Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday

Maybe it is so because the very calendars are against us?

"February 29. Superstition has it that if you are a teenager and have sex on this day, you will be macheted to death by a maniac wearing a makeshift mask made out of a calendar. This superstition is, of course, the basis for the '80s horror movie Leap Year."

— More Information Than You Require

It goes like this: You're at a nice Easter gathering with your family, when suddenly a deranged killer in a bunny mask starts stalking you. On April Fools' Day, that guy you and your friends pulled a rather nasty prank upon is out to get you. On Halloween, the dead rise from their graves and start to terrorize the neighborhood. And on Christmas, The Antichrist decides to be born.

"Oh, for Pete's sake!" you cry; "Couldn't these things happen on any other day, like, I don't know, Tuesday?"

Sorry, slick, Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday.

When the horror happens, it tends to happen on holidays and other special days marked on your calendar for various reasons: Lots of people tend to gather around on those days (usually at a remote location), calendar days make nice titles, and nothing quite says Subverted Innocence like (for example) Santa Claus killing people with an axe.

Also, remember, some days are sacred to pagan/occult religions and so "natural" choices for supernatural events. These days may have had Christian and/or commercial holidays added, or they may just be special to the pagans/witches/Satanists/whoever, still not just Tuesday, even if the hero doesn't know this at first. Granted, if you consider all cultures, faiths and customs, every day on the calendar is bound to be a holiday to someone; this trope only applies when that holiday is specifically referenced in the work.

And of course, Lovecraftian unspeakable horrors don't have any use for the human calendar, so they won't bother to do the timezone math to see where to appear. They only care the stars are right on THEIR calendars and none of these calendars have Tuesday!

Popular trope among horror movies (especially in the Slasher Movie genre), but not necessarily limited to them. In fact, the idea of Christmas as a time for ghost stories dates back to at least the 19th Century,^note Halloween was mainly thought of as a holiday for romance at that point and the Victorians loved to while away the long dark winter nights by swapping scary yarns. It's worth remembering that the best-known 19th Century Christmas story, A Christmas Carol, is also a ghost story.

See also Attack of the Town Festival, Regularly Scheduled Evil, Twisted Christmas, An Ass-Kicking Christmas, Valentine's Day Violence, A Birthday, Not a Break, Died on Their Birthday, Dangerous 16th Birthday, Prom Wrecker, Wedding Smashers, Special Occasions Are Magic, and various holiday episodes. Did I Mention It's Christmas? (or any other holiday) may be in effect for some of these. Contrast But for Me, It Was Tuesday, although the name of that trope might have inspired this one's, as in, the difference between something evil one does every day and the kind reserved for specific days.

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Examples:

