Christmas Eve Gets a Body Count

Read Time:6 Minute, 19 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Unholy Night
–

Genre: Horror, Comedy
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 34m
Director(s): Michael Gabriele
Writer(s): Michael Gabriele
Cast: Marc Bendavid, Shailene Garnett, Jacqueline Robbins, Toni Ellwand, Ron Lea, Cristina Rosato, Olivier Renaud, Celia Owen, Ellen David, Frank Spadone, Al Sapienza
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Fantasia Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: Family holidays already come with ghosts; some come in the form of memories, some in the form of grudges, and some are just relatives who never really stopped telling everyone else how to live. UNHOLY NIGHT takes that idea and gives it teeth, turning an Italian Christmas Eve celebration into a blood-soaked reunion where the dead don’t just haunt the room; they come back with a grudge to solve.

Michael Gabriele’s feature debut offers up the kind of premise that sounds built for a midnight showing: Gino’s traditional family Christmas Eve is interrupted when his long-dead grandmother returns from the grave and begins a murderous rampage. That alone would be enough for a seasonal horror-comedy, but the more interesting thing is what happens around the carnage. Gino reconnects with his ex, Rene, while dead relatives start appearing across the neighborhood, turning a family gathering into a survival test with old wounds, unfinished business, and cultural pressure all crashing into the chaos.

The best version of UNHOLY NIGHT is right there in its title. This isn’t just Christmas, but scary. It’s Christmas as a pressure cooker, the kind of night where love, guilt, obligation, food, memory, and resentment all share the same table. Horror-comedy lives or dies on whether the joke and the threat belong to the same world, and this film has a concept that connects both. A grandmother returning from the dead is ridiculous. A grandmother returning from the dead, still somehow controlling the room, is painfully believable.

Gino, played by Marc Bendavid, is without question the film’s emotional center, not just because of the panic of trying to survive. The story isn’t only about escaping the undead. It’s about escaping the version of yourself your family keeps insisting you should be. That gives the movie a stronger foundation than a simple parade of holiday kills. When ancestral pressure becomes literal, the film has room to be funny and personal without needing to choose only one lane.

That’s also where Shailene Garnett’s Rene becomes even more important. Bringing an ex back into the chaos adds another level of tension to the story. Gino isn’t just fighting off apparitions; he’s being forced to confront old choices in front of a family history that refuses to stay buried. Horror has always worked when the monsters externalize the argument that everyone was already avoiding, and UNHOLY NIGHT seems to understand that family can be both a comfort and a trap. The dead relatives are dangerous because they’re undead, yes, but also because they represent expectations that never stopped following the living.

The supporting cast gives UNHOLY NIGHT a lot of its shape. Jacqueline Robbins makes Nonna Pina the wild card she needs to be, playing the role with enough bite to be terrifying, hilarious, or both from scene to scene. Toni Ellwand, Ron Lea, Cristina Rosato, Olivier Renaud, Celia Owen, Ellen David, Frank Spadone, and Al Sapienza help build a family structure that feels messy in ways the movie understands. Horror-comedy benefits from faces and personalities that register, and this ensemble gives the Christmas gathering a sense of history before everything starts going completely wrong. Once the plot starts, the crowded family setting becomes a pressure cooker of overlapping panic, resentment, shouting, bloodshed, and people trying to process the impossible while still somehow arguing like relatives at dinner.

Gabriele’s background in short-form horror shows in the film’s punchier stretches. The movie understands escalation, quick turns, and the value of not waiting too long before pushing a scene into chaos. At 94 minutes, UNHOLY NIGHT also knows better than to drag out a premise that works best when it keeps tightening around its characters. There are moments where the tempo wobbles a little and the film brushes against repetition, especially when scenes settle into screaming, stabbing, and frantic regrouping. Even then, the energy rarely drops far enough to lose the film’s grip.

The director’s interest in immigrant family dynamics and inherited expectations gives UNHOLY NIGHT a deeper-than-expected exploration. The dead coming back isn’t just a supernatural experience; it becomes a blunt, funny, violent image for the way family history keeps making demands long after anyone wants to admit it. That gives the film more to work with than a seasonal splatter. The pressure of tradition, especially inside a holiday built around ritual, food, faith, and obligation, feels suffocating before anyone even rises from the grave. Once they do, the movie turns that emotional pressure into something physical, bloody, and inescapable.

The most encouraging part is that the premise doesn’t feel random. The horror comes from the family setting. The comedy grows from that same place. The holiday isn’t just a backdrop; it’s the reason everyone is trapped together, the reason old roles resurface, and the reason the dead returning feels like an extreme version of something familiar. Anyone who has survived a tense family Christmas understands the basic horror of being stuck in a room where everyone has an opinion about your life. UNHOLY NIGHT simply takes that feeling, adds corpses, and lets the resentment spill out with the blood.

UNHOLY NIGHT has personality, timing, and enough bite to keep the bloodshed from feeling empty. Gabriele carries much of the confidence from his short-film work into a feature-length adventure, even if a few scenes could have used a little more variety. The result is a scrappy, crowd-pleasing debut with enough cultural specificity to stand apart from more generic Christmas carnage.

UNHOLY NIGHT works best as a horror-comedy with a sharp seasonal identity and enough personal fuel to make the mayhem matter. Christmas may be about family, but this one argues that sometimes the only thing scarier than the relatives who show up is the ones who refuse to stay dead.

Please visit https://linktr.ee/overlyhonestr for more reviews.

You can follow me on Letterboxd, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. My social media accounts can also be found on most platforms by searching for 'Overly Honest Reviews'.

I’m always happy to hear from my readers; please don't hesitate to say hello or send me any questions about movies.

[photo courtesy of CLUB RED PRODUCTIONS, SHUT UP & COLOUR PICTURES, BLUE FINCH FILMS RELEASING]

DISCLAIMER:
At Overly Honest Movie Reviews, we value honesty and transparency. Occasionally, we receive complimentary items for review, including DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, Vinyl Records, Books, and more. We assure you that these arrangements do not influence our reviews, as we are committed to providing unbiased and sincere evaluations. We aim to help you make informed entertainment choices regardless of our relationship with distributors or producers.

Amazon Affiliate Links:
Additionally, this site contains Amazon affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, we may receive a commission. This affiliate arrangement does not affect our commitment to honest reviews and helps support our site. We appreciate your trust and support as you navigate these links.