Film
Everything Is Terrible! Holiday Special
- Comedy
- Strange
- Relentless
Everything Is Terrible! Holiday Special is a found-footage collage film that raids decades of forgotten VHS tapes, commercials, and B-movies to create a deliberately abrasive, hallucinogenic assault on Christmas sentimentality. It's maximalist, unhinged, and weirdly hilarious—a fever dream for people who find conventional holiday specials unbearably saccharine. It's comedy for the joyfully warped.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you love found-footage collages stitched from vintage clips, where the joke lives in the jarring cut-ups and the deadpan sincerity of mismatched holiday ephemera.
Skip it if you need a plot, characters, or any sense of narrative build, since this is pure chaotic montage with no through-line and it can feel relentless for its full length.
What it asks of you: Attention in short bursts: about fifty minutes of rapid-fire cuts that rarely settle, so let it wash over you rather than trying to follow a storyline.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
The Room2003
A cult masterpiece of accidental hilarity where the filmmaking itself becomes the joke. Like EIT!, it's entertainingly wrong in every possible way, and that wrongness is the entire appeal.
But It moves slowly and asks you to sit with awkwardness for two hours. If you need a story that makes sense, this will frustrate you.
Rubber2010
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But The premise never becomes less stupid, and some viewers will find that exhausting rather than liberating.
Synecdoche, New York2008
A fractured, layered collage of a film that plays with reality and fiction the way EIT! plays with found footage. Darkly funny, visually overwhelming, and endlessly strange.
But It's genuinely bleak and requires patience. The surrealism can feel indulgent if you're not in the mood.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Everything Is Terrible! Holiday Special
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Ghostwatch1992
Both use the grammar of found media—news broadcasts, home video, TV ephemera—to destabilize reality. EIT! uses it for absurdist comedy; Ghostwatch uses it for existential terror. Same tool, opposite register.
A BBC mockumentary presented as a live haunted-house investigation that genuinely terrified the UK in 1992. It's found-footage horror before that was a genre, structured like a real broadcast event unraveling in real time.
But The horror is genuinely distressing rather than funny. If you're coming for laughs, the dread might feel like a genre miscalculation.
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MTV's greatest gift: a feature film that's exactly as stupid and juvenile as the show, with a genuine road-trip structure underneath the chaos. Peak late-90s irreverence.
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National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation1989
Holiday comedy that's actually funny without trying to deconstruct itself. Chevy Chase, catastrophe, and genuine warmth—a masterclass in the form EIT! is deliberately destroying.
But It's comfortable and crowd-pleasing, which might feel soft if you're looking for something genuinely provocative.
The Eric Andre Show2012
Talk-show parody that's as committed to chaos and absurdism as EIT! The format breakdown and willingness to make the audience uncomfortable is genuinely kindred.
But Many sketches don't land. It thrives on an anti-comedy sensibility that can feel like watching someone waste your time.
Too Many Cooks2014
Adult Swim's legendary 11-minute short that spoofs 90s sitcoms while morphing into something genuinely unsettling. Found-footage energy applied to television history itself.
But It's brief and leaves you hanging. The tonal shift might feel like a gimmick rather than satire.
Mulholland Drive2001
Both are deranged collages of cultural material. Lynch mines noir, melodrama, and Hollywood history to create uncanny beauty; EIT! mines the same detritus to create uncanny horror-comedy. Both trust their audience to swim in the wreckage.
David Lynch's masterwork collapses narrative into a fever dream of Los Angeles, identity, and cinema itself. It's overwhelming, contradictory, and demands surrender to its logic rather than understanding it conventionally.
But The story doesn't resolve and the film actively resists interpretation. Some viewers will feel cheated by a narrative that refuses to cohere.
People
Directing
- Dimitri SimakisDirector
- Nic MaierDirector