All Hallows' Eve / Halloween / Samhain

• While it's more a Black Comedy murder-mystery than an actual horror film, Arsenic and Old Lace takes place on Halloween.
• Most of Blood: The Last Vampire takes place during Halloween, with a notable plot thread centering on a local high-school party. Partly exploited, as the vampires know they'll have an easier time hunting without being noticed on a day like this one.
• Batman: Arkham Knight plays out on Halloween night, and features several horror-themed Rogues Gallery villains (Scarecrow, Man-Bat, Professor Pyg) in greater or lesser roles.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer offers something of a Subversion as the monsters tend to lay low on Halloween because it'd be tacky not to, but like much going on in Sunnydale, good intentions go real bad.
• Referenced in a Missing Trailer Scene in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series:
  Hobbes: You gonna call?
  Calvin: GHOST BUSTERS!
  Hobbes: YOU FOOL! IT'S THEIR BUSIEST NIGHT!
• C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud has a zombie outbreak during Halloween.
• Clownhouse has the young brothers left home alone being menaced by a a group of escaped mental patients dressed like clowns.
• Creepy Town, a game played in Cool Kids Table, takes place over the week leading up to Halloween.
• Cry_Wolf deconstructs the trope. A group of High School Students spread rumours of a serial killer they made up as a practical joke, to prove they're better than the other students. The rumour involves many of the cliches of horror and Urban Legend because they think it'll make it more believable. Unfortunately, this inspires a copycat killer to start killing people for real. At least, that's what you're SUPPOSED to think . . .
• Dark Night of the Scarecrow has a wrongfully accused man being killed and coming back dressed as a scarecrow to seek revenge on Halloween.
• Day Of The Dead takes place over several days including Halloween and the titular holiday
• Dark Walker is set in an abandoned amusement park, where a group of teenage employees get terrorized one Halloween.
• Doctor Who episode "The Halloween Apocalypse", as you might expect from the name, involves an Apocalypse How event called "the Flux" ripping apart most of the universe as the people of Earth celebrate Halloween. The villain, Swarm, lampshades this by mockingly asking the Doctor "Trick or treat?" during one of her visions of him.
• Multiple instances in The Dresden Files. Justified in that the barrier between the spirit and mortal worlds is weakest on Halloween, so all manner of nasty supernatural stuff happens on that day. It also happens to be the main character's birthday.
• Ernest Scared Stupid has the titular character releasing a troll on Halloween.
• FAITH: The Unholy Trinity: The date that the Satanic ritual of the Profane Sabbath, intended to bring forth Hell on Earth, is set to be performed is, of course, October 31st.
• Fallout 4 drives home the point more than any other game in the series that the nuclear apocalypse known as the "Great War" happened in late October, because just about every shell of a house still standing in the Commonwealth has Halloween decorations out.
• Forced Perspectives takes place over the last few days of October, with the climax on Halloween. It's implied that the original architect of the conspiracy deliberately designed it to come to fruition on Halloween, for the symbolism.
• Justified in Ghostwatch, a mockumentary where the BBC put together an investigation into an alleged Haunted House specifically as a Halloween broadcast. Unfortunately, the house turns out to be a lot more haunted than they were ready for.
• Ginger Snaps involves a teen girl infected with lycanthropy during the Halloween season, fully transforming during a costume party.
• Go to Sleep (A Jeff the Killer Rewrite): On October 29th, the day before Jeff is admitted home from the hospital, the doctor Mr. Patterson tells Jeff's family that he may be facing psychological issues from his concussion and booked for Jeff to see a child psychiatrist on the 31st. However, the family convinces him to not have Jeff hospitalized on his favourite holiday, and he returns home on the 30th to celebrate Halloween with his family. Unfortunately, that Halloween night is when Jeff kills his family.
• Grounded for All Eternity: Parris is released on Halloween night, or Samhain as Hell's residents refer to it as. Justified as that's when the veil between dimensions is thinnest.
• The 1988 film Hack-O-Lantern is about a teen manipulated his satanic grandfather into joining performing a human sacrifce.
• Good ol' Michael Myers's preferred day for a killing spree is, of course, Halloween. Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the only film in which he isn't active, is more about ancient Samhain.
• In HalloweeNight A school janitor devises an evil scarecrow to exact revenge on those who have tormented him, but then loses control of his fiendish creation
• In Halloween Night an escape mental patient kills of members of a Halloween party one by one.
• In the Harry Potter series, it just happened to be on Halloween night that Voldemort murdered Harry's parents. In fact, there's generally one major plot event every Halloween that Harry is at school, as well. First year: Troll gets in and wreaks havoc (the title of this chapter is even "Hallowe'en"). Second year: the Chamber is opened and takes its first victim. Third year: Black breaks in and slashes up the Fat Lady's portrait. Fourth year: Harry is entered into the Triwizard Tournament.
