The scene opens with a loving family huddled around a roaring fire, their faces illuminated by the flames and unwrapping perfectly wrapped gifts from under an enormous tree. It’s Christmas and they are grateful for each other’s company. Later, satiated by upsetting amounts of food and drink, they lay around dazed, thinking that the Santa wielding a knife hovering above them is merely a food-induced vision, until blood splatters everywhere.
Okay, that’s not from a movie, just from my imagination, but it could be a scene in a Christmas horror film.
It’s easy to readily associate horror with Halloween—the spooky atmosphere, costumes—it’s an entire holiday built around scares. Christmas, of course, is the complete opposite. It’s a holiday built entirely around family time, getting presents and basking in the joy of the “season,” whatever that means. (We won’t discuss like the lowlevel depressing nature of it all). But for all intensive purposes, Christmas is a holiday about love, celebration and joy.
So, then what’s more sinister than having something horrific happen to you and yours smack dab in the most joyful season of the year?
The Christmas horror genre (can we call it a genre?) is small but packs a punch. As with any genre, and especially horror, there’s always crap (hello to Jack Frost and Santa Claws) but when it’s good (or even "so good it's bad") this type of holiday horror can be legitimately more frightening or funny, just because of the setting.
Take for example Bob Clark’s 1974 horror masterpiece, Black Christmas, a low budget slasher about a group of sorority sisters who have long been receiving menacing phone calls from an unknown creep. Starring Olivia Hussey (the babe in the 1970s Romeo and Juliet you surely watched in an English class), it follows a group of women at the end of their winter term celebrating the end of finals, drinking a ton of booze and getting ready to head home for the holidays. Off the bat, the setting is cheerful and loose, but is punctuated by the phone calls of the “moaner” (as the ladies call him), that throughout the film escalate into more serious tension as the maniacal moaner begins stalking and killing the sisters of the sorority. The kills of the film usually contain some sort of holiday flair—carolers singing in the background, Christmas lights flickering through a window—making them even more unsettling. While Black Christmas, just from its own merits elevates itself from typical slasher fare (it is one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen), the Christmas setting—a time of goodwill and joy and family