Home For The Holidays (1972)

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (1972)

Dir: John Llewellyn Moxey

After purchasing Are You In The House Alone? Growing Up With Gargoyles, Giant Turtles, Valerie Harper, The Cold War, Stephen King & Co-Ed Call Girls TV movie compendium 1964-1999 edited by Amanda Reyes of Made For TV Mayhem, I’ve become obsessed with finding the gems. I’ve found most of the TV movies that I’ve viewed recently are impressive in myriad ways, but I have also started from the top of the heap. Home For The Holidays rests firmly at the top and for good reason.

The patriarch of a well-to-do family has sent word that he believes his wife (their stepmother) is slowly poisoning him to death. Each of the four estranged daughters are summoned back home. Father passes judgement on each one and we get to know them as the put-upon, the addict, the lover, and the student. He requests his children get rid of his wife. Kill her! The backstory is then introduced through monologues. The new wife had a husband who died from poisoning, she was acquitted of the charges, went to an asylum, and met and married the girls’ father. The other backstory is that of the girls’ mother who we believe to have committed suicide when she found out that their father was stepping out on her. This background gives the film enough meat so we care when the girls are butchered one after another.

Before they were commonplace, this film features a few red herrings and becomes a guessing game midway through. Had this film come a decade later, it would have been a run-of-the-mill slasher knockoff. But in 1972, we are in proto-slasher territory where all horror films and their elements are scrutinized and academically discussed to see if they had a bearing on the early eighties slasher boom. There’s the Italian Giallo films of the sixties and seventies and Black Christmas (1974) that are held as the main inspirations for John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). But, is there also a chance that Carpenter and his college friend Dan O’Bannon tuned in for Home For The Holidays when it aired? I’d say yes. That chance also increases with Julie Harris from The Haunting (1963) portraying the ‘wicked’ stepmother. Any genre geek would have flocked to that.

The film also features a young, but still drunk, Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) who graces the screen along with Julie Harris and an even younger Sally Field. The kills don’t show much but they are effective. The twists are intriguing, explanations are satisfactory, and the pre-slasher street cred makes the whole thing worth it.