As Randy Meeks from the Scream franchise warned his friends, you should always make sure the killer is dead at the end of a horror movie, because he/she always springs back up for one more scare. That's why it's so important for two survivors to finish off a murderous man in a Santa Claus suit in the short film Holiday Fear, but the final act proves to be more difficult than expected for one of the survivors. 

Synopsis: "In the final act of a Christmas slasher film, Bruce attempts to reclaim his manliness and impress the final girl by finishing off the killer."

You can watch Holiday Fear in its entirety below, and to give more insights into the creation of the short horror film, here are director/writer/producer Nicholas Payne Santos' comments on the project:

"At the end of September 2016, I sat down to write a script like no other I'd written before: a feel-good romantic comedy. By Halloween, the screenplay had morphed into a meta-horror-comedy about machismo in film. Not exactly what I set out to write, but a story that spoke to me, nonetheless. As a kid, my friends and I had movie marathons every weekend, renting VHS tapes from the local Blockbuster's horror section. HOLIDAY FEAR picks up at the very end of a typical Slasher movie, where the killer is seemingly dead, but wakes up with a vengeance just as the heroes thought they were safe. The film takes on what it means to be a man in a relationship while poking fun at the genre that I love."

  • Derek Anderson
    About the Author - Derek Anderson

    Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.

    When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.