For many people, a familiar pastime in the weeks leading up to major winter holidays is gathering with family members and watching holiday movies, be they in a theater or on television. During the month of December, the Falls Free Press will return to our tradition of “The 12 Films of Christmas,” focusing on new holiday movies for the year 2024—a year that can still do with plenty of peace and joy. We will review each film, whether naughty or nice, and let you know where to watch.
For the four years I’ve reviewed holiday movies for the Falls Free Press, I have insisted on including an animated and/or family film, and one from the horror genre in order to provide options from an array of different styles. For horror, such films have included Silent Night, Christmas Bloody Christmas, and Toys of Terror. There are times when artistic filmmaking makes a holiday horror an interesting watch, but for 2024, Shudder’s A Creature was Stirring falls flat when it comes to composing a sensible story.
Chrissy Metz stars as Faith, a nurse taking care of her daughter, Charm (Annalise Basso), who suffers from a mysterious unnamed illness. While trapped inside during a massive whiteout at Christmastime, the duo are faced with a break-in by a brother and sister caught in the storm while hiking. The siblings are initially treated by an attack from Faith, however they are soon, though still suspectedly, welcomed into the home until it’s safe to venture outside. This is understandable based on her caring demeanor toward her sick daughter who has previously been seen magically racing around her bedroom under a blanket and angrily putting on full-face headgear and frothing at the mouth. It seems her unstable condition began when she entered a porcupine enclosure at the zoo and was attacked as a child.
The premise of a “mysterious porcupine disease,” which may or may not transform her into a giant quilled monster, makes as little sense as any other nuclear monster movie, especially when porcupines are normally non-aggressive creatures unless attacked. The monster is even more confusing though, when halfway through the film we encounter what is possibly a different, larger creature that communicates with the brother. The major question exists throughout the movie however, of whether the monster actually exists. It is obvious that Charm may very well never have been sick and her constant nursing is merely munchausen syndrome put on by her mother.
When the film begins, the decorations and music inside the home relay that this is a Christmas tale, however once the break-in occurs, there is too much happening concurrently that it’s far too easy to get lost, let alone remember when this is meant to take place. The end of the movie introduces a third plotline that twists the story further, providing a new story that should have started the tale, if not simply to hide what we know about Faith, history that only helps prevent the movie from making any more sense when the Nebraska winter suddenly looks like Florida summer and the only character we see is Faith.
If the story was organized differently it might have made a really excellent holiday film. Sadly, barely one-third of A Creature was Stirring is worth digging into.
A Creature was Stirring is available to stream on Shudder and AMC+.
