Virtual Lecture by Samm Deighan (in English)

Along with festive decorations and holiday cheer, there is a long Christmas tradition that includes the eerie and the horrific, dating back to pagan winter solstice celebrations. The more recent wave of Christmas-themed horror movies has its roots in the Victorian practice of reading ghost stories by the fire on Christmas eve. In 1891, British writer Jerome K. Jerome wrote, “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.” Writer and film historian Samm Deighan will discuss the evolution of holiday horror from Victorian tales of the supernatural to their „Ghost Stories for Christmas“ BBC adaptations in the ‘70s to slasher films in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

About Samm Deighan
Philadelphia-based writer and film historian covering everything from classic cinema to Eurocult. Editor of Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cine- ma of Jean Rollin and author of a monograph on Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and The Legacy of World War II in European Arthouse Cinema. Samm has contributed liner essays and commentary tracks to over 100 blu-ray releases and she‘s the co-host of the Twitch of the Death Nerve podcast.