  • It's actually played with in regards to the third book. Hermione even points out that they were lucky everyone was at the Great Hall for the feast when Sirius Black attempted to break into the Gryffindor Tower, having assumed he had lost track on time while being on the run. However, with the reveal that Sirius is innocent, Sirius intentionally picked that day because no students would be in the tower, so he could go after Peter Pettigrew and that Lupin would be confined in his office as a werewolf as that year happened to have a full moon that night.
• A Haunting in Venice: On Halloween, mystery writer Ariadne Oliver convinces Poirot to attend a séance at the palazzo of famed opera singer Rowena Drake.
• The Hazing takes place on Halloween and a group of fraternity and sorority pledges have to spend the night in a Haunted House in order to complete their initiation.
• Headless Horseman: A group of college students on their way to a Halloween party are lured into a Town with a Dark Secret to act as sacrifices to the Headless Horseman.
• Hocus Pocus features a ritual where a virgin must light a black candle on the night of Halloween. Whilst it plays THIS trope straight, this is a comedy, and so the zombies, the witches and the aforementioned virgin are not what you'd usually expect.
• House of 1000 Corpses has a group of teen being massacred by hillbillies on Halloween
• House on Haunted Hill (1999) has a group of people being paid to stay overnight in a haunted house on Halloween. Absent, however, in the original House on Haunted Hill (1959).
• Averted but Lampshaded in the horror novel The House On The Borderland, in which the anonymous writer of the journal remarks that if he were making up his account, he surely would have chosen to initiate its supernatural events on Halloween.
• Idle Hands begins with the demonically possessed main characters' hand killing his parents on Halloween.
• In Lady in White, A young boy is locked in a school closet on Halloween and visited by the ghost of a girl who was killed by a friend of Frankie's father.
• The Last Crown: Midnight Horror takes place in and around a pub Halloween party.
• The various retellings of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, like the film Sleepy Hollow (1999) takes place near Halloween, which is fitting because the villain is associated with jack-o-lanterns. The original story does revolve around a "quilting frolic" in autumn, but was written before Halloween had really been popularized as a holiday.
• The Batman story The Long Halloween is a story where the killer strikes over many holidays, but begins on a Halloween and ends on the next one.
• Lovely Assistant (novel), though the bad guys seem to have specifically scheduled their plans for Halloween, so either they're Genre Savvy or they had their own reasons.
• Night of the Demons (1988) and its sequels feature demons released during Halloween at an abandoned funeral home.
• Pet Sematary Two has a young boy resurrect his mother on Halloween
• The Predator, where a kid even goes trick or treating with the title alien's mask.
• Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave has the series zombie toxin being released during a Halloween rave.
• Spider-Man (PS4) has a mission set at a Halloween party, where the villain corrupts several students into rioting.
• Supernatural
  • The pilot episode starts on Halloween.
  • The episode "It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester" features a demon named Samhain who can only be raised from Hell on Samhain.
• Tales of Halloween, a horror/comedy anthology
• Tales of the Dead
• Revealed to be why exactly Medic doesn't grow Demoman another left eye to replace his missing one. In his youth, Tavish DeGroot was tricked by The Bombinomicon into opening it; causing the book to haunt Tavishs' left eye, but even after Merasmus managed to remove the eye from Tavish, Bombinomicon also cursed Tavish's left eyesocket that whenever Medic grew another replacement eye for Demoman "it functions normally until Halloween Night" where the eye transforms into a new Monster that the team inevitably has to fight against. After enduring this nonsense for eight years, Medic decided to simply scoop out the part of Demomans' brain that kept pestering Medic to grow a new eye for him.
• In To Kill a Mockingbird, Bob Ewell's attack on Jem and Scout occurs on Halloween night.
• Trick Or Treat has a ghostly rock star coming back to life near Halloween
• Trick or Treats has a babysitter taking care of a bratty child who's father escapes from a mental asylum
• Trick 'r Treat s an anthology horror film that takes place on the same Halloween featuring things like poison candy, vengeful ghosts, and werewolves.
• In Varsity Blood, a killer dressed as the school mascot stalks and murders and group of jocks and cheerleaders attending a Halloween party.
• V/H/S's last segment is called, and set on, "10/31/98" has a group of friends going to a Halloween party where a cult is performing a ritual.
• WNUF Halloween Special. A local news station sends a reporter to an allegedly-haunted house for a fun little Halloween broadcast that quickly gets out of hand.
• X-Men: The pivotal event of Days of Future Past (namely, Mystique and Destiny killing Senator Robert Kelly) takes place on October 31st, though apart from this the date doesn't come up at all in the rest of the story.

