‘Home for the Holidays’ – Revisiting the 1972 TV-Movie Slasher

The American Broadcasting Company aired its iconic series ABC Movie of the Week from 1969 to 1975. In the intro of Michael Karol’s book The ABC Movie of the Week Companion: A Loving Tribute to the Classic Series, the author called the anthology show “influential” for baby-boomers. Karol then went on to quote a press release from Barry Diller; ABC’s vice president at the time said the network was trying to “broaden the base of familiar television anthologies and movies-for-television” and how a 90-minute format would “do justice to that special echelon of story ideas, which don’t quite work in the standard one-and two-hour television program forms.” The concept also entailed working with production companies outside of their own (ABC-Circle Films), including frequent collaborator Spelling-Goldberg (as in, Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg). And as many fans of vintage American tele-cinema will agree, one of Spelling-Goldberg’s, not to mention ABC’s most memorable TV-movies from that momentous era is Home for the Holidays.

Back then, starring in a made-for-television movie after appearing on the big screen wasn’t as frowned upon as it is today. So Jessica Walter going from Play Misty for Me to this movie-of-the-week wasn’t a huge step down in her career — if anything, the part gave Walter more recognition. The Flying Nun herself, Sally Field was on the cusp of greater fame with Sybil and Smokey and the Bandit in her near future. Jill Haworth has the least amount of screen-time in Home for the Holidays, but her character made a memorable exit. The two most prolific actors in the female cast, Julie Harris and Eleanor Parker, each brought experience and gravitas to their opposing roles. And three-time Oscar winner Walter Brennan, who turned in one of his final performances before passing away two years later, held his own even as his character was bedridden the entire time. There isn’t an ineffectual performance among this stacked ensemble.

“If there’s one thing the good people of Kenyon liked to talk about, it was the Morgan Family,” states a supporting character early on in 1972’s Home for the Holidays. This one pointed line says everything about the family in question without really saying anything at all. Yet, regardless of what happened in the past to earn this clan such a reputation, nothing can compare to the events of this Christmas. As four estranged sisters reunite at their ancestral house, an eeriness washes over them as well as those watching this classic TV-movie. There’s something wrong about the Morgans. Something very, very wrong.

Image: Sally Field, Jill Haworth and Eleanor Parker’s characters surround Walter Brennan’s bedridden character in Home for the Holidays.

Viewers are barely five minutes into Home for the Holidays before the laid-up Morgan patriarch all but announces the goings-on at his remote estate. The ailing father removes his hands from his face after pretending to sleep and, in a hushed and anxious voice, asks his confidante and oldest daughter Alexandra/Alex (Parker), “Where is she?” The “she” in question is, of course, Mr. Morgan’s second wife and the story’s ostensible villain, Elizabeth (Harris). It wouldn’t be until all of the Morgan daughters are gathered before their one remaining biological parent that the audience learns the man’s life is in immediate danger.

Screenwriter Joseph Stefano understood family dysfunction; he wrote the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho adaptation. And while his characters in Home for the Holidays have the potential to be as complex as Norman Bates, there was too little time to expose everyone’s innermost workings. Stefano and director John Llewellyn Moxey were up against a 75-minute runtime here. Even so, the family “therapy” swiftly begins as soon as Alex’s three younger sisters — Christine/Chris (Field), Frederica/Freddie (Walter) and Joanna/Jo (Haworth) — all arrive and hear out their paranoid father. Once they all catch up in the nastiest manner possible, which includes the father implying one daughter is promiscuous and shaming another for her substance use disorder, the main plot comes into focus. After nine years apart, this curmudgeon’s children have been summoned to look into whether or not Elizabeth is indeed slowly poisoning him. And if she is, maybe then give their stepmother a taste of her own medicine.

The growing storm outside is a timeworn method of amplifying tensions inside. Although, the Morgans don’t exactly need inclement weather to make them feel on edge. Elizabeth’s calm demeanor, even in the face of near constant insinuation, is unnerving enough before reaching all the sheer sadness on display. From an outsider’s perspective, the family’s pathos courses solely through Freddie, whose coping mechanisms are perhaps her last connection to her mother. It’s through Walter’s heavy-hearted character that the four sisters’ shared trauma becomes known; the original Morgan matriarch evidently took her own life on account of her husband’s infidelity. Acting like Henry VIII, the father sought someone else to bear him a son after receiving only daughters. Each of those daughters having a masculine nickname is a bitter reminder of their innate failure to make their father happy.

Image: Sally Field, Jessica Walter, Jill Haworth and Eleanor Parker in Home for the Holidays.

What starts off like a Hitchcockian thriller eventually transforms into one of the earliest examples of American slashers. A proto-slasher, as some would say. For reference, this movie came out a good eight years before the popular subgenre kicked off and became a permanent fixture of horror. The Morgan daughters have no time to investigate Elizabeth — a woman plagued by rumors since her last husband died under mysterious circumstances — before an unseen assailant picks them off one by one. The meager and bloodless body count along with the soapy adult atmosphere are far cries from the emerging attributes of typical slasher movies. Nevertheless, the journey to death is familiar. Unsuspecting characters gather at a single location only to then die at the hands of a disguised killer. In this case, the pitchfork-wielding perpetrator dons a yellow slicker and a pair of red kitchen gloves.

When analyzing his other directed works, such as The City of the Dead and fellow famous TV-movie The Night Stalker, Moxey was undoubtedly more at home in the supernatural. Home for the Holidays does an admirable job of distorting its reality so that everything increasingly feels like a nightmare, though. Dramatic thunderclaps and ironic dialogue indicate this is, in fact, a story plucked out of someone’s twisted imagination. Moxey’s direction comes across as a patchwork of both American Gothic and Giallo cinema, especially once Field’s character takes off through the rainy woods in search of help and then makes a grave discovery about her perilous situation.

Unlike the slashers to come after, Home for the Holidays doesn’t unmask its villain with sick pleasure. Viewers feel worse now knowing who is actually behind these premeditated murders. Their identity is not as obvious or logical as most killers’ reveals, but once the reasoning is given so greatly in their mid-Atlantic way of speaking, the tragedy of everything that has happened so far hits even harder. There isn’t a drop of snow to be found in this cheerless Christmas-set story, however, the antagonist’s motive rant is chilling.

From pursuers of campy classic television to slasher scholars, Home for the Holidays is a gift for everyone to enjoy. It entertains as much as it intrigues. Whether or not this movie directly inspired a more famous staple of holiday horror — Bob Clark’s Black Christmas was released two years later — is unclear, but without question, this beloved piece of vintage TV did predict tropes still in use today.