Christmas Horror Movies Even Scrooge Would Approve Of
This holiday season, ditch the sleigh bells for sledge hammers.
Art & Words By Bryan West
Most of us can name at least one cliche holiday film. Titles like It’s A Wonderful Life, The Nightmare Before Christmas, or Miracle on 34th Street are but a few that come to mind.
But over the last couple of decades, people — and the media — have started broadening their definitions of what a Christmas movie can and should be. Hell, according to Rotten Tomatoes, Die Hard is one of the best Christmas movies of all time.
With its gunplay, gleeful swearing, and violence it’s not what most people would consider your standard Christmas flick, and yet apparently it is. In 2018, on the film’s 30th anniversary, 20th Century Fox even recut the trailer, reframing it as a zany Christmas comedy.
Any film genre, it seems, can count as a holiday movie so long as you inject a bit of Christmas time lore into the storyline — including even horror films. Mixing Santa with Satan or snowmen with serial killers might seem antithetical, but they are combinations that do exist within film, however deep you must dig to find them.
Unlike most ‘80s kids, I was lucky enough that the first slasher movie I saw wasn’t Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street, but rather Silent Night, Deadly Night Part II. This totally insane sequel to the 1984 original is about an orphan whose parents were murdered by a man dressed as Santa. His childhood trauma combined with a youth spent in a Catholic orphanage turn him into a killer later on, one who dresses up like Santa Claus and uses the excuse of the holiday to punish the naughty.
Exposing a 9-year-old to such a warped and twisted film was probably not my mom’s brightest move. It only fired up a desire within me to devour more horror films, and I’ve spent the remaining decades of my life scouring video stores, and now online film databases, to find more freaky holiday oddities, like Christmas Evil, Krampus, and The Gingerdead Man.
Because that’s the other thing: Christmas horror movies are not easy to find.
They are few and far between, and more often crap than quality. (Although some might argue that crap is a certain type of quality, but that’s another discussion.)
But, coming from a film nerd who’s seen it all, there are certainly some Christmas horror movies that are better than others. They might not warm your heart and leave you with feelings of holiday cheer, but they will put a smile on your face...or just make you scream.
GREAT (AND UNDERRATED) CHRISTMAS HORROR MOVIES:
Better Watch Out (2016)
Exclusive to Shudder, an all-horror streaming service, Better Watch Out is a thoughtful, funny, and tense thriller. A film for horror fans and cinephiles, it playfully subverts genre cliches and tropes in a way that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
Ashley is a suburban babysitter heading over to her neighbor’s house to watch their 12-year-old son while his yuppie parents head off to a Christmas party. Things are going pretty well until a night of movies and pizza turns into a terrifying home invasion.
If any of this sounds cliche it’s because it is, but Better Watch Out is also full of twists and turns that not only comment on the genre itself but on the state of suburbia and the upper class, as well.
It has a young cast, with Olivia DeJonge playing Ashley the babysitter, a character who is a lot like Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in Halloween. It’s a challenging role as she has to be believable as a regular teenage girl who transforms into a no-nonsense hero capable of handling everything that comes her way. Levi Miller as 12-year-old Luke is stellar, conveying a complex blend of naïveté and bratty entitlement.
The film, directed by Chris Peckover, is slick, fun, and energetic. It’s packed with cinematic references to other films but executed in such a way that it isn’t obvious or irritating. Better Watch Out toes the line of being too clever for its own good, but never crosses that invisible boundary into parody or metafiction.
This is one of those movies that is difficult to discuss without spoiling anything, and I would recommend avoiding reading any reviews or synopses before watching it. In fact, don’t even watch the trailer because it gives too much away; it’s best seen knowing nothing.
Jack Frost (1997)
There are two movies called Jack Frost and both are equally horrific — just for different reasons.
Made one year apart, Jack Frost (1997) is a movie about a killer snowman, while Jack Frost (1998) is a family drama about a jazz musician that gets turned into a snowman. The latter is pretty dreadful to watch and it very nearly destroyed Michael Keaton’s career.
As for Jack Frost (1997), which was directed by Michael Cooney, I have a lot of nostalgia for it, having first rented it from the video store when I was 12.
The movie opens on a recently-apprehended serial killer conveniently named Jack Frost who has just been sentenced to death a few days before Christmas. Jack is being transported to prison when the police van he’s in just happens to collide with another car containing an experimental government chemical. Some of it spills on Jack, turning him into snow and imbuing him with all the powers of…snow.
Freshly amped, he then heads to the nearby and appropriately named town of “Snowmanton” where the sheriff that originally apprehended Jack just so happens to live.
It’s an aggressively stupid movie, but it’s also self-aware in a way that makes you feel like the filmmakers are laughing with you. Jack is constantly cracking jokes and he delivers so many snow-related puns that he puts Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze to shame.
Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)
Anna and the Apocalypse is not just a Christmas horror movie, but a musical, to boot. And when I say it’s a musical, I mean it. Get ready to sing and dance your (snow)boots off while watching this John McPhail-directed flick full of people expressing their inner emotions through song, dance, and more song.
The titular Anna is a high school student who wants to take a year off from school before starting college, and her overprotective dad isn’t happy about it. The cast is filled out by Anna’s friends, a diverse group of students each with their own melodramas. All of this intensifies when the dead start returning to life as mindless zombies just a few days before Christmas break.
Much like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the zombie outbreak is never fully explained. If you are the type of person that hates shows on The CW or can’t enjoy the insanity of Degrassi (either generation), then this is probably not for you. As someone who loves The Flash and Supergirl, I found the melodrama genuinely effective. I even got a little choked up during a few of the more heartfelt scenes.
The horror elements aren’t really “scary,” which isn’t really a surprise given the film’s lyrical similarity to High School Musical. But there are some great zombie deaths and gore effects to satiate fans of the macabre and grotesque.
Surprisingly, you never really feel the shift in tone from horror to musical. Much of this is due to the talented young cast and their characters. What they want, and the challenges they face, create a consistent emotional arc for the audience to follow whether they are singing, taking selfies, or decapitating zombies.
Blood Beat (1983)
Blood Beat is probably the least Christmas-y movie on this list, but what it lacks in yuletide cheer it makes up for in sheer what-the-fuckness. It is one of those special films made with such amateurish enthusiasm that it almost feels like a European arthouse film.
When Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi he famously wrote the script around what he had access to. Blood Beat feels similar to that, but instead of a guitar and a tortoise, director Fabrice A. Zaphiratos had access to rural Wisconsin and a set of samurai armor.
The story centers around a young man who is bringing his college girlfriend home for the holidays. Things get awkward when his presumably psychic mother starts to suspect that there is something strangely familiar about her son’s new girlfriend. The next thing you know, his girlfriend is having orgasmic wet dreams (or perhaps nightmares?) about killing people with a samurai sword.
With its archaic weaponry and raunchy yet awkward bedroom scenes, Blood Beat feels tonally like The Room mixed with The Shinning and a little bit of the 1977 Japanese horror comedy, Hausu. The score was composed by the director using a spastic mix of lo-fi synth tones and public domain classical music. Zaphiratos also wrote, shot, and edited the film. It might have a few too many random deer hunting sequences, but on the whole, watching Blood Beat feels a lot like discovering a buried cult treasure.
Black Christmas (1974)
The progenitor of Christmas horror films, Black Christmas is also often lauded as one of the first slasher movies. Released long before the slasher movie boom of the ‘80s and a solid four years before John Carpenter’s Halloween, all of the familiar ingredients are here, just with a more original slant.
Black Christmas contains everything we’ve come to love (and hate) about horror films: the sorority house, the obscene phone calls, the incompetent police, the voyeuristic camera, and of course the kills.
Part of what makes the film so good is that the typical slasher tropes weren’t established yet and because Black Christmas never tries to adhere to a proven formula. Director Bob Clark (who would go on to helm A Christmas Story nine years later) confidently shifts tones from horror to police procedural and back again. There are even some moments of expertly applied humor to disarm the audience between kills.
The sorority house setting is used in many slashers to titillate or engage an imagined primarily male audience, but Black Christmas might be the least exploitative slasher of all time. The emotional plot of the film revolves around Jess, played by Olivia Hussey, who has recently found out she is pregnant and has decided to have an abortion. When she tells her boyfriend, he is enraged and feels like he should have some say in her decision.
Male entitlement is at the core of this film. The women in the sorority house are constantly being subjected to judgment from the outside world. They are told how to behave, what they should want, and what is expected of them culturally.
This idea is crystallized in Barb, Jess’s boisterous housemate played by Margot Kidder. Kidder’s mix of elegance and raucous energy is what made her perfect for the role of Lois Lane just a few years later. Throughout the movie, she is drinking, swearing, and openly talking about sex. She’s really no different than the other girls she lives with, but she isn’t hiding anything. The men in Black Christmas can only react to her in stunned and horrified silence.
Once the killings start and the girls in the house begin to go missing, it’s victim-blaming time — and even some of the girls blame Barb for provoking the killer by telling him off over the phone.
The kills are few but the methods are varied and brutal. Black Christmas isn’t very gory, but it’s genuinely creepy, and when someone dies you feel the loss. Eventually, the movie starts to feel like a snow globe — enclosed and chaotic — with us, the audience, pressed up against the glass and complicit in the murders.
(This article was originally published on Dec. 13, 2019)
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