April Fools' Day

• April Fools' Day has a group of teens being picked off on their rich friend's island
• The very horror-esque Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth has Batman's rogue gallery taking over Arkham asylum on April Fools. April Fools actually ends up being the reason everything in the comic is happening, and in fact might be the cause for everything in the Batman canon as well, when Dr. Cavendish's spell to exorcise the Bat-demon he believes is haunting the Asylum winds up becoming the reason why it was retroactively haunted in the first place. April Fools, Doc!
• Deep Fear takes place in an underwater military facility overrun with monsters. The only significance of the date is that it deprives everyone's ability to call for outside help, as their one attempt to tell them they're dealing with mutant zombies gets brushed off as a joke.
• Killer Party has some sorority girls releasing an evil spirit during a hazing ritual on April fools.
• Slaughter High has a group of teens accidentally maiming the school nerd who seeks revenge on April Fools Day years later.
• Invoked in the Savage Worlds setting Necessary Evil. When the aliens turn traitor and take over Earth, they launch their attack on April 1st, hoping to delay military and civilian response as people mistake news reports for practical jokes. It worked.

Birthdays

• The Babadook is about a mother being possessed by an entity that's trying to make her kill her son. Maybe. A significant event that sends her over the edge is her son hurting his cousin at her birthday. The film also ends during his birthday.
• Bloody Birthday about three children who were all born during a solar eclipse going insane on their 10th birthday.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Buffy celebrates her seventeenth birthday by sleeping with Angel and turning him evil.
  • On Buffy's eighteenth birthday the Watcher's Council subjects her to a test when she must fight a psychotic vampire without superpowers.
  • On Buffy's nineteenth birthday, Giles is turned into a demon.
  • On Buffy's twentieth birthday, she has to fight a god to protect her sister.
  • On Buffy's twenty-first birthday she's trapped in her house with a demon — on this occasion, Spike suggests that it would be best if Buffy not celebrate her birthday, and since there's no birthday episode in Season 7 she's apparently taken this advice.
• A segment of 1997 Campfire Tales, titled "People Can Lick Too" has a little girl being stalked by an online predator on her birthday.
• Child's Play a young boy receives a toy doll for his birthday that's possessed by a serial killer.
• Don't Go Near the Park about brother and sister immortal cannibals who need a sixteen-year-old virgin sacrifice to remove their curse.
• The events of Escape Room (2017) occur on Tyler's 30th birthday
• In the children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events, the events of "The Vile Village" occur on Klaus's birthday. Likewise, "The Grim Grotto" takes place on Violet's birthday.
• Friday The 13th has Pamela Voorhees choosing to kill teenagers on the birthday of her late son Jason. Who turns out to be alive, and seemingly liking to continue using Friday the 13th as the day of his murders.
• The slasher film Happy Birthday to Me has the main character's friends being picked off one by one counting down to her birthday.
• Happy Death Day, to the point the killer only went into slashing because the victim passed on a poisoned cupcake baked for her.
• In The Haunting of Molly Hartley, the titular protagonist's parents made a Deal with the Devil to save her, on the condition that the Devil will claim Molly on her 18th birthday.
• In Train to Busan it's the main character's daughter's birthday.

