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(Fantasia Fest 2026) Unholy Night: Grandma's Making a Naughty List…and Everyone's On It!

By. Professor Horror 

 

It's Christmas in July! Horror has always had a strange soft spot for the holiday season, probably because nothing sets off violence quite like the forced cheer of twinkling lights and obligatory togetherness. There's a long tradition of filmmakers pointing a camera at tinsel and eggnog and finding something rotten underneath, whether it's a killer in a Santa suit or a home invasion dressed up as a family reunion. The genre works because Christmas already asks so much of people emotionally, and horror just has to nudge that pressure a little further before it snaps. Michael Gabriele's feature directorial debut Unholy Night, which had its world premiere at Fantasia Fest, slots comfortably into that lineage while adding its own distinctly Italian-American flavor of dinner-table dread. The film follows Gino, an anxious painter played by Marc Bendavid, whose traditional family Christmas Eve gets upended when his long-dead grandmother comes back to enforce the holidays her own way.

The film starts with nostalgic images of Christmas: the tree glowing in the corner, a tray of holiday sweets nobody will admit to eating half of before the guests arrive, and uncles smoking cigars while slapping cards down like they've got something to prove. The whole family has gathered for some holiday cheer, warm and loud and thick with the specific comfort of a house that smells like garlic and pine needles. What follows that cheer is an unspeakable bloodbath, leaving only one survivor to carry the memory of the night into the present.

Flash forward to present day, and we find Gino deep in the stressful pre-ritual of preparing the house for family, which anyone who has hosted a holiday will recognize as its own form of psychological warfare. Gino tries to mentally and emotionally prepare himself for the inevitable arrival of his loud Italian family, pacing through the house and bracing for what's coming. He preps food, and he preps it wrong, then spends much of the evening dodging criticism from his parents. It's a familiar irony of the holidays that all the twinkling lights and forced cheer somehow make the stress of family gatherings worse rather than better, since everyone is expected to smile through it. Even with all that supposed joy in the air, the people who know you best also know exactly where to press, and Gino's family presses often. Bendavid plays that particular flavor of holiday dread with a jittery, put-upon energy that makes Gino feel painfully real long before any zombies show up.

Family can be comforting, suffocating, and terrifying all at once. HOME BODIES explores those same tensions through a very different lens, trapping its young protagonists inside a carefully controlled home where love and authority become impossible to separate.

As the relatives trickle in one by one, the volume and the stress levels begin to rise in a way that feels almost musical, each new arrival adding another instrument to an increasingly chaotic ensemble. Gino's brother and cousin can do no wrong in the eyes of the family, while Gino himself, and everything he does, becomes the butt of every joke lobbed across the dinner table. The jokes rise to a boisterous crescendo, the kind of overlapping, half-affectionate ribbing that will feel intimately familiar to anyone who has sat through a big family holiday. The film has fun leaning into broad, warm-hearted Italian family stereotypes here, and it earns the humor by clearly coming from a place of affection rather than mockery. Just when the room reaches its loudest, most jovial peak, the front door opens one more time. All of that noise and joy comes to a screeching halt the instant Grandma shows up.

Everyone immediately goes somber, and not just because Italian matriarchs are not to be messed with under any circumstances. It's because dear departed Nona is supposed to be dead, and yet here she is, standing in the doorway looking distinctly unbothered by that fact and already muttering about how nobody made the gravy right. She takes her traditions seriously, and the film establishes early that when she's crossed, she becomes violent, favoring blunt force over anything subtle as she works her way through the people who wronged her. Christmas is a time to gather family, living or dead, and Unholy Night takes that sentiment and turns it into the engine of its entire back half, as the neighborhood fills up with undead relatives determined to see the holiday done properly, one way or another. As it turns out, Nona isn't the only deceased relative with an opinion about how this Christmas should go, and soon enough other departed family members start showing up around the neighborhood with the same unfinished business. The curse bringing them back is referred to as Ritornate, and it seems to activate whenever a relative feels disrespected, slighted, or otherwise wronged by the family they left behind, which for this particular family is an awfully low bar to clear.

The gore in Unholy Night earns a favorable comparison to the splattery excess of the Evil Dead series, trading chainsaws for candy canes, rolling pins, and whatever else happens to be within reach at the dinner table. There's plenty of bludgeoning to go around, and the film treats it with the same gleeful abandon Raimi brought to his own holidays of carnage, minus the tree. Between the two, the film clearly knows which ingredient carries more weight, and it keeps circling back to the bludgeoning whenever the pacing threatens to lag. Where things get a little tangled is in the film's B-plot romance, which finds Gino reconnecting with an ex amid the chaos, and while that thread makes sense as part of the overall story, it has a habit of popping up at strange, awkward moments to remind the audience of the couple's past. It's less that the subplot doesn't belong and more that its timing occasionally feels like showing up to Christmas dinner a day early, standing around while everyone else is still setting the table. Even so, the romance never derails the movie so much as it politely interrupts it every so often before the zombies mercifully return to reclaim the spotlight.

 

Despite that uneven subplot, Unholy Night remains a thoroughly enjoyable holiday horror-comedy with plenty of presents to unwrap, from its committed cast to its practical gore to its genuine understanding of what makes family gatherings simultaneously comforting and completely exhausting. Balancing horror and comedy in equal measure is notoriously hard to pull off, since leaning too far in either direction tends to leave one half of the audience unsatisfied, but Gabriele manages to keep both stockings full without letting one overflow at the other's expense. For a festival premiere in the middle of summer, it's a strange and delightful thing to walk out of a theater craving panettone, and I suspect plenty of horror fans will be tucking this one into their own stockings come December.

Holiday traditions aren't the only things that get messy. EVIL DEAD BURN delivers another gleeful barrage of practical carnage (and has a killer granny), proving that few things are more satisfying than horror willing to get its hands dirty.