music serves as a score. The separated couple keeps arguing. The new girlfriend seems to be trying to seduce the son. They end up in a sauna together, and apparently the steam seeps into the floor and revives the priest, who is buried in the ground underneath.
I can’t even comprehend what I was watching. Seriously, the film consists of one person after another crawling under the floor of the sauna and getting killed.
It’s not until 79 minutes into this 86-minute movie that the reincarnated priest pops up through the floor. I was hoping that he would be back for more juicy tits, which seemed the only way this movie could go considering a huge-boobed woman was cast as the girlfriend, but there is absolutely no balloon popping in this silly little film. It’s a disappointment as both a slasher and a Thanksgiving horror flick.
SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (2025)
Many argue that Silent Night with Malcolm McDowell is not a remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night, but in essence, it’s more of a remake than this remake. With this take on the 80s classic, the director of Summer School and Wrong Turn 2021 does something totally different with the main plot, and I fricking loved it.
Based off initial kills, I thought the change here was going to be that Billy, who witnesses a guy dressed as Santa kill his parents after leaving his Santa-like grandfather’s nursing home, only targets older men with white beards. That alone would have been a cool update, but that’s not where this one goes.
After an opening similar to the original, this film takes liberties. Forget the orphanage and the wicked nun. Doesn’t happen here. We go right to meeting older Billy, played by Rohan Campbell of Halloween Ends. He regularly hears a voice in his head telling him to kill like he’s got Venom living inside him or something. For most of the movie, I kind of hated this aspect and thought it unnecessary, but it all makes perfect sense by the final act.
In between answering the calls to kill and marking them with blood in an advent calendar, Billy becomes involved with a female coworker at the toy store where he gets a job, played by the roommate from Happy Death Day. Yay!
The absolute highlight of Billy’s kills is when he crashes a white supremacist Nazi holiday party and slaughters everyone in attendance.
The most amazing thing about this scene is that I’m sure the knee-jerk reaction of all the woke haters is to pounce on the political bias messaging in this movie—you know, the one that’s saying that Nazis and white supremacists are naughty and deserved to be punished. Heh heh.
It’s in the final act that the plot takes a total turn and becomes its own animal, and it totally rocks. I think it was brilliant to completely change the plot line. It’s fresh, different, and much more character focused than the original movie, offering something unique rather than a Christmas cookie cutter slasher. There’s also a fantastic sequence that takes place in a ball pit.
The way in which it’s used is actually quite chilling. And I adored the ending.
GOBBLEFOOT (2025)
I would avoid SRS Cinema movies like the plague, but they keep releasing holiday themed horror flicks, and I feel obligated to watch every holiday horror movie I know exists.
I’ll make this short. Like all SRS Cinema films, this 71-minute flick feels like a bunch of guys got together and improvised a story while they filmed in their hometown.
300 years ago, a girl was accused of being a witch after stealing turkeys. She cursed her town with a demonic presence on Thanksgiving….Gobblefoot!
We see this comical monster puppet soon after in modern times as it attacks a dude in the wilderness. A college professor investigates a series of murders believed to be the work of Gobblefoot.
A queer looking dude appears to have conjured Gobblefoot, and has the hots for the creature. He lures a few different men to a warehouse so Gobblefoot can kill them. That’s it. That’s the movie. Other than the killer turkey man, the holiday is irrelevant and never celebrated.
