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SYFY WIRE Horror

This 2017 Home Invasion Chiller Is an Underrated Christmas Horror Flick

This month, we're heading off the beaten path of Christmas horror with Lake Alice.

By Matthew Jackson
A ski masked man holds a video recorder in Lake Alice (2017)

Welcome to Hidden Horrors of Peacock, a monthly column spotlighting off-the-beaten-path scary movies available to watch right now on NBCUniversal's streaming service. From cult classics to forgotten sequels to indie gems you've maybe never heard of, we've got you covered.  

It's the holiday season, which means that horror fans are on the hunt for seasonal chillers that they can watch by the tree with a mug of cocoa in hand.

Christmas and horror have gone hand in hand for centuries, but ever since Charles Dickens decided to turn his Christmas Carol into a very effective ghost story, the holiday and the genre have been truly inseparable. That means there are a lot of choices out there in the Christmas horror department, with more coming every year, and while you might have seen a lot of them, you probably haven't seen them all.

Which brings us to Lake Alice, streaming now on Peacock. Released in 2017, this holiday horror film is stripped down, straightforward, and produced with an indie spirit that makes it both charming and sometimes alarmingly real. It's not one of the marquee Christmas horror films, and it never reaches the heights of Black Christmas or Silent Night, Deadly Night, but the atmosphere of discomfort and fear it cultivates, all around a Christmas tree, is truly impressive.

Why Lake Alice Is a Great Horror Flick for the Holiday Season

The title, Lake Alice, refers to the lake where the close-knit Thomas family –– father Greg (Peter O'Brien), mother Natalie (Laura Niemi), and daughter Sarah (Caroline Tudor) –– has an idyllic cabin. They visit each year to celebrate the holidays together, and this year Sarah has augmented their plans by inviting her boyfriend, Ryan (Brad Schmidt), who's meeting Greg and Natalie for the first time and celebrating Christmas in a strange place. There's a little bit of well-meaning tension in the air right from the start.

But it gets weirder when the Thomas clan arrives in town. Greg is repeatedly hassled by the local cops for what seems like no good reason, Ryan is upset when Caroline runs into an ex-boyfriend, and nosy neighbors are always dropping in with unexpected gifts and offers of firewood for the snowy nights that are about to blow in. Some of these encounters go smoothly, others less so, but writer Stevie Jane Miller's script and director Ben Milliken's pacing lets you know immediately that something is just... off.

What's always fascinating about these situations is the way horror films treat the dissonance of experience between character and audience. The characters, of course, don't realize they're in a horror movie. They think they're having their usual Christmas get-together and there are just one too many interruptions. The audience, in contrast, knows that it's watching a horror film, knows that something is lurking just around the corner prepared to strike. The thing we the audience and the characters share is that we don't know when or how. With its limited budget and locations, Lake Alice keeps everyone constantly on their toes, looking for the solution to the mystery, and for the first outbreak of bloodshed.

The sense of palpable unease the film creates, all building to a satisfying climax that both makes sense and gets especially brutal, is accented by the decision to set the film at Christmas. This could have just been a family vacation movie, taking place in any season, but the holiday flair of Lake Alice adds yet another layer of strangeness and dread. There's so much coziness and cheer in the house, so much closeness, that in the brighter moments it feels like the opposite of isolation. It feels like insulation from the world around the Thomas family, a chance for them to shut everything else out. Then the horror kicks in, and it becomes clear that their seclusion, and their deliberate holiday escape, could be the thing that dooms them. It's a very well-considered way to do a Christmas horror film, and it makes Lake Alice worthy of adding to your holiday horror rotation this year.

Lake Alice is now streaming on Peacock.

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