Former Winnipegger offers up nightmare for Christmas with new horror anthology series

Posted on December 14, 2024 by Peggy

To look at the premiere episode of the anthology series The Haunted Season on the horror streamer Shudder, you would hardly guess that it originated with a former Winnipegger.

The milieu of the first entry, a short film titled To Fire You Come at Last, is thoroughly English, right down to its thick-as-milk-stout class friction.

And if the setting is English, so is the whole premise for the horror-drama anthology, according to Winnipeg-born Kier-La Janisse, the executive director for The Haunted Season — which will showcase different filmmakers from around the world in new instalments arriving annually on Shudder each December for the next five years.

Janisse, speaking by phone from her home on Pender Island in B.C., asserts that the scary story told around Christmas time is a time-honoured tradition in the U.K.

“The BBC series A Ghost Story for Christmas is the primary inspiration, for sure,” said Janisse, referring to a celebrated cult series that initially ran from 1971-78, and was more recently revived by actor-writer-director Mark Gatiss.

To Fire You Come at Last, the first instalment of The Haunted Season, saw its premiere on the Shudder streaming service on Dec. 1, just in time for the holidays.

Written and directed by U.K.-based Sean Hogan, it’s set in the 17th century, centring on a quartet of men tasked with taking a corpse for burial over miles of land deemed to be cursed. As the journey proceeds, the men are increasingly at odds, including the deceased’s aristocratic father Squire Marlow (Mark Carlisle), his ruthless servant Pike (Richard Rowden), the dead man’s best friend Holt (Harry Roebuck) and the malevolent village fool Ransley (James Swanton).

A black-and-white still from a movie shows men in period costumes carrying lanterns and a wodden coffin. — A scene from To Fire You Come at Last, which centres on four men tasked with taking a corpse for burial over miles of land deemed to be cursed. (Severin Films)

The Haunted Season represents a convergence of interests for Janisse, 52, who started her career as a fanzine writer-turned-film festival producer (she helmed Vancouver’s genre fest CineMuerte from 1999 to 2005.)

Her talent for bringing obscure European horrors to North America won her programming gigs at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, and also Winnipeg’s Cinematheque, where she was hired in 2008. She’s also written several books, including an essential look at women and madness in genre film, 2012’s House of Psychotic Women.

But The Haunted Season arrives at the intersection of Janisse’s fascination with folk horror (on display in her monumental 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched) and Christmas horror, which she examined as the editor and contributing writer to the 2017 book Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television.

“In the Yuletide Terror book, we do have a chapter that is specifically addressing the ghost story tradition at Christmas in the U.K.,” Janisse said.

“They have all these ghost stories that will premiere on television at Christmas, but they’re not necessarily about Christmas or set at Christmas or anything like that,” she said. “We had to explain that they’re just part of this overarching tradition of ghost stories commissioned for the Christmas programming by the BBC.”

A woman sits beside a cat in front of a tree with Christmas lights. — Winnipeg-born Kier-La Janisse, pictured here with her cat Zacherley, is the executive producer of The Haunted Season. (Submitted by Kier-La Janisse)

For the past few years, Janisse has worked for Severin Films, an American film production/distribution company specializing in restoring cult films and releasing them in high-definition formats. The company allowed Janisse to direct the three-hour-plus opus Woodlands, when the film started out as a 30-minute DVD extra for a 1971 film titled The Blood on Satan’s Claw.

When it came time to pitch her anthology series, she found the company happily receptive.

Testing that resolve, Janisse will herself direct what is likely to be the next episode for December 2025, which will shoot in Winnipeg this spring.

A black-and-white still from a movie shows a closeup of a man in period costume, including a tri-corner hat. — Mark Carlisle, right, as Squire Marlow in To Fire You Come at Last. Shudder plans to stream new instalments of The Haunted Season each December for the next five years. Janisse will direct next year’s short film, which she plans to shoot in Winnipeg in spring 2025. (Severin Films)

For now, she must stay silent on what the film will be about.

“But it will be all the same people who work on Matthew Rankin’s movies and Guy Maddin movies,” Janisse said. “I figured if anybody knows how to work with a low budget and lean into the artificial, it’s them.”

Usually, when directors talk about taking on their first narrative work, they speak as if it was a culmination of years of training, experience and ambition. Janisse, though, tends to be modest about her abilities.

“I feel like every step of my whole career is like something I’ve stumbled into by accident,” she said. “It was never really a plan to be a filmmaker or a programmer or a producer. There was never ever any real drive to do that.

“I just sort of fell into those roles, because I was in the right place at the right time and had the right ideas at that time.”

To Fire You Come at Last is streaming now on Shudder. Further instalments of The Haunted Season will arrive each December, the streamer says.