Kier-La Janisse Returns With The Occupant of the Room, the New Winter Ghost Story for Shudder’s The Haunted Season

Shudder unveils the next chilling chapter of The Haunted Season with The Occupant of the Room.

Kier-La Janisse Returns to Shudder With a New Winter Ghost Story in The Haunted Season

Kier-La Janisse is keeping the Christmas chill alive—and we don’t mean the weather. Shudder has announced the next entry in The Haunted Season, the anthology series curated by the renowned author and filmmaker behind Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. The new film, The Occupant of the Room, arrives this December, continuing the tradition of winter ghost stories the way they were meant to be told: late at night, surrounded by shadows, with something lurking just beyond the firelight.

Based on the classic Algernon Blackwood tale, The Occupant of the Room follows a schoolteacher who shows up late at night at a hotel tucked deep in the Alps—without a reservation, without a plan, and with nowhere else to go. Left with only one option, he accepts the room belonging to a mysteriously absent guest. What unfolds is a long, sleepless descent into uncanny terror: disembodied sounds, strange movements in the dark, and the increasing suspicion that the room itself remembers the person who vanished before him.

Janisse, one of the most essential voices in contemporary horror scholarship and filmmaking, leans into the atmospheric demands of winter tales—those ghost stories that aren’t loud, but heavy, creeping, and meant to be whispered. With The Occupant of the Room becoming the second film in The Haunted Season, Shudder appears committed to giving horror fans exactly what they’ve been craving: classy, unnerving, literate hauntings that echo the old BBC Christmas Ghost Story tradition while introducing fresh blood to the form.

The series kicked off with To Fire You Come At Last in 2024 (currently streaming on Shudder), and this new installment looks ready to double down on dusky folklore vibes, old-world unease, and the unresolved grief that Blackwood specialized in. Each December, Shudder will drop a new chapter in the anthology, creating an annual ritual for horror fans looking to replace holiday cheer with holiday fear.

If you’re tired of Hallmark movies and want something with frostbitten dread instead, The Haunted Season is already shaping up to be one of the most exciting new yuletide horror traditions.

More coverage soon from Horror Movies Uncut.