Christmas Season

• Batman Returns has the deformed penguin being abandoned as a baby by his parents during Christmas and comes decades later to seek vengeance on Gotham.
• Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas reveals that The Beast's Karmic Transformation resulting from him spurning one of The Fair Folk disguised as a beggar took place on Christmas Day. Of course, that would be a good time to ask for kindness and hospitality, or test someone's moral character regarding such things.
• Better Watch Out has a boy and a babysitter he has a crush on dealing with a home intruder on Christmas.
• Black Christmas (1974) a killer preys of a sorority near Christmas time.
• The Blackcoat's Daughter mostly takes place in a boarding school where two girls have been left behind for Christmas break.
• Blue Stinger takes place at a research facility that is sealed off from the outside world when a mysterious object lands on it on Christmas Eve. One of the areas you explore is a shopping center decked out in Christmas lights.
• Body has three college girls find themselves in terrible trouble when they break into a mansion on Christmas Eve.
• A segment of the 1991 Campfire Tales, titled "The Fright Before Xmas"
• To call it a horror story would be an overstatement, but A Christmas Carol revolves around Ebenezer Scrooge's visited by four ghosts (of varying degrees of creepiness) on Christmas Eve, making this trope Older Than Radio..
• A Christmas Horror Story is an anthology featuring segments with Krampus terrorizing a family in the woods and Santa fighting zombie elves.
• Downplayed in The Cremation of Sam McGee, a ghost story in the form of a Narrative Poem. The narrator briefly mentions that the story beings "on a Christmas Day", but, since the story is set in the wilderness of the Yukon, the holiday ultimately plays a fairly minimal role.
• The Day of the Beast follows the misadventures of a priest who believes that The Antichrist will be born and shall bring the apocalypse on the midnight before Christmas '95.
• Doctor Who has a longstanding history of Christmas Episodes, to the point where it's lampshaded in-series; by "Voyage of the Damned", most Londoners have enough sense to get out of town for Christmas.
• Elves has killer elf demon connected to Nazi war criminals going on a spree during Christmas.
• Faceless takes place in the run-up to Christmas and ends on New Years Day, or just after.
• The Field Guide to Evil: The "What Ever Happened to Panagas the Pagan?" takes place at Christmas, when goblins are relased from the underworld to play tricks on mortals.
• Forever: The episode "Skinny Dipper" relentlessly reminds us it's the Christmas episode, from carols playing while a cabbie is skewered with a sword to a car passing by with a Christmas tree tied on top as Henry suffers a Heroic B So D from all the trauma he's gone through in the episode.
• Gremlins (1984) starts out as a wholesome Christmas movie about a teen boy who receives a mysterious pet called a mogwai for Christmas along with several rules to follow. The horror starts when the rules are broken.
• The Hand: The climax of the film (and most of the violence) occurs around Christmas.
• In Hardware (1990), the protagonist gives his sculptor girlfriend a robot head as a Christmas gift, so that she could use it for her latest work of art. Eventually the robot comes back to life, and is revealed to be a killer drone.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): A masker killer strikes on Christmas Eve. Then, in an alternate timeline one year later, he strikes again. Downplayed in that the text says that the killer is striking at other times of year too, we just don't see those kills.
• Referenced in Andy Williams' song "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year", in which "scary ghost stories" are listed as one of the many features of the Christmas season.
• Jack Frost (1997) about a serial killer possessing a snowman
• Jaws: The Revenge takes place near Christmas despite its tropical setting.
• Likewise, Jurassic World is set during the Christmas holidays.
• Krampus has an extended family, gathered together for the holidays, being terrorized by the title character.
• The Mothman Prophecies, though set over several months, climaxes with the collapse of the Silver Bridge. As in real life, most of the people caught in the disaster are coming home from their Christmas shopping, and there's a lot of imagery of wrapped presents floating in the frigid water. In the movie, 36 people are killed in the collapse, but in real life, it was actually 46.
• Night of the Comet has a comet passing by earth eleven days before Christmas leading to mass death leaving only a handful of survivors, zombies and an red skies behind.
• Parasite Eve begins with a fatal opera on Christmas Eve, and things only get worse on Christmas. Sequel The 3rd Birthday also features a concert on December 24 with just about every patron killed.
• Pagan Warrior: The Krampus can only be summoned at Christmas.
• The classic proto-slasher film Psycho takes place near Christmas. It has no bearing on the plot but Christmas decoration can be seen in the background of several shots.
• While Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is merely implied to take place around the holiday season, Jumanji: The Next Level explicitly takes place around Christmastime, with the four protagonists planning to reunite during the winter break.
• In Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale a British company in Finland unearths a giant, Lovecraftian Santa clause(Who has more in common with Krampus) that turns adults exposed to it into "elves" who resemble the normal Santa clause albeit with a desire to gather naughty children for "punishment" from the bigger Santa when he awakens.
• The Saga of Grettir the Strong reflects the medieval belief that on Christmas ("Yule") Eve, ghosts and demons have special power over people that shirk Mass: On Yule Eve, the shepherd Glam is killed by a ghost, and every year the troll woman of Bardardal raids the farmhouse at Sandhaugar.
• Santa's Slay, which even has a killer Santa.
• Sheitan takes place primarily on Christmas Eve with a group of young people in isolated country house with an overly friendly Crusty Caretaker, as time tick down to something nasty scheduled to occur at midnight.
• The Silent Night, Deadly Night series, which started with killers dressed as Santa. The second film also infamously shows that, if it has to, Horror is more than willing to pencil in GARBAGE DAY!
• The film Slay Belles, which takes place around Christmas Eve, has three cosplaying women have their urban exploring adventure at an abandoned Santa-themed amusement park ruined when they encounter the Christmas demon Krampus, thus prompting them to get help from a casually dressed Santa Claus to stop the monster.
• Tales from the Crypt once ran a story called "And All Through the House", about an escaped lunatic in a Santa suit. It was adapted as the first segment of the Tales from the Crypt film, and later as an episode of the TV show.

Day of the Dead / El Día de los Muertos / All Souls' Day

• Supernatural's pilot episode ends on November 2nd, the Day of the Dead and the anniversary of Mary Winchester's death.

Devil's Night / Hell Night / Mischief Night

• The Criminal Minds episode "Devil's Night" featured a serial arsonist who, every year, killed on the days leading up to Halloween.
• The Crow (1994), where it's even said to be the day the dead come back to life - such as the protagonist.
• Orson Welles' 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds broadcast the "news" of a Martian attack live on the evening of October 30.
• The D12 album Devil's Night is a Horrorcore album based on the concept of the Detroit Devil's Night tradition, which involves kids getting high and/or drunk to burn down abandoned buildings.

Easter

• Bless the Child
• In Critters 2: The Main Course the title creatures eggs are mistaken for Easter egg.
• Dead Snow has a group of medical students getting attacked by Nazi zombies during Easter vacation.
• Doctor Who has one Easter special, 2009's "Planet of the Dead". Set on the holiday, it mainly involves a bus going through a wormhole and winding up on a ravaged Ghost Planet, with the same fate ready to befall Earth if the Doctor can't find a way to stop it.
• Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! involves a developmentally-challenged teen who's bullied by his stepfather the night before Easter.
• Kottentail has a mutant bunny man going on a killing spree.
• Murder House takes place on the Easters of 1986 and 1987, where your player characters are stalked by a serial killer in an Easter Bunny costume.
• Midnight Mass (2021) takes place during Lent, with the penultimate episode and finale falling on Easter.
• True to history, Medici: Masters of Florence sees the climax of the Pazzi conspiracy at Easter of 1478. Giuliano is murdered at mass, and the ensuing chaos tears through the holiday.

Father's Day

• The first Creepshow segment, which is literally titled "Father's Day". A man returns from the dead on Father's Day (which is also the anniversary of his murder), angrily demanding someone make him a cake.

