A Cold Season Review: Blood on the Snow and a Santa in Shades

A Cold Season | Christian Jude Grillo | 2026 | 80 min | Not rated |

A Cold Season is the third feature from writer and director Christian Jude Grillo, a Christmas horror shot in a real Pennsylvania winter. This A Cold Season review finds a small, cold and often clever film about a lonely man and the thing in a Santa suit that lives inside his head. It is rough in places and it shows its budget. Even so, it has more on its mind than most of the festive killers that have come through our horror movie reviews at Ginger Nuts of Horror. Here is why it earns three and a half stars, and where it slips on the ice.

A Cold Season swaps the killer Santa for something sadder: a lonely man, a red suit he cannot shake off, and a winter that never stops closing in. A thin world around him holds it back, but Grillo’s grip on the cold is sure, and it stays with you.

A Cold Season Review: The Loneliest Man in Pennsylvania

Sunglasses. Of all the things to put on a Santa, Christian Jude Grillo hands his one a pair of shades, and it is the smartest, nastiest choice in A Cold Season. Father Christmas is meant to see you when you are sleeping. This one hides his eyes.

That small touch tells you most of what you need to know about the film. Grillo is not here to give you a jolly killer with a sack full of gags. He is here to sit you down next to a man called Jacob White, played by Andrew Hunsicker, and make you spend Christmas with him. It is not a fun Christmas. It is a long, quiet, frozen one, and somebody keeps ending up dead.

The film starts near the end. We meet Jacob at what looks like a police station, telling his side of things, and the story runs back from there. So you know from the first minutes that this ends badly. The question is not what happened. The question is whether the man telling you about it has any idea himself.

I like that trick a lot. It turns a simple plot into a puzzle about trust. Every warm moment, every bit of routine, every Christmas light comes with a little voice asking if any of it went the way Jacob says it did.

What Watching It Feels Like

A Cold Season runs for about 80 minutes, and it uses them like a man walking home through deep snow. Slow. Steady. Head down. There are no big set pieces and no rush. The film builds its dread out of routine: the drive, the house, the lights, the next day, the same again. You start to feel how small Jacob’s life is, and then you start to feel what he is keeping inside it.

Grillo has said he wanted winter to feel like a character, and that is the part of the film that works best. It was shot in a real Pennsylvania winter, with real snow, mountain roads and huge wind turbines turning over empty ground. None of it is a set. You can almost feel the cold through the screen. The turbines are a great find, too: tall, white, slow and blank, like something keeping watch that will never step in.

Christmas itself gets the same treatment. The lights and the decorations look warm at first. Then, bit by bit, they stop looking like comfort and start looking like a disguise. A tree in a window is meant to say home. Here it can just as easily say nobody is coming.

Is A Cold Season Scary?

Not in the way a lot of people will expect. If you want jump scares, you will be waiting a while. The killings are played low and flat, almost matter of fact, and that is far more upsetting than a big gory show would be. The horror is not in the blade. It is in how normal it all becomes for Jacob, and how quickly you get used to it too.

There is a fair warning to give here. Mild spoiler: the film puts an animal’s suffering on screen and returns to it in flashback, and it does not look away from a child’s death either. These are not cheap shocks. They feed straight into Jacob’s guilt and grief. But they are hard to sit through, and some viewers will want to know before they press play.

How Grillo Builds It

Grillo did almost everything on this one. He wrote it, directed it, shot it, cut it and wrote the music. That is a lot of hats for one man, and you can see both sides of it on screen.

The good side first. The film has one tone and holds it. The cold blue of the snow, the hush of the edit and the music all pull in the same direction, because they all came from the same head. Nothing feels like it was made by committee.

He also knows how to make a little go a long way. One scene is lit only by the lights of a police car parked nearby, red and blue washing over the snow and the faces. It is cheap to do and it looks great. That is real craft, the kind you learn when you have no money and plenty of ideas.

