The marriage of horror and Christmas isn’t as weird or counterintuitive as it may seem at first glance. We grow up with the promise of a man magically invading all of our homes, and we hope we’re well-behaved enough all year to get presents from him, rather than the uneasy feeling that comes with the thought he might be sneaking in to punish us with lumps of coal.
Enter the thriving Christmas horror film industry.
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Binging on winter-themed gore flicks is probably the most metal way to deal with a stressful time of year—though it’s hard to separate the so-bad-it’s-good from the actually-just-bad. There are many low-budget, straight-to-video cheese fests, though those can be their own kind of fun. Then there’s the genuinely good, prestige output of holiday horror, like the genre-defining Canadian classic Black Christmas, widely regarded as the first slasher film and a major influence on Halloween. But in either case, these aren’t movies that get the same kind of mainstream push as modern classics like Scrooged or Jingle All the Way (or Die Hard and Lethal Weapon ).
Kier-La Janisse has attempted to compile a list of these films, along with essays and mini reviews of the tradition as a whole in the new book Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television, co-edited with Paul Corupe.
We may think of Krampus and a murderous Santa Claus as new ideas, but they’re part of a much longer tradition. The obvious historical example is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in which miserly old Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts in the night and terrorized into changing his greedy ways.
“Dickens was actually tapping into a tradition that already existed when he wrote A Christmas Carol,” says Janisse. “It goes back hundreds of years before that.” She adds that “many of the British Christmas horror films have nothing to do with Christmas. In the UK, Christmas is the time that’s associated with horror stories and ghost stories, not Halloween.”
Of course, we have plenty of other reasons to want to subvert the sickly sweet veneer of Christmas time. For a lot of people, Christmas is a time of anxiety and hardship, whether for financial of familial reasons. Maybe you can’t afford presents for your kids. Maybe you’re pissed about the elaborate dinner no one’s helping you with. Maybe you’re nervously waiting for that one uncle to finish his third glass of eggnog and start complaining about football players kneeling during the national anthem.
“We know, just from going through Christmas, that most times people are grouchy and complaining, so I think it’s very easy for people to understand that nihilistic approach to Christmas and the subversion of a lot of those more positive traditions,” says Janisse.
Horror is particularly good at subverting norms. That’s virtually it’s raison d’être. We watch the world as we know it burn to the ground in horror films. Parents become monsters, nuclear families become incestuous bloodbaths, the institutions meant to protect us prey on us. everything and everyone we trust lets us down.
That’s been a problem for the industry at times, says Janisse. “The Santa slasher has been the most popular Christmas horror subgenre. Because of Silent Night, Deadly Night , certain films had protests around them.” Sometimes Christians don’t love having their traditions messed with. Silent Night, Deadly Night was a standout, as its killer was a man traumatized by his parents’ murder on Christmas Eve, and that was followed by an abusive upbringing in a Catholic orphanage. As an adult, he dons a Santa suit and goes on a killing spree. Janisse also points to the more recent protests against 2010’s Sint, in which St. Nicholas is a Bishop who kidnaps and murders children at the full moon.
Slasher Santa as manifestation of PTSD in Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984).
“Obviously horror fans like it. But normal people don’t like the idea of Santa Claus being evil,” says Janisse.
“That created the reemergence of Krampus as an important figure in Christmas horror. Five years ago, most people didn’t know who Krampus was, and now everybody knows,” says Janisse. “People wanted to have that Christmas villain without having to deal with Christians thinking that there’s a war on Christmas.”
In 2015’s Krampus, the titular monster is somewhat like Santa, but only his coal-giving punisher side. Krampus, a mythical goat demon, terrorizes a family when they lose their Christmas spirit. (It’s a decidedly pro-Christmas film, in its own way, if you’re trying to slip under the righteous Christian radar.)
So what else should you watch this Christmas?
“Everything starts with Black Christmas,” says Janisse. “A lot of people just consider it the best Christmas horror film.”
Aside from being an influential and genre-changing film (and possibly the first filmed version of the urban legend in which the killer is calling from inside the house), Black Christmas is just a solid little slasher pic. In it, a deranged killer holes up in the attic of a sorority house during a Christmas party and proceeds to torment and kill the sisters therein over the holidays.
“Some are darker than others. I think a film like Christmas Evil is a much more nihilistic film,” says Janisse. In the 1980 film, another man in a Santa suit goes on a killing spree, this time he’s a fed up toy maker, losing his mind on the assembly line. “Horror transgresses boundaries all the time, and it subverts expectations. It’s a mockery of what is normal. A lot of Christmas horror, like Christmas Evil, will be statements that are anti-commercialist.”
There are other options too, if you’re willing to dig a little to find some even more obscure holiday viewing.
3615 code Père Noël, released in the US as Game Over, sounds like a great choice. “It came out a year before Home Alone, and it’s basically the movie that Home Alone ripped off,” says Janisse. “It’s a little kid who’s in a house, and there’s an evil mall Santa that’s trying to get into the house. The kid is communicating with him through Minitel, basically a primitive form of internet that they had in France 10 years before the internet was widely used in North America. In the movie there’s one in the mall. This evil mall Santa gets on it and pretends to be Santa, and this kid tells him where he lives, and then it’s just the kid defending himself with booby traps.”
Janisse also recommends Elves—“if you want just a real what the hell kind of Christmas movie. I think it’s only ever been released on VHS.” In the 1989 movie, a group of Neo-Nazis works to realize Hitler’s secret agenda to create a master race that actually involves reproducing with Santa’s elves (so, yeah, what the hell?). “There’s actually a screening of it, if people are in LA, on the 16th of December at the American Cinematheque.”
Caption: Tales From the Crypt offers EC Comics-inspired Christmas frights.
“I really like A Christmas Horror Story, a Canadian film that came out a couple years ago, that’s a bit of a portemanteau film,” she adds. “And speaking of portemanteau films, Tales From the Crypt, the 1972 film, has a segment in it with Joan Collins, which is very famous.”
There’s plenty of holiday-themed carnage to choose from, if that’s your jam. Don’t let the sappy positive vibes fool you, there’s no bad time for the sick and twisted.
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