Graduation

• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Mayor scheduled his Ascension for graduation day, and proceeded to turn into a gigantic snake demon and attempt to snack on the graduates.
• Final Destination 3 starts with a class of graduates going to an amusement park... and then a bunch of them die in a roller coaster crash.
• Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan despite its title mostly takes place on a luxury boat where several teens on a post-graduation trip to New York are being hunted by Jason.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child starts just as protagonist Alice graduates from high school.

Groundhog Day

• Subverted in Groundhog Day. While the endless time loop does take place on the titular holiday and lasts quite possibly for thousands of years from Phil Connor's perspective, it is not intended to terrify or harm him in any way. Instead, it ends up making Phil a better person, and the only deaths in this film are the ones he inflicts upon himself.
• Invoked in The Monster Squad, where the Kid Hero asks his dad to give him some money to go see a Groundhog Day-themed slasher film.

Mardi Gras

• All Dogs Go to Heaven: Carface murders Charlie during Mardi Gras.
• Five friends are sent to a hospital on Mardi Gras in the Autopsy, and begin disappearing one by one.
• Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh: The Candyman makes his return on Mardi Gras evening.
• Dracula 2000, where Dracula is revived in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season.
• Hatchet: A group of tourists on a ghost tour are hunted down by a deformed man on Mardi Gras.
• Unsurprisingly, not even The Twilight Zone is immune to this trope. In the fifth season episode "The Masks", wealthy businessman Jason Foster forces his greedy relatives to wear grotesque masks if they wish to obtain his fortune. After he dies, the relatives remove their masks...only to discover their faces have taken the shape of the masks themselves, permanently disfiguring them.

May Day / Walpurgis Night

• Doctor Who: "The Dæmons" takes place around May Day, and involves the Master up to some attempts at, essentially, demon summoning.
• The "Night on Bald Mountain" segment of Fantasia. The narrator informs us that the demons and ghosts are celebrating Walpurgis Night.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Walpurgisnacht is the eponymous Witch that comes every year in a random location at that particular date. The location that she visits always ends in ruin and deaths.
• The Wicker Man (1973) has a cop going to an island celebrating May Day, and culminates with him being sacrificed.
• Dario Argento's Dracula 3D opens with a young woman foolishly going out to have sex with a married man on Walpurgis Night. Naturally, Dracula shows up and kills her.

New Year

• BioShock has as its backstory the Rapture Civil War starting after a New Year's Party was attacked. The game itself starts by the following year, showing how the underwater city degraded to a very sorry state.
• BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger takes place New Year's Eve 2199. Due to the events of the game, the calendar never manages to reach 2200.
• Bloody New Year starts with partygoers vanishing during New Year's 1959 - though the main plot happens as people in July 1987 discover the abandoned location.
• Doctor Who: "Resolution", the new series' first specific New Year's special, set on its airdate of 01/01/2019 and involving an incredibly dangerous alien breaking out of its can on Earth and going on a rampage.
• End of Days follows the attempts to prevent Satan from conceiving the Antichrist before the year 2000.
• The climax of Ghostbusters II happens on New Year's Eve.
• Madhouse (1974): The first murder takes place on New Year's Eve.
• Mystery of the Wax Museum: The events in New York start just after the New Year Has Come.
• The slasher film New Year's Evil has a serial killer synching his murders with the New Years turn in different time zones.
• Steel Trap takes place on New Year’s Eve, with the protagonists trapped on the abandoned 27th floor of a building after being invited to an “exclusive” party there.

Prom Night

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When the vampires emerge
• Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever has most of the promoters infected by the virus.
• Carrie. Never has hazing a prom queen went so wrong...
• Dance of the Dead: Where zombies attack on prom night. They reach the actual prom offscreen but there aren't many survivors left there and one mentions that they ate the Prom King.
• The original Prom Night (1980) was about a masked killer hunting teens during their prom night. Its sequels veer off in odd directions but stick to the slasher formula.
• The Slasher parody Student Bodies in a send up to Carrie
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation: The main characters are attacked after driving off from prom.

Spring Break

• The Evil Dead (1981) has a group of collage age students spending vacation in a cabin in the woods.
• Jeepers Creepers has a brother and sister returning home from college during spring break.
• Piranha 3D has a school of prehistoric piranhas being freed by an earthquake and attacking some spring breakers.
• Spring Breakers, while not an outright horror film, certainly one with killing.

St. Patrick's Day

• In God Told Me To a detective investigates a series of killing sprees in New York. One of them is at a St. Patrick's day parade.
• Maniac Cop A deformed killer cop terrorizes New York. Climax takes place during a St. Patrick's day parade.

Thanksgiving

• Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County: It starts out with the main character filming his family's Thanksgiving dinner, then quickly takes a turn for the worst.
• The Pater Familicide flashbacks in Amityville: A New Generation
• Blood Rage: Terry starts killing again on Thanksgiving Day.
• Bloodwine: It's around Thanksgiving that our protagonists get their hands on the mysterious brandy bottle.
• Home Sweet Home: The killer manages to escape captivity and go on a rampage during Thanksgiving weekend.
• Kristy is set over Thanksgiving, but this is almost entirely to establish why Justine is isolated on campus.
• Madman is set fairly close to Thanksgiving
• The Mutilator is set during "fall break", which implies that it takes place around Thanksgiving since that's when most American schools tend to have a fall break.
• Séance: The main characters hold a séance over Thanksgiving weekend. Three guesses as to how that turns out.
• Eli Roth's Thanksgiving (2023), which started out as a mock trailer that was part of Grindhouse. The fake trailer poked fun at the tendency of this sort of film to be released at least a few months away from its associated holiday (it happened to come out not long before Rob Zombie's Halloween remake was released... in late August); the movie would escape this, appropriately coming out the Friday before the titular holiday.
  Narrator: Thanksgiving. Coming this February.
• ThanksKilling and its sequel, in which the murderer is none other than a demonic turkey.

