Reddit reviews The House on Haunted Hollow

tl;dr ... Most holidays are a single-day event with narrow and well-defined cultural expectations that don't include going to see a movie, whereas Halloween and Christmas are more like season-long celebrations based around broad, fictional ideas that loan themselves to new interpretations and reruns of favorite stories alike.

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I think that one key difference between Christmas and Halloween and other holidays is that Christmas and Halloween aren't really individual holidays ... they are entire holiday seasons.

Think about it. Halloween is pretty much the entire month of October. People put up house decorations. They buy candy. The entire month is spent building up to the actual holiday.

And the holiday itself? Because it represents "everything spooky" to our culture, it loans itself to a variety of different stories. Any vampire, ghost, demon, possessed child, or serial killer can be easily marketed during the entire month of October.

I recently self-published my first children's book. Its a Halloween story, and the artist and I were busy taking pre-orders for it and approaching book sellers and doing marketing from September onward.

And because this story is seasonally relevant, there's a chance that we'll be able to drum up sales every single year. These aren't strategies the artist and I thought about when we set out to create a children's book, but they've certainly been good lessons to learn.

Thanksgiving, in contrast, is a single day. It's part of the nebulously defined "holiday season," falling between the big Halloween event and the Christmas build-up. I mean, let's be honest ... Christmas sales and programs are already playing well before Thanksgiving takes place.

So culturally, Thanksgiving is less of a season and more of a simple holiday.

Additionally, there's not much mystical or magical about the holiday that can open itself up to stories. We understand the very real history about Thanksgiving and we tend to whitewash/ignore it in favor of giving thanks that we could spend $500 on a plane ticket to go home to ignore our relatives in favor of stuffing our faces and watching football games.

Which leads to another interesting point ... we already have pre-established traditions for Thanksgiving. Those pre-established traditions don't leave a lot of time

Check out this list of best movies opening on Thanksgiving. Some of these movies are explicitly Christmas movies. And some, like Frozen, are definitely geared towards the winter/Christmas spirit.

Now [check out this list of best movie openings, period]. Frozen, the #1 Thanksgiving release, is #141 on the all-time releases. People are busy during Thanksgiving. Busy with family. With shopping for Christmas. With the aforementioned feasting and football.

So even if a Thanksgiving movie were to be released and do well critically and commercially -- like, say, Planes, Trains and Automobiles -- there simply isn't a big chance that it will become strongly associated with that holiday. There isn't a big "Thanksgiving window" where people will be interested in tuning in to watch a 30 year-old movie instead of the latest episode of Scandal or the MNF game of the week.

Same with a holiday like Easter. Or Independence Day. Or Memorial Day. These are all individual days that don't have an entire season dedicated to them. They are all based on historical and/or religious events that have a limited number of imaginative stories to be told. Tell a story about an Easter Bear and people will look at you like you're crazy because we have a very set canon for what Easter is about and the limits of how we celebrate it.

Tell a story about a Memorial Day Bunny and you're going to get a lot of pissed off military veterans.

On Christmas, however, anything can happen. Opening presents is associated with wishes coming true, with magic happening. So why not a snowman that comes to life? Why not have George Bailey saved by an angel? Why not invent a Grinch to tell cautionary tale about materialism? Why not create a reindeer with a red nose for marketing? Why not penguins and polar bears drinking Coca Cola?

There's simply a much broader idea base from which you can tell your story.

And that answers the question about Jewish holidays as well ... they simply have a very limited appeal to a very limited audience that is already engaged in cultural activities on those days. Why make a movie for five people who aren't going to be going to movies on that day?

I think that Valentine's Day, however, is its own unique holiday for the film industry. People explicitly go on dates to the movies on this day. So there is a strong market for romantic movies on this day. They don't all explicitly deal with Valentine's Day, ostensibly for the lack of "magic" stories that Halloween and Christmas have. After all, there's just no basis in our culture for wishes coming true or shared cultural experiences on Valentine's day. No trick-or-treating or gift-giving or sledding. If you're lucky, you get flowers and a date.

So Valentine's day gets movies programmed for it, just not movies written about it.

Ultimately, I think that it's a good idea to try to write a script for a Christmas or Halloween movie. It's kind of like getting to work with an IP that has an established fan base, and something that could potentially make your idea more marketable.

Writing for an under-served holiday may be tricky, but as ID4 and Groundhog Day show us, it can also be a great way to market a clever idea. I mean, ID4 would have been a great sci-fi movie no matter what. But attaching it to the holiday just leveled up the camp and awesomeness and gave it instant name recognition and "event" status. And Groundhog Day would have been a fine comedy even if Phil had been a newsman covering a county fair in the boondocks. Having the movie take place on Groundhog Day, however, gave it an extra bit of charm and an identifiable marketing strategy.

Anyway, that's a really long rant, but I hope it helps!