Matthew Hill on Turning Holiday Rituals into Haunting, Habit-Forming Storytelling with Long Winter Nights

Matthew Hill’s Long Winter Nights transforms familiar seasonal rituals into an inventive horror experience, blending the nostalgia of advent calendars with deeply unsettling storytelling. What began as a creative experiment rooted in family tradition quickly evolved into an ambitious, collaborative series that captivated audiences with nightly releases and emotionally resonant themes. By tapping into shared anxieties around holidays — connection, pressure, loneliness, and love—Matthew and his team crafted a format that feels both ritualistic and unpredictable. As the project grows, he envisions expanding beyond audio into physical and multi-format experiences, continuing to explore horror that lingers long after the story ends.

Matt, Long Winter Nights has a really unique concept. What inspired you to build a horror series around seasonal rituals and an “advent calendar” format?
The simple answer is that I love folk horror, I love advent calendars, and I love experimenting with different modalities of storytelling.

In my family, every December my wife, son, myself, and our dog each get an advent calendar and we open them together. It’s something we genuinely look forward to every year, part of how we experience the holiday. Somewhere in the flickering recesses of my brain, a synapse fired and those ideas connected.

Shortly after, I ran the idea past Chelsea Sutton and Lisa Dring, who are friends, frequent collaborators, and both much better writers than I am. When they loved it too, we started building it together.

Releasing 45 stories across a structured timeline is ambitious. How did you approach maintaining consistency while keeping each story fresh and engaging?
It was definitely more ambitious than we realized, but that often seems to be the trick to getting things done. Not that we weren’t prepared, just that the reality of doing this over the holidays was… a lot.

We originally set out to do a 25-day Christmas advent, but people were enjoying it, so we kept going. That led to the first bonus episodes, Krampusnacht, which was a secret drop, and the New Year two-parter. We didn’t even commit to a Valentine’s Day advent until the very end of December. This, of course, made the Valentine’s Day schedule very tight.

What made it work was the team. There was definitely a lot of divide-and-conquer. We were also very lucky to have an incredibly consistent, generous group of collaborators. Terrific actors, an amazing composer, a great graphic designer. Our Valentine’s Day advent was actually made possible with the support of meriko borogrove, who came in as EP. We also brought in Lyndsey Stogdill to help produce, and Kerry Kazmierowicztrimm to help with the writing for the Valentine’s run. He wrote a fantastic Lupercalia episode, by the way. People showed up and made the whole thing better.

As for keeping things fresh, we focused on what actually scares us, and what feels thematically tied to the holiday. December stories leaned into travel stress, family dynamics, loneliness, the pressure of perfection. Valentine’s became about the ways love drives us to consume and be consumed.

The idea of “habit-forming” storytelling is interesting. What have you learned about audience behavior from releasing stories nightly?
I’m not sure it’s new, honestly. From Saturday morning cartoons to Game of Thrones watch parties, people love ritual.

What we saw is that audiences really embraced the nightly release. We got a lot of comments from people who looked forward to “opening the door” each day and listening to that night’s story.

It also felt native to how people already engage with social platforms, just through a specific genre lens. And for horror fans, that lens really clicked.

Now that Season One is complete, how are you thinking about expanding the world? Do you see it evolving more as audio, or branching into books and other formats?
Right now, we’re definitely talking about Season Two.

We’re also exploring ways to collect Season One into something physical, like a chapbooks or zines. Maybe even a true advent object that contains the stories in some tactile way? I’d love to see that, personally.

Chelsea, Lisa, and I are all multi-hyphenate storytellers, and we like playing across formats. So there’s not much we aren’t at least talking about.

Horror often taps into deep emotions, what themes or feelings are you most interested in exploring through Long Winter Nights moving forward?
I love this question.

For me, the best horror I can write is rooted in my personal fears and anxieties. And interestingly, many winter holidays are built around trying to manage or appease those same or similar fears. Wassailing to ensure the harvest. Krampusnacht as a warning. Even celebrations like Epiphany carry an undercurrent of dread.

To that end, we’ve talked a lot about wanting Long Winter Nights to hold all kinds of horror. Like an advent calendar of chocolates or whiskey, we never want you to know which one burns, which one numbs, and which one lingers bitter on the tongue long after it’s gone.

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