United States Independence Day / Fourth of July

• The Cape Fear remake has a lawyer and his family being menaced by a killer the father failed to defend in court.
• The I Know What You Did Last Summer trilogy has a group of teen accidently killing a man while drunk driving after a fourth of July party. He comes back during around the same time next year seeking revenge.
• Independence Day and Independence Day: Resurgence - on the first is coincidental that the aliens came in early July. In the second, it's deliberate, as Time Dilation makes them return after exactly 20 years.
• Jaws, where the mayor even complains that closing the beach due to shark attacks on a holiday would be harmful.
• Men in Black II is implied to have started on July 4 (the film's release date).
• Paranormal concludes on July 4.
• The Return of the Living Dead has an employee at a warehouse accidentally release a zombie virus into a nearby cemetery where his friends are having a party.
• Uncle Sam: A zombified Gulf War soldier returns home and begins killing people he deems unpatriotic.
• The Blue Rock Springs attack in The Zodiac and Zodiac.
• In the backstory to The New Order Last Days Of Europe (or the old one at least), a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hawaii on the 4th of July, forcing the United States to surrender and ushering in an Alternate-History Nazi Victory.

Valentine's Day

• Massively Multiplayer: The Valentine's Day Massacre, the timeline's equivalent to Columbine (the actual one having fizzled out earlier on), is named as it occurs on Valentine's Day.
• My Bloody Valentine and its remake both have a series of murders taking in a small mining town near Valentine's Day.
• In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the titular picnic is a Valentine's Day celebration, which turns to tragedy after three girls and their teacher mysteriously vanish (possibly due to supernatural means), kicking off the plot of the novel.
• Pontypool has a radio station dealing with zombies during Valentine's Day.
• Another segment of the Tales from the Crypt film, titled "Poetic Justice", is actually set over two different Valentine's Days. It revolves around a Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold (played by Peter Cushing) being tormented and eventually Driven to Suicide by his cruel neighbours, and eventually rising from his grave to take revenge.
• Valentine, which culminates in an attack during a Valentine's Day party.

Weddings and Honeymoons

• Alligator features a scene where the giant reptile crashes a wedding and causes all sorts of ruckus, including eating the groom.
• Bride of Chucky has the series killer doll being resurrected by his old girlfriend whom he turns into another doll.
• Haunted Honeymoon has Gene Wilder's and Gilda Radner's going on a honeymoon to his ancestral home in an effort to cure him of his panic attacks.
• He Knows You're Alone, about a soon-to-be bride who is stalked by a killer the weekend before her wedding.
• VHS has a segment called "Second Honeymoon" has a couple being stalked by a killer well on a second honeymoon/vacation.

Multiple

• Batman:
  • Calendar Man's entire schtick, especially his Arkham Series incarnation, who's effectively a holiday-themed serial killer. In Batman: Arkham City he'll tell you about his previous murders if you visit him with your system clock set to certain holidays.
    • Batman: Arkham Knight contains a series of journal entries from Calendar Man, who made a New Year's Resolution not to commit crimes on major holidays, but to focus on lesser-known events like Groundhog Day and National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Eventually, he can't resist the urge and decides to cheat by committing a crime on Halloween...the day the events of the game take place. His journal entry for October 31 simply says "Damn Scarecrow."
  • The Long Halloween: The Holiday Killer strikes on Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, a birthday, then Halloween again. On April 1st, the killer attacks the Riddler but doesn't kill him — because it's April Fools' Day.
• Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf, where the moon is conveniently full for a couple of holidays (New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, April Fool's Day, Homecoming Sunday, high school graduation, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and New Year's Eve. The only major holiday that is excluded is Halloween (the full moon was a few days before it; instead the protagonist Marty gets to see the werewolf in his human form for the first time on Halloween). King admits in a short post-script that the moon cycles doesn't behave like that in the real world, but he ignored this fact as he found the idea of a horror story focused on holidays too appealing to pass up on.
• The Hack/Slash comic Entry Wound had every holiday-related slasher "waking up" early due to a cosmic disturbance. While various holiday slashers are alluded to,◊ the main villain of the story was a Groundhog Day-based one (if the groundhog sees his shadow, six weeks of death ensue). The comic also has an amusing Deconstruction of the trope, as Cassie and Vlad usually take out those slashers rather easily by just finding their resting place on a regular Tuesday and blowing it up while they are still hibernating.
• The anthology film Holidays has various horror stories taking place on Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Easter, New Year's Eve, Mother's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, and Christmas.
• The 2019 Halloween Horror Nights maze Holidayz in Hell at Universal Studios Hollywood is all about every holiday becoming scary. Ironically, the Halloween section is the least frightening part of this maze with moving pumpkins not looking as scary as say skeleton Uncle Sam or the Thanksgiving Turkey that killed an entire family.
• The Enfant Terrible film Home Movie has sequences set on a number of different holidays; in order, they're a birthday, Halloween, an anniversary, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day and Easter, which the climax occurs on. Justified, as it is implied that the kids want the results of their... antics to be caught on camera, and it is holidays their dad tends to film.
• The Horror Seasons is an anthology that features Christmas ("Satan Claws"); Halloween ("The Darkest Secret") and Easter ("Easter Beast").
• It's My Party and I'll Die If I Want To is set on Halloween, which is also the protagonist's birthday.
• Tales from the Grave, Volume 2: Happy Holidays is a horror anthology with all the segments dealing with holidays.
• Clive Barker's The Thief of Always is set at the Holiday House, a magical residence which experiences a full year's worth of seasons every day. There's an Easter every morning, a Halloween every dusk, and a Christmas every evening. Granted, it doesn't become a horror story until the characters catch on to what's going on...
• Fearnet has produced a series of shorts featuring Sam from Trick 'r Treat celebrating a variety of different holidays, like Easter and Father's Day.
• In Real Life, terrorists are far more likely to align their crimes with specific calendar dates than are serial killers, as the former sometimes schedule their attacks to make a political statement, while the latter are usually opportunists.
• Real Life Edinburgh's infamous corpse-selling serial killers, Burke and Hare, were finally arrested for a murder that took place on Halloween of 1828. Hare testified about the brutal event in exchange for immunity nine weeks later, on Christmas Eve, and Burke's death sentence - complete with an order that his body be dissected - was issued on Christmas morning.
• The SPI Files novels by Lisa Shearin have this happen often, with the first happening at New Years, the second at Halloween, the fourth at an equinox, the fifth at the 100th anniversary of an in-universe event, the sixth at a supermoon (and coincidentally the main character's birthday), the seventh at Christmas, and the eighth before a major UN summit. Most of these are due to occult reasons, but the other three were for mundane reasons - if a pair of ten-foot tall monsters started slaughtering the thousands of people gathered at Times Square for the New Years celebration while millions watched on live TV, there would be no way to maintain the masquerade, and the centennial anniversary of a major event and the UN Summit would have a large number of VIPs gathering in one place, making it a tempting target. The sole exception to this, the third novel, takes place during the unremarkable first week of November, due to it being an immediate sequel to the second, and following up on the revelation on the final page of said book that the two main characters are both going on their first dates (to other people) at the same restaurant at the same time.
• Night World:
  • The latter half of Spellbinder (1996) takes place in the lead up to Halloween, or Samhain as the witches call it, with the climatic showdown with Suzanne's ghost taking place on Halloween night. It's justified in that the "veil" between the living world and the 'beyond' is thinnest at this time of year, which is likely how Thea was able to summon Suzanne and is also required to banish her. It also poses a significant risk to the students of Lake Mead High because of the Halloween Dance they're throwing, which includes decorations of witches being tortured that are bound to enrage Suzanne, given her history.
  • The Chosen (1997) largely takes place in the lead up to and on the night of the spring equinox, which is a holiday for Night People and especially vampires, as it's the anniversary of the day Maya - the first vampire - turned Thierry and thus created the vampire race. Rashel comes to realize the kidnapped girls are being taken to be devoured at a Blood Feast celebrating the equinox.

