Home for the Holidays (1972)

This 1972 TV suspense movie is mainly notable for two things: having a bizarrely impressive cast, and for being well ahead of the curve by delivering what's essentially a Christmas slasher before "slasher" even coalesced into a subgenre. This beat Black Christmas by two years, though it's worth acknowledging that being first is the only metric in which this could ever seriously be said to "beat" Black Christmas. Not that it's a fair comparison: Home for the Holidays was made for the ABC Movie of the Week series, not a theatrical release.

Which of course raises the question of how much of a curve we should be grading this on. It's not bad for what it is, but "what it is" isn't exactly good. There's not much tension, it's not at all scary, and the characters aren't particularly entertaining outside of the novelty of seeing Sally Field, Eleanor Parker, Jessica Walter, and Julie Harris in a proto-slasher TV movie produced by Aaron Spelling. In short, if the existence of this doesn't immediately fascinate you, there's no real reason to track it down. 

That doesn't mean there's nothing here worth exploring. On top of its place in the developing slasher landscape, this also represents an interesting inversion of the family Christmas dynamic by bringing its characters together for an Agatha Christie-inspired killing spree, rather than a celebration. Even before the killing starts, the movie makes it clear these people don't want to be together and have no real interest in acknowledging the holiday.

That doesn't mean the movie is unclear. Aside from the title, the house the film is set in is decorated, and the movie makes sure we know it's set on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Though it's also worth noting this could have been a late alteration. The characters only discuss the season on a handful of occasions, the plot-point weather is a thunderstorm rather than the usual blizzard, and the motive for the gathering is unrated to the holidays. I can't find enough information on the production of this to confirm or falsify the theory, but this definitely feels like it could have been a script that was changed to Christmas at the last minute. Whether that's the case or not, the movie ultimately embraces the setting and offers some interesting parallels to a classic Christmas movie (or perhaps more accurately a quasi-Christmas movie). More on that later.

The story centers around four adult sisters gathering at their elderly father's request. Benjamin (played by actor Walter Brennan in one of his last roles) is convinced his second wife, Elizabeth (Harris), is poisoning him. This isn't entirely out of left field, as we learn she was suspected of killing her first husband the same way.

The death most of the sisters are more bothered by is that of their own mother, Benjamin's first wife. The prevailing theory is that their father drove her to substance abuse and eventually the grave as a result of his affair with Elizabeth. Because of this, none of the sisters have been home in years, and there's disagreement whether or not they should even care if Elizabeth is murdering their father.

Around the thirty minute mark, one of the sisters decides to take off only to be stabbed in the back with a pitchfork in the barn. We don't get a good look at the killer, but we're shown they're wearing a yellow rain coat, red gloves, and rain boots. The movie soon ensures we're shown these items in the possession of Elizabeth to imply she's the killer (which of course means she isn't).

No one finds her body until the third act, so the movie carries on as before, giving us shreds of backstory, exposition, and misdirection until it's ready to take out the next sister. This time it's one with a substance abuse problem like their mother, so when she'd found drowned in a bathtub the remaining characters are unclear if it was murder, suicide, or an accident.

By now the storm has knocked out the phone (or perhaps the killer did this) and made the road unpassable. The only ones left are the youngest sister, Chris (Field), the oldest sister, Alex (Parker), and Elizabeth. And Benjamin, I suppose, but he doesn't do much and he's killed off camera soon after. Chris decides to try and go for help, which will require walking a mile through the woods. She soon realizes she's being followed and narrowly evades the killer. Because of the storm, she can't identify any more than we can - the murderer's coat, boots, and gloves. Eventually Chris circles back to the house and finds the body of the first sister killed. She also runs into Elizabeth, who's wearing a yellow raincoat and immediately concludes she's the killer. Elizabeth tries to get her attention, but Chris winds up fleeing.

