Unholy Night world première at Fantasia, 25 July, 2026
As its title suggests, writer/director/editor Michael Gabriele’s debut feature Unholy Night is a sweet Christmas movie in negative, coming with a diabolical twist on the Yuletide formula. Its prologue sets the scene, as the camera sinuously tracks little Lucia (Toni Ellwand) navigating a big family gathering. And this is not just any family, but an overtly Italian one, in both the language that they speak and in the elegant savouries and cakes in abundance on the serving trays. For this extended clan emigrated, generations earlier, to a small snowy town in Canada which they then helped build up, and though assimilated, they have also maintained their traditions. These, however, include the unexpected guest who comes knocking at the door, bringing instant murder and mayhem to the party.
“So you’re telling me the living dead is an Italian tradition?”, asks Rene (Shailene Garnett), as she discovers that the zombies plaguing this Italian quarter in Canada are in fact ritornati, returned from the dimension of the dead on Christmas day as a result of an ancestral curse imported from the old country. Rene’s family is relatively new to this community, and decidedly not Italian, having moved into the property across the street after the death of the previous all-Italian residents Uncle Bruno and Aunt Maria led to its sale – and as Rene, back in town, is guided by Yuletide nostalgia to reconnect with her neighbour and ex-boyfriend Gino (Marc Benavid), she finds herself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. For as the Christmas dinner gets underway in the house opposite of Gino and his parents Giuseppe (Ron Lea) and the now middle-aged Luca (Toni Ellwand), old, no-nonsense Nonna Pina (Jacqueline Robbins) makes an unexpected reappearance, three years after she died. Bruno and Maria will return too, and others, on this night of miracles but not necessarily of good will. For as the family’s numbers are unexpectedly expanded by the dead, they are just as rapidly thinned.
Now you might think that the answer to Rene’s question is a resounding yes. After all, it was George A. Romero who effectively invented the modern cinematic zombie in his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its many sporadic sequels. Yet despite the Italian, indeed Roman, origin of his surname, Romero was in fact born to a Spanish father and a Lithuanian mother – although his Dawn of the Dead (1978) would directly inspire Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh-Eaters, 1979) and a whole subgenre of Italian ripoffs over the next decade. The ending of Fulci’s The Beyond (1981) in particular finds its echo in Unholy Night.
Yet the zombies in Unholy Night belong to a different tradition entirely, very much sui generis. For Grandma talks, and sings, and cooks, and does the dishes as she did when she was alive, and the other revenants similarly go through the motions of their past existence – but most importantly, they have a fiery Mediterranean temper that compels them, when barely provoked, to lash out with unrestrained violence. In this respect too, they fit right back in with a family whose living members are just as hotheaded and tempestuous. For while Gabriele’s film may at times recall Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992) with its undead old woman, its prejudicially excluded girlfriend and its full-blooded slaughter, really this is, like any Christmas gathering, an opportunity for a family to thrash out, often viciously, its dysfunctions, difficulties and difference. These domestic disputes are merely amplified by the presence of the dead, who simmer with unresolved tensions, regrets and all the things that have gone unsaid.
Even before the dead arrive, basement-dwelling, low-paid paint salesman Gino is terrified of his own family’s acid criticisms of his failings, and just wants Christmas to be over. He is a hilarious anti-hero, craven and pathetic yet good-hearted, always setting out to save Rene only instead to be saved by her, and open – in a way that his conservative relatives are not – to change. Over the course of this night, he will literally go through hell and back to resolve his feelings for his ex, and to find his place at the family table. There will be blood, but some of it will just be paint – and in any case, here death is not the end, and family is forever, with each new generation bearing the brunt of the last in its own peculiar way.
strap: Death, Italian style: Michael Gabriele’s Christmas comedy horror sees a family haunted by its own cursed history
© Anton Bitel
