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The Christmas season is a special time for many. A chance for friends to gather and spread cheer, or clans to gather in the warm glow of familial love. Sometimes, however, the warm glow cools down, love turns to hate, and the carving knife is put to more insidious uses. Welcome to ABC’s Home for the Holidays (1972), a fun murder mystery filled with proto-slasher goodness.

Originally broadcast November 28th as part of the ABC Tuesday Movie of the Week, Home for the Holidays was up against CBS’s Hawaii Five-o and NBC’s The Bold Ones: The New Doctors (whatever that was) and had a solid showing, as ABC often did with this particular brand. However, you won’t find any Snoopies or undernourished trees in this Holiday special.

Let’s open our eggnog soaked TV Guide and see what’s going on around the tree:

Home For The Holidays (Tuesday,...

Throughout the month of December, we will be highlighting a film a day that has some tie into the holiday somehow. Some titles will be obvious, others won’t be. Some films will be good and, again, others won’t be. However, we think all titles are worth your time whether to give you chills inside your home or to make you drink more eggnog until you puke laughing.

On Christmas Eve four daughters are summoned to the country home of their estranged father (Walter Brennan). He believes his new wife is slowly poisoning him. And he has one request: kill her before she kills him! A raging storm cuts the phone line and washes out the roads, not to mention a poncho wearing pitchfork wielding psycho running around. Will anyone survive the holidays?

Home for the Holidays premiered on ABC way back in 1972. And it’s a fun little thriller.

“If a movie makes you happy, for whatever reason, then it’s a good movie.”

—Big E

*******Warning: Review Contains Spoilers*******

By Ernie Magnotta

If there’s one thing I love, it’s 1970s made-for-tv horror films. I remember sitting in front of the television as a kid and watching a plethora of films such as Gargoyles, Bad Ronald, Satan’s School for Girls, Horror at 37,000 Feet, Devil Dog: Hound of Hell, Scream Pretty Peggy, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Moon of the Wolf and The Initiation of Sarah just to name a few. Some of those are better than others, but all were fun.

When I think back, there have been some legendary names associated with small screen horrors. Genre masters John Carpenter (Halloween), Steven Spielberg (Jaws), Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street), Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and Joseph Stefano (Psycho) all took shots at television...

She was so versatile, her biography was titled Woman of a Thousand Faces. A lovely, talented actress and a solid leading lady for three decades, Eleanor Parker was best known as the Baroness in The Sound Of Music. I remember her being terrorized by an army of killer ants opposite Charlton Heston in The Naked Jungle (1954), as the crippled wife of junkie Frank Sinatra in The Man With The Golden Arm (1956) and especially climbing out of a hole with her head shaved in the prototype women’s prison film Caged (1950). After her prime, she did a couple of schlocky roles, most notably The Oscar (1966) and Eye Of The Cat (1969) where she pushed Gayle Hunnicut in her wheelchair into traffic. She worked mostly on television in her later years including the classic 1972 TV movie Home For The Holidays in which Walter Brennan, believing his current wife (Julie Harris) is plotting to murder him,...

Home For The Holidays was recommended to me by the Hysteria Continues Podcast. This is a great little TV movie from 1972 starring a fresh off the Flying Nun Sally Field and the always amazing Walter Brennan in his second to last film role. Eerie choice as the character he plays is a man on his death bed. Story starts with Benjamin Morgan calling his four daughters home for the holidays. Apparently all have very little love for their crass an…...

The man who penned the screenplay for cult thriller Psycho has died at 84. Joseph Stefano, who was a close friend of Psycho director Alfred Hitchcock, was also the co-creator of science-fiction TV series The Outer Limits. The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania native was also a talented pianist and lyricist, who began his career touring in a modern jazz band. His big break as a screenwriter came in the mid-1950s when he penned The Black Orchid, which became a hit film in 1958 starring Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren. He moved to Hollywood in 1960 and started work with Hitchcock on an adaptation of a Robert Bloch novel for the big screen. The project became Psycho. Stefano's other celebrated screenplays have included Eye of the Cat and Home for the Holidays...