Unholy Night
Writer/Director: Michael Gabriele
Cast: Marc Bendavid, Shailene Garnett, Jacqueline Robbins
I love Christmas horror, even at its most basic, but I especially love the kind of Christmas horror stories that dig into family dynamics (found families or blood relatives) while also peppering in mayhem and violence from outside the family. Black Christmas is an excellent found family example of this, while Krampus fits neatly into the blood relatives category. Christmas is as much about the people you share it with as it is about the decorations, so it's nice when these themes meet.
Unholy Night, the feature debut from writer/director Michael Gabriele, fits snugly into this category of Christmas horror, and the results are delightful. Though it sometimes falters a little bit in managing its tone, this is Christmas horror done right, a movie fully in touch with the many ways in which the holiday can frighten us, and what it means to carry family traditions forward even when they seem futile.
Gino (Marc Bendavid) is the least successful sibling in an Italian family that loves its traditions, right down to the way they cut the melons for Christmas Eve dinner (slices, not cubes!). As his family gathers for their typical Christmas festivities, Gino tries to assert himself, to insist that he can contribute to the family in a meaningful way despite ribbing from his more successful siblings, his mother Lucia (Toni Ellwand), and his father Giuseppe (Ron Lea). It's all very typically underachiever anxiety around the holidays, but that starts to matter just a little bit less when the family discovers that the deceased family matriarch, Gino's Nonna (Jacqueline Robbins) is not just reanimated, but wandering around the kitchen, trying to relive her old rhythms. Of course, when she finds out that the family sold her longtime home after she died, Nonna grows vengeful, setting off a night of terror steeped in Italian folklore.
"Family Drama Exacerbated by the Arrival of a Monster" is, again, a time-honored piece of the holiday horror subgenre, and Gabriele clearly knows what he's doing as he lays all of this out. The dialogue is crisp and quick, the actors dialed in to their various archetypal places within the family, and the production design blooms with genuine seasonal warmth. You feel like you know this family, even as they grow into individual characters with their own hang-ups and ambitions. If you've ever felt like the unimpressive one at Christmas dinner you definitely know Gino. He defends his relatively low-level career path, clings to a relationship with old flame and neighbor Rene (Shailene Garnett), and resents his family for making him the butt of so many jokes. These are familiar and potent rhythms, so when they're disrupted by something supernatural, it really works.
And those supernatural elements also work. Anchored by Robbins' performance as Nonna, which requires her to turn on a dime from nurturing grandmother to vengeful spirit and back again as the plot requires, the zombie elements of the story carry the added weight of familial obligation, which creates new wrinkles in the story. Nonna's not just a mindless zombie. When she harms someone — and boy does she harm someone, the gore in this movie is a blast — it's for a reason, and when she regains her composure and speaks simply as the Nonna her grandkids once knew, it's also for a reason. This shifts Unholy Night into an intriguing hybrid of zombie film and classic ghost story in which the spirit of a dead person is carrying around some kind of unfinished business, as Gino, Rene, and the rest of the family try to figure out what's causing this supernatural disruption. The family's efforts to root out the cause of what's happening, and find a way to stop it, make for a fun little detective story in the middle of all that horror, and add levity along the way.
The one real issue with all of this, and it's a small one, is what happens when that levity has to pivot hard into all-out horror. There are scenes of violence and death in Unholy Night that not only pack in fun gore, but work on a visceral, emotional level. If you love your family you'll find yourself grieving along with this one as their ranks are thinned by a vengeful zombie grandma, and that's a mark of great filmmaking. The trouble is that sometimes the grief and the comedy don't blend, they simply clash. There are ways to do that kind of tonal balance really well (see: Shaun of the Dead, to name just one example), and Unholy Night just doesn't quite nail it.
That discordance is far from enough of a problem to ruin the film, though, particularly as it makes the turn for home and reveals that it still has more surprises for its audience. At its core, Unholy Night is a movie about family and the bonds we test with each holiday season, not because they're fragile but because the struggle over the dinner table, and the shape of the melon, and who's got the best job, is worth it in the end. This is a twisty, well-paced, very fun holiday horror delight with surprising emotional resonance, and it'll be making its way into my Christmas movie rotation for years to come.
Unholy Night is coming soon.