By now, the roads are a little clearer, and Alex reappears driving on the road. Chris starts trying to tell her what's occurred, but Alex reveals she already knows... because she's the real killer. She attacks Chris with a tire iron, and Chris rolls down a hill. Before Alex can follow to confirm her sister's dead, a local doctor (and love interest for Chris) shows up. Alex lies to him but in the process loses a chance to check Chris's body and instead heads into town to fetch the sheriff.

The next morning, she shows up to show the sheriff the bodies, believing she'll have no trouble framing Elizabeth for the deaths. Only of course Chris isn't dead, so Alex is apprehended and the movie can end relatively happily, aside from all the trauma and victims.

The movie's pace is a little slow. It's also worth noting that the violence is relatively tame, even by '70s TV standards. I realize "stabbed in the back with a pitchfork" sounds brutal, but it's an instantaneous, bloodless death. Likewise, the drowning is accomplished by gently tugging on the unconscious sister's leg so her head slips under the surface. In other words, this isn't going to appeal to slasher fans.

The movie's morality is also a bit muddled. The film goes out of its way to establish one of the murdered sisters is promiscuous and the other's an addict. Whether or not the intent was to imply this somehow made the women's fates deserved, the movie falls into the pitfall of seemingly implying what happened was on some level a just punishment. Though, to be fair, it's more generous in its depiction of both than in its portrayal of the cruel, misogynistic father, who's implied to be cause of the family's suffering, up to and including Alex's murderous psychosis. 

Returning to the holidays, the movie's family has some interesting parallels with (and is perhaps intended as a dark reflection of) the sisters from Little Women. In addition to there being four in each case, both feature a "Jo," though in this case she's the first one killed. Broadly speaking, the sisters in Home for the Holidays each resemble characteristics of the March sisters (though under this reading, Jo is really the group's Amy). I'll add that the movie's Beth analog would be Chris, the film's final girl (though the term is admittedly anachronistic here, as the trope wouldn't be formalized for a while).

To be clear, all of this could easily be coincidental - the archetypes at play here are fairly broad, and the fact one character is names Jo (short for Joanna, not Josephine) also ties to all four sisters having boys' names, which is explained in an offhanded comment implying their father wanted sons, not daughters. But given the parallels, I think it's a real possibility. If so, it would also offer a competing explanation for the holiday setting, as the two classic adaptations of Little Women are associated with Christmas.

The pointed inversion of family holiday norms is less ambiguous. 1970s Christmas movies, to the limited extent they even exist, tends to be made from a cynical point-of-view. That's not really unique to Christmas movies, of course - growing social distrust of authority translated into a media landscape permeated with themes of corruption more or less across the board. But for our purposes, the conservative holiday films of the '40s and '50s must have seemed antiquated, since very few were produced through the '60s and '70s (though they'd certainly see a revival in the '80s and '90s). The 1960s included a handful of Hollywood productions deconstructing the simplistic themes and social structures featured in the films of the preceding decades, and for the most part the 1970s continued this trend.

In this context, Home for the Holidays feels a little less bizarre. Audiences of the time were used to bleaker, less optimistic perspectives on the season, though it's still a little surprising to find this airing on a TV network in the lead up to Christmas.

As interesting as the movie is in the abstract, there's not enough to recommend it to anyone who isn't curious about seeing an A-list cast in what's essentially a cheap PG horror flick. Between the cast and melodramatic tone, this seems to be trying to sell itself as smart, psychological horror, but the ideas are pretending to be a lot more insightful than they actually are. And hamstrung by its medium and budget, the movie fails to develop any real tension or suspense, leaving you with a movie that gets tiresome fast. Regardless of which came first, anyone seriously looking for a '70s Christmas slasher film is better off rewatching the real deal (and I say that as someone who's not entirely enamored with Black Christmas).

There's still a lot here to appreciate as an artifact, largely because of the seemingly out-of-place cast. If you're curious about this on that level, you won't be disappointed.... Just don't expect much beyond that.

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