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Ghosts at the Hearth: THE OCCUPANT OF A ROOM and the Lost Tradition of Christmas Haunting

 

For most people, Christmas conjures warmth: fireplaces, family gatherings, soft lights, and cinnamon-scented nostalgia. But long before Santa Claus became the reigning spirit of December, the holiday belonged to ghosts. Victorian England treated winter not as a season of cheer but as a threshold...a moment when the world grew dark early, the wind moaned through the eaves, and the veil between the living and the dead thinned like ice on a pond. It’s no coincidence that Dickens cemented the modern Christmas ghost story with A Christmas Carol (1843), a supernatural morality tale delivered not in October but on Christmas Eve. For decades afterward, British families gathered around the fire to swap stories of specters and unfinished business, a practice that lasted well into the twentieth century. Though this tradition has faded in America, filmmakers and writers continue to resurrect it, reminding us that winter was always meant to be haunted. Kier-La Janisse’s adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Occupant of the Room” emerges as a beautifully somber revival of this forgotten custom, stitching modern atmospheric filmmaking to a deeply rooted seasonal ritual.

 

Blackwood’s original story, first published in 1909, unfolds as a quiet nightmare: a solitary traveler (Don McKellar) arrives at a remote mountain lodge, intending to rest before a long journey. The innkeeper offers a room that has recently become vacant, and from the moment the protagonist crosses the threshold, something feels wrong. The traveler discovers hints that the former occupant (a woman whose presence lingers in the room’s arrangement, its smells, its miraculously preserved atmosphere) may not have truly departed. Blackwood constructs dread not from violent apparitions or sudden shocks but from emotional residue: the horror of entering a space still saturated with the despair of the dead. His ghost is not an active attacker but a presence, heavy and sorrowful, pulling the living into its orbit. It’s a perfect Christmas ghost story because it is quiet, melancholy, and deeply concerned with the psychic weight of the past.

 

Janisse’s short film adaptation embraces this mood while heightening the emotional clarity of the original tale. Set predominantly in a single room, her OCCUPANT mirrors Blackwood’s claustrophobic atmosphere but adds texture through cinematography and performance. The production design recreates the suffocating stillness of an untouched spacea: bed sheets faintly rumpled, acurtains drawn just enough to let in the bleak, wintery light. The camera lingers on objects the way memory lingers on unfinished conversations, emphasizing the idea that rooms can retain emotional fingerprints. Janisse leans into the psychological instability of isolation, using subtle shifts in framing and light to suggest a presence pressing in on the protagonist’s mind. Her ghost is barely glimpsed and rarely defined, which makes the haunting feel more intimate and more internal. A painting on the wall deepens the unease: at first it shows a woman posed quietly in the foreground, as if she were merely out of sight elsewhere in the inn, but later her figure vanishes entirely, leaving behind an empty landscape that feels scraped clean of her presence. That shift (subtle yet alarming) makes the room feel steeped in whatever fate befell her, as though the walls have absorbed her final moments. Rather than jump scares, the horror emerges from the slow realization that the protagonist has become the next link in a chain of emotional inheritance as he is another soul pulled into a room whose story refuses to end.

 

One of the most compelling aspects of Janisse’s film is how it explicitly aligns itself with the tradition of Christmas ghost stories, a subject she explored in her documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. In that film, she remarks on the long-standing connection between the winter solstice and the supernatural: the dark months were believed to be times when the dead visited, when spirits wandered, and when fireside tales reminded communities of mortality, morality, and mystery. Her adaptation of “The Occupant of the Room” feels like a direct extension of that idea as she presents a curated return to the kinds of narratives once shared as families gathered indoors against the cold. Janisse doesn’t modernize the story with flashy effects or rapid pacing; she honors its slowness, its echoing stillness, its lingering dread. By doing so, she positions the short not just as an adaptation of Blackwood, but as a deliberate act of cultural memory, a way of re-inviting ghosts back into the holiday season where they once belonged.

 

 

The tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas may feel unusual in a culture now dominated by twinkling lights and consumer frenzy, but historically, it was one of the most beloved winter entertainments. Dickens himself wrote several seasonal ghost tales beyond A Christmas Carol, and the BBC’s iconic “A Ghost Story for Christmas” broadcasts in the 1970s cemented the practice in British media. These televised adaptations of M.R. James and other supernatural authors became a yearly ritual, blending literary sophistication with visceral eeriness. What makes these stories distinctly “Christmas” isn’t the presence of holiday decor but the presence of winter itself: the long nights, the fog-shrouded landscapes, the domestic interiors where the uncanny seeps in. Janisse’s short taps directly into that lineage. It isn’t interested in holiday iconography, but it’s interested in winter as a liminal season, when loneliness grows sharper and the mind becomes fertile ground for spirits. Watching The Occupant of the Room feels like participating in the very tradition Janisse describes: sitting quietly, letting the cold settle against the windows, listening to a story that reminds you that human fears are oldest in the months with the least sunlight.

 

Janisse’s film also resonates because it emphasizes how ghosts in Christmas tales are rarely malicious for cruelty’s sake. Instead, they are mournful, unresolved, or seeking connection. In Blackwood’s story, the ghost is defined by sorrow and entrapment, not aggression, and Janisse preserves this emotional nuance in the adaptation. The haunting becomes a mirror of the protagonist’s internal landscape: his own isolation, his own vulnerability, his own capacity for emotional collapse. Christmas ghost stories were always less about fear than about reflection as they encouraged audiences to confront the things left unsaid, the regrets that linger, and the memories that cling to certain rooms no matter how much time passes. The ghost becomes a symbol of unfinished emotional business, and winter becomes the season in which we confront it. Janisse’s OCCUPANT understands this deeply. Her ghost is not a threat, but it is a shadow of longing and grief, a presence that reveals what happens when solitude becomes unbearable.

 

In resurrecting Blackwood’s tale for a contemporary audience, Janisse offers more than a simple adaptation: she offers an invitation to revive a tradition nearly lost. THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM is a reminder that Christmas once belonged to ghosts, to stories whispered in dim light, to the idea that winter is a time for reckoning with what haunts us. Dickens knew this. Victorian families knew this. And through Janisse’s work, we are reminded again. Ghost stories are not an interruption of holiday joy, but they are a counterbalance to it, acknowledging that joy and sorrow share the same threshold. As winter deepens and the nights grow longest, THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM encourages us to embrace the haunting, to listen closely to the stories that linger in the quiet, and to remember that Christmas has always been a season for spirits (both literal and emotional) to return.

 

THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM is now streaming on Shudder. 

 

Looking for more 25 Slays of Winter? Read about why Winter is scary or about the film Rare Exports.