Coming Soon
GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS
1970s
Director
Leslie Megahey
Kier-La Janisse
Starring
Runtime
100 MINUTES
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Originally broadcast in the dying hours of Christmas Eve, the BBC's A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS series was a fixture of the seasonal schedules throughout the 60's and 70's. Tucked away from the more joyous yuletide celebrations late at night, the hour long films gave viewers an extra winter chill, continuing a long tradition of spooky stories that undercut the seasonal cheer. The films are classic slow-burners. There's no rush to get to the scares, nor any false jump-shocks to punctuate proceedings; just a buildup of dread, taking time to concoct a thick atmosphere of unease, with strange, intriguing characters, things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, and then great payoffs that are impossible to completely shake off.
This year's program features:
THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM (2025)
A schoolteacher’s late-night arrival at a hotel in the Alps without a reservation leaves him with no option but to accept the room of a missing hotel guest — leading to a sleepless night full of strange and uncanny occurrences. Based on the classic chiller by Algernon Blackwood, THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM is the narrative debut of Kier-La Janisse, director of the SXSW award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, and author of the pioneering horror memoir House of Psychotic Women.
SCHALCKEN THE PAINTER (1979)
Leslie Megahey’s SCHALCKEN THE PAINTER is a celebration of the art of the Dutch Golden Age and a condemnation of the era’s bourgeois materialism and dehumanisation of women as chattels for trade. It’s also one of the eeriest ghost stories ever filmed. Megahey adapted the film, a visual tour de force with scant dialogue, from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1839 ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalcken the Painter’, a short story in which the real-life genre painter and portraitist Godfried Schalcken (1647-1706), a student of Gerrit Dou (1613-75), receives a visitation from the spectre of the woman he once loved but forsook.
This year's program features:
THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM (2025)
A schoolteacher’s late-night arrival at a hotel in the Alps without a reservation leaves him with no option but to accept the room of a missing hotel guest — leading to a sleepless night full of strange and uncanny occurrences. Based on the classic chiller by Algernon Blackwood, THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM is the narrative debut of Kier-La Janisse, director of the SXSW award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, and author of the pioneering horror memoir House of Psychotic Women.
SCHALCKEN THE PAINTER (1979)
Leslie Megahey’s SCHALCKEN THE PAINTER is a celebration of the art of the Dutch Golden Age and a condemnation of the era’s bourgeois materialism and dehumanisation of women as chattels for trade. It’s also one of the eeriest ghost stories ever filmed. Megahey adapted the film, a visual tour de force with scant dialogue, from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1839 ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalcken the Painter’, a short story in which the real-life genre painter and portraitist Godfried Schalcken (1647-1706), a student of Gerrit Dou (1613-75), receives a visitation from the spectre of the woman he once loved but forsook.