College might not have prom every year, but the academic calendar keeps memories of these things flitting about in the mind. Prom usually takes place near the end of the high-school year, around April and early May. This is just when the spring semester at my university winds up, so it lines up with School’s Out a little bit.

• Prom Night (1980): Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielson in a slasher movie culminating on prom night.
• Jawbreaker (1999): “I killed Liz. I killed the teen dream. Deal with it.” Also culminating on prom night.
• Carrie (1976): suppressed telekinetic abilities of a bullied teenager wreak havoc at prom.
• 10 Things I hate About You (1999): 90s teen movie version of Taming of the Shrew wrapping up in prom.

Sometimes movies aren’t just a way of celebrating a holiday, they are a reason to have one: a movie holiday of sorts.

John Carpenter’s 1980 The Fog takes place very plainly on April 21st, so April 21st is the day we watch The Fog to celebrate the anniversary of Antonio Bay.

We embrace the academic calendar milestones as defining moments in our year, so why haven’t we celebrated spring break with Holidays in the Movies? During our most recent celebration of the start of the school year we noticed that two movies on that list were set during spring; spring breakish even. So we have grabbed them from schools-in and will be doing a spring break watching:

• PCU (1994) – “We’re not gonna protest!” But maybe we should protest this being a school starts movie. This is spring time, near end of term.
• Girl Happy (1965) – seriously, how have we not included an Elvis movie in our watching yet. I may not have talked about our Elvis collection too much here, but it is fully featured in Doomed Moviethon.
• Crocodile (2000) – Tobe Hooper’s direct to video spring break adventure.
• Nightmare beach (1989) – what’s scarier and surer to ruin spring break than a crocodile? A motorcyclist, obviously.
• Where the Boys Are (1960) – despite the tonal shift, which was actually buffered by the sequence of events so as to not be too jarring, this is a lovely film. It is both a girl’s fantasy of spring break and a depressing warning that the danger of spring break is that girls get assaulted. Sex is the only thing boys want.
• Palm Springs Weekend (1963) – with the same initial feeling as Girl Happy and Where the Boys Are, this also echoes the warnings to girls that sex is the only thing boys want.
• Spring Break (1983) – on to a boy’s dream of spring break, 80’s style, where girls are over-sexed objects on giggle juice and don’t even become near to characters until the end, but fun none the less.
• There’s Nothing Out There (1991) – Group of college students head to a house on the pond for spring break and from the outset Mike is driving the rest of them crazy with warnings of a killer in the woods and horror-movie happenings to come.
• Camp Fear (1991) – A car full of sorority sisters heads to a mountain with their anthropology professor to look for artifacts during spring break. They become terrorized by a gang of bikers, a lake monster, and a mad ‘druid.’

For Holidays in the Movies, no holiday is too little acknowledged for us to celebrate with a movie. The only real challenge is finding the movies that definitely place themselves on a holiday of some kind, especially those that don’t have large cultural celebrations attached. Well, lucky for you I noticed when Coraline’s mother, in the 2009 movie Coraline, said that it was President’s day. So, for President’s day, until I find more, I will watch Coraline.

Of course there are plenty of thematic lists to rely on as well if you want to go that route as we have for Earth Day and the like. If you are feeling the theme you will not be spoiled for choices of movies about presidents.

Weird that we haven’t already covered Hanukkah in our movie watching. This year we will be taking some first steps toward addressing this.

• Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah (1995) : I may have been born just a little too late for lamb chop, but it has the comforting television special feel that I grew up with.
• Hanukkah (2019) : a horror movie unseen by us so far, we shall see.

• Mardi Gras Massacre (1978) : a serial killer roams the streets of Mardi Gras to make sacrifices to a Peruvian god. Not a repeater for the Schmidt house.
• Dracula 2000 (2000) : the costume parade is not Halloween, it is Mardi Gras and the action takes place primarily in New Orleans when a recently re-awakened Dracula trails havok through the city with the colleagues of Van Helsing on his tail.
• Mardi Gras (1958) : as yet unseen by us musical with Pat Boone
• Interview with a Vampire (1994) : so natural and yet it almost slipped my mind
• Flesh and Fantasy (1943) : provided we can get a hold of it, this occult anthology seems right up our alley at the Schmidt house
• A Woman’s Secret (1992) – Italian thriller with Margeaux Hemingway.
• Hatchet (2006) – gory slasher!
• Death Spa (1988) – gory supernatural thrillery thing. Why does everyone keep going to this place?
• “The Perfect Foil” Murder, She Wrote (S2.E21) – Jessica Fletcher is visiting a distant cousin during Mardi Gras when he is accused of murder during a costume party.

Labor Day is one of those holidays for which it is especially difficult to build a comfortable, celebratory, collection of watching. It is very close to the end of summer/back to school celebration, and also lacking in a dearth of movies taking place during or about the holiday.

• 9 to 5 (1980) : this is more thematic than actually aligned with the holiday, but sometimes that is just how things have to be
• Humongous (1982) : labor day weekend vacationers being stalked by a slasher/monster
• Dirty Dancing (1987) : tells the tale of an entire summer adventure, but does actually culminate on Labor Day