Other

• The Bagman takes place on Friday the 13th.
• Barrow Hill takes place on the night of the Autumnal Equinox.
• Bloody Homecoming has a slasher dressed as a fireman stalking and killing teens at a homecoming dance.
• The Bridge Curse: The bravery test that invokes the curse happens when it's taken on the stroke of midnight on Leap Day. It then continues until all students involved in it are dead and/or one of them offers themself up to help the ghost with the next ones.
• The City of the Dead features Candlemas
• Dark Fall: Lost Souls happens on Bonfire Night.
• Dark Harvest takes place on the night of the Harvest Moon.
• A few of the deaths and several narrow escapes from Final Destination 3 take place at the tricentennial celebration of the town's founding.
• Final Exam takes place during a college finals week.
• Freaky takes place mostly during a Friday the 13th (its Working Title was even Freaky Friday The 13th to make clear what kind of plot we're dealing with).
• In Geostorm, the Big Bad activates the Weather-Control Machine to kill the President during the Democratic National Convention because, while the President's schedule often changes at the last minute, this was a massive event scheduled months in advance that he had to attend.
• Hangover Square climaxes on Guy Fawkes Day.
• The prologue to Humongous happens on Labor Day.
• Night of the Living Dead (1968) takes place on the day the clocks move forward for Daylight Savings Time.
• The climax of Nothing but the Night takes place on Guy Fawkes Night, with the bonfire and the guy playing an imprtant role.
• The Orphan (no, not this one) happens during Friday the 13th
• Patriots Day, a True Crime film about the 2015 Boston Marathon bombing. Notably, the actual attack was a subversion; the Boston Marathon is scheduled every year to be held on Patriots' Day (a state holiday in Massachusetts commemorating the Battles of Lexington and Concord), so anybody plotting a terrorist attack against such would also, by coincidence, be plotting an attack on that holiday. The date initially led investigators to suspect a far-right militia as the culprit before the actual bombers, a pair of Chechen Islamist brothers, were uncovered.
• Run Hide Fight takes place on senior prank day, and as a result, the action takes place against the backdrop of such locales as a teachers' lounge filled with balloons and a stairwell that's been turned into a slip-and-slide.
• Solstice takes place, as the title implies, on midsummer solstice.
• A Thing of Vikings: Henry the Sinister starts his massacre of Jews on the 9th of Av, the same day that both Jewish Temples were destroyed, and a day of mourning for Jews.^note In real-life history, several other disasters befell the Jewish community on this date — the Rhineland massacres and the expulsion from Spain, to name a few. It's ambiguous whether he knew or cared what the date was.
• The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism takes place on Good Friday.
• In some cultures, the "unlucky day" is, in fact, Tuesday the 13th. And, yep, when Friday the 13th is dubbed for one of those cultures (including the Spanish dub)...
• The Victorville Massacre is set on Labor Day.
• V for Vendetta begins and ends with a bombing on Guy Fawkes Day.
• Went the Day Well? is about an attempted takeover of an English village by Nazi soldiers on Whitsun weekend.
• What Keeps You Alive: The film's events take place on the first anniversary of a lesbian couple's marriage.
• April 20 for anything related to Nazis and neo-Nazis, as that date was Adolf Hitler's birthday:
  • Chuck Norris action-comedy Top Dog has this as a plot point. Norris's character knows the bad guys plan a terror strike, but doesn't know when. Once he figures out meaning of the date, everything falls in place allowing the plot to be foiled in the nick of time.
  • The Columbine High School massacre took place on April 20, leading to speculation that the killers were neo-Nazis. Others have suggested that they scheduled their killing spree for April 20 so that the school's stoners wouldn't be caught in the crossfire (they'd never had much of a problem with those kids). In truth, it was a defiance of this trope — quite literally, as April 20, 1999, was a Tuesday. In his journal, Eric Harris wrote that he wanted the massacre to happen on an ordinary day at school rather than at some major event like the prom (which had taken place three days earlier) or a football game, feeling that it would more properly shock Americans out of their routine. Furthermore, the massacre was originally scheduled for the day before but had to be delayed because an order of ammunition only came late in the afternoon. That said, the fact that they originally scheduled the massacre for April 19 has also led to speculation that it was a reference to the Waco siege and the Oklahoma City bombing, especially given the killers' stated desire to "outdo" those events.
• Germany has had several significant events occur on November 9, most of which were negative. In 1848, parliamentary leader Robert Blum was executed. In 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, and both the Weimar Republic and a Free Socialist Republic were proclaimed. In 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch occurred. In 1938, the Nazis began Kristallnacht. Subverted in 1989 when the Berlin Wall began to fall on November 9.
• This is a major part of the reason why the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 had such a profound effect on European culture and Enlightenment-era thought. Not only did a massive earthquake and tsunami devastate one of Europe's great capitals, but it also happened on November 1, All Saints' Day, one of the holiest days on the Catholic calendar. Nearly everybody was in church when the earthquake struck — and furthermore, Lisbon's churches were mostly built tall in the center of the city, on soft riverbank sediments that underwent liquefaction during the earthquake, causing nearly all of them to collapse and kill the parishioners inside. The disaster has often been cited as the birth of modern atheism, as writers like Voltaire saw it as an affront to the idea of a just and loving God, or even of The Scourge of God, given that the earthquake claimed the churches but spared the brothels (Lisbon's Red Light District, which was built on higher ground, having been one of the least-damaged neighborhoods).
• Similarly, the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, the second most powerful earthquake ever recorded, struck on March 27, Good Friday. Coincidentally, the Book of Matthew also describes an earthquake occurring during Jesus' crucifixion (the event that Good Friday commemorates).
• The Loma Prieta Earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area on October 17, 1989, at the start of Game 3 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, which came to be known as the "Earthquake Series" that year as a result. The entire thing was caught on video by ABC's cameras, with sportscaster Al Michaels screaming "I'll tell you what, we're having an earth-" before the broadcast cuts out. In hindsight, many seismologists believe that the earthquake striking during the World Series was the lucky break that saved hundreds of lives, meaning that lots of people were at home or at after-hours parties and thus reducing traffic on the elevated highways (particularly the Cypress Street Viaduct) whose collapse during the earthquake in the middle of late-afternoon rush hour claimed most of its 63 victims.
• Defied with the 9/11 attacks, which happened on a literal simple Tuesday.
• In The Day of the Jackal, the titular date, on which Jackal plans to shoot Charles de Gaulle, is Liberation Day, the holiday that celebrates the Nazis withdrawing from Paris in WWII. Between the date being a major holiday, the President of France's status as a hero of the liberation, and his tremendous ego, De Gaulle pretty much has to go out and participate in the commemoration events, which means that Jackal is guaranteed a chance to strike.
• Unsounded: During an in-universe holiday ("Tirna's Day", when a pair of shrine maidens get delivered to a town to be 'anointed'), psychotic renegades from two rival empires clash in Litrya Shrine, slaughter the servants, molest and (indirectly) kill two of the maidens, kill off one of the main characters, and generally get themselves killed or ruined at the end. And it's possible the day will conclude with yet another town massacre from the giant zombie cyborg.
• The Widow (2020): The bulk of the film takes place on October 13th to 14th. The significance of this is that this is considered the time when evil spirits have their last chance to torment the living before hibernating until spring.
• The Heroes of Olympus: Gaia chooses to wake from her slumber on August 1, which was the feast day of Spes goddess of hope in Ancient Rome. Safe to say, Gaia waking up is the opposite of hope for the world.

Spoofs and Parodies

• As mentioned under Film, Thanksgiving (2023) was originally a spoof fake trailer in Grindhouse.
• MAD spoofed the concept with Arbor Day, which became Hilarious in Hindsight with the creation of the aforementioned Arbor Daze.
  • Arbor Day is again the chosen day of horror when It's a Living took on slasher films.
  • One of the guests at the horror-event-turned-massacre from Blood Fest is the lead actor from an Arbor Day slasher franchise.
• Spoofed in More Information Than You Require with the imaginary slasher Leap Year.
• The horror anthology NightThirst had a story called "Christmas in July", which had a murderous Santa inexplicably killing in the middle of summer.
• The Psych episode "Tuesday the 17th" spoofs this trope by having a very Friday the 13th-esque story (hence the title) happen on an unimportant day.
• Saturday the 14th also parodies this trope.
• Along with ending on the prom, the aforementioned Student Bodies starts, says "Halloween" on screen but nothing happens, Fade Out. Fade In again on "Friday the 13th" nothing happens on that day either, fade out again. Fade in again on "Jamie Lee Curtis' Birthday" that's when all hell breaks loose!
  • Either that or the film takes place in a Verse where — to better facilitate this trope — all three of these events can and do happen on the same date.
• From the Phineas and Ferb episode "Terrifying Tri-State Trilogy of Terror":
  "Wow, this is such a Halloween thing to happen in the middle of summer!"
• The Eminem song "Underground" spoofs this:
  Fuck Jason, it's Friday the 19th.
  That means it's just a regular day,
  and this is the kind of shit I think of regularly
• Explained in this◊ Madam & Eve comic — the aliens invade on major holidays because they get paid double overtime for doing so.

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