Black Christmas Is Getting a Head Start on the Holiday Scares

Halloween gets October 31. Christmas horror would like to call dibs on November 1.

Black Christmas arrives on Tubi just as the pumpkins are heading back into storage, trading trick-or-treaters for a snowed-in sorority house where staying in for the holidays becomes a spectacularly bad decision. A winter storm has left a group of sisters at their campus house over Christmas break when an escaped killer begins making his way back toward a place with a particularly ugly connection to his past.  So much for a silent night.

Writer-director Glen Morgan's 2006 reimagining of the influential 1974 slasher takes the original's holiday nightmare and pushes it toward something bloodier and more elaborate. The decorations are cheerful. The weather outside is frightful. Threatening phone calls and disappearing housemates are less committed to the festive atmosphere.

The cast makes revisiting this version especially fun now. Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Lacey Chabert all enter the house before several of them became closely associated with the horror, thriller, comedy, and television roles audiences know them for today. Andrea Martin even returns after appearing in the 1974 Black Christmas, giving the remake a direct connection to the movie whose sorority-house nightmare started the franchise. 

November 1 may technically move us out of spooky season, but horror clearly hasn't received the calendar invite. Terror on Tubi makes that handoff from Halloween to holiday horror feel a little less abrupt, especially once Black Christmas starts putting its own sinister spin on the holiday decorations.