Now the other side. This is a low budget film and it does not hide it. Some of the picture is rough. The town around Jacob feels thin, as if only a handful of people live there and most of them are just passing through his story. In a film about how alone he is, you could argue that is the point. I think it is partly the point and partly the money, and the money shows more than it should.

Andrew Hunsicker Carries the Weight

The whole thing sits on Andrew Hunsicker, who also produced the film, and he is up to it. He plays Jacob as a man who has worked very hard at seeming fine. He is polite. He is tidy. He is very still. You can see the effort it takes, and that effort is where the dread lives.

He also has to carry the double, the Santa figure who keeps pushing Jacob further. The film never says for sure what that figure is. It might be real. It might be a breakdown. It might be a story Jacob has built so he has somewhere else to put the blame. Hunsicker keeps all three doors open, and that is not easy.

Julie Chapin brings real warmth as Jacob’s older neighbour, and her scenes are some of the best in the film because they show what Jacob could still have. Paul Monte Jr. and Elijah Santoro, who plays Officer Rodney Daniels, fill out the rest of the world. They do fine work with what they are given, but they are given little. This is my main complaint. Jacob is drawn in full. Almost everyone around him is a sketch, and a richer town would have made his isolation bite harder.

What It Is Really About

Under the snow, A Cold Season is about grief, guilt and loneliness, and about the stories people tell themselves when the truth is too heavy. Christmas is the perfect place for that. It is the time of year when everyone is meant to be together. If you are alone, it is the loudest silence there is.

The Santa double is the cleverest idea in the film. Santa is the one man who knows who has been bad. Making him the voice that drives Jacob on is a sharp twist. It turns the figure of judgement into the figure of permission. Is Jacob the killer, or is the suit? The film knows that is a false choice, and it lets you feel how badly Jacob wants it to be a real one.

There are moments where the film says this a bit too plainly, where the double spells out what the pictures had already told us. Those beats take some of the frost off. Grillo is at his best when he trusts the silence.

Where Grillo Is Heading

A Cold Season is the third feature that Grillo and Hunsicker have made together through Intruder Films in just over two years. Before it came Intruder, a science fiction horror for which they built a practical spaceship set by hand, and Neighbor, a psychological thriller. Three features in that time is going some for any film maker, never mind one who does half the jobs himself.

What stands out is the turn inward. Intruder went up into space. A Cold Season stays in one man’s head. The do-it-yourself spirit is the same, and it makes sense for someone who came up through punk rock and death metal and counts The Toxic Avenger and High Tension among his touchstones. But the ambition has changed shape. This is a smaller film than Intruder in scale and a bigger one in what it is reaching for. It feels like Grillo finding where his real interests lie.

Where It Sits in Christmas Horror

Christmas horror has a long shelf. Black Christmas (1974) set the bar for festive dread. Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) gave us the killer in the red suit, and the recent reboot, which earned a creepy, clever review from us last Christmas, showed there is still life in that idea.

A Cold Season’s nearest cousin, though, is Christmas Evil (1980), Lewis Jackson’s story of a lonely man who wraps himself up in Santa until there is nothing else left. Both films care more about the man than the body count. You could also put it on a shelf with Maniac (1980) for the way it keeps you locked inside a killer’s world and makes you share his days.

What sets Grillo’s film apart is that sly idea of the double, and the way it uses a real winter as its biggest special effect. It never plays the suit for big laughs. It is not trying to be the next festive slasher franchise. It is a cold little character study with blood on the snow, and in a corner of horror stuffed with gimmicks, that makes it worth seeking out.

It is not perfect. The world is thin, the budget shows, and now and then the film explains when it should just let us shiver. But it knows exactly what it wants to be, and most of the time it gets there.

Most Christmas killers want you to look at the suit. Grillo wants you to look at the man inside it, and he makes very sure you never see his eyes.

The Verdict: Is A Cold Season Worth Watching?