If you're anything like me, you spend every Christmas Eve reading Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and entertaining a vague yearning for more distinctly Christmassy tales of terror which fate has so far hidden from you. Though the 'ghost story for Christmas' tradition is an old and auspicious one, the actual canon of horror stories set at Christmas is far smaller. Nonetheless a bit of digging can open a window into some good stuff in that vein which can allow you to give poor Tiny Tim a rest once in a while on your Christmas rotation. Here I present to you some of my favourite recent discoveries; I hope you enjoy them, and inform me of any which I have missed.
Content Notes: While this zine itself discusses nothing in detail, some of these stories, particularly the more recent ones, contain disturbing elements and I highly recommend checking trigger warnings online or dming me if you can’t find any. Hell House in particular contains a platter of triggering topics, particularly in relation to Catholicism, blood, & depictions of sexual assault.
Charles Dana Gibson, “A Christmas Fantasy” (1900). ID: Illustration in black & white of a small white boy in black clothes leaning as though cold against a wooden packing crate marked "fragile." Around him swirl images of cakes, toys, turkeys, and a bicycle. END ID.
- Dead of Night 1×01 The Exorcism (1972)
"I think we should be concentrating on how to be socialist.. and rich"
What!? Can it be!? Indeed it is: this is a marvellous piece of made-for-TV Marxist Christmas horror. Four upper class dilettantes gather in a cosy little cottage for a Christmas feast that turns out decidedly uncheery. There's blood in the wine, mysterious power cuts, corpses popping up here and there. Surely this has nothing to do with an injustice committed in the house years ago…
- The Legend of Hell House dir. John Hough (1973)
"Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies. Shall I go on?"
If your idea of Christmastime is scaring yourself shitless with a visually stunning film about The Haunting of Hill House on ghostly steroids this movie was made for you. It has everything: doubtful scientists, devout Catholics, glorious synth music by Delia Derbyshire, bright red blood in technicolor, sex obsessed ghosts, evil cats, traumatised child prodigies, seventies computers, and a truly indescribable ending. I think this is my favourite of the list. It has a lot to love, but its marvellous technicolor cinematography truly takes the cake. And the whole thing takes place during Christmas!
3. Christmas Meeting by Rosemary Timperley (1951)
"My family says there's no point in my writing, that I'm too young. But I don't feel young. Sometimes I feel like an old man, with too much to do before he dies."
A (very) short and bittersweet ghost story about a middle aged woman and the strange young man who stumbles into her living room one lonely Christmas. Infused with a distinctly vintage festive atmosphere, and the young intruder has quite a queer manner about him..
4. The Stone That Liked Company by A. L. Rowse (1945)
"It would seem that that stone had a hunger for what was young and innocent."
One Christmas night a set of university lecturers gather by candlelight to celebrate the season with the traditional ghostly tale. What follows is a story of deeply human proportion which is perhaps more harrowing for its tragedy than its strange series of mystical occurrences — though its got those by the dozen too. A chronically ill young musician sent to the countryside for his health gets far more than he bargained for when his amateur archaeology leads him to a mysterious standing stone which the locals are strangely remiss to discuss. Though the events of the main story happen at an unknown season, the distinctly festive frame story and compellingly short length get it onto this list with ease.
- The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)
"I was trying to suppress my mounting unease, to hold back the rising flood of memory."
Though this novel can be found in the Vintage Classics children's series I assure you it's a real spine chiller. Opening on Christmas Eve, we are thrown into the horrible reminisces of a solicitor who spent a night in a haunted mansion and certainly won't be forgetting it anytime soon. Hill writes in a pseudo-Victorian style which makes her treatment of the PTSD faced by her narrator particularly interesting. As someone with the condition myself, the narrator's distress at the casual telling of Christmas ghost stories felt real and made the frame story particularly relatable, despite the fact that I have not myself been terrorised by a spirit from another realm. It's the perfect length for sitting down with on Christmas Eve and being thoroughly harrowed.
Hans Tegner, “She Lighted a New Match” (1900). ID: Black & white illustration of a white girl in a dark cloak sat on a snowy street with her hands in a prayer position. Next to her hovers a vision of a christmas tree surrounded by dancing children. END ID. 
NB: The text in the cover illustration refers to a Christmas folktale I heard as a young lad, in which the robin's breast becomes red from the blood of Christ when it attempts to remove a thorn from his dying head. The holiday certainly has some dark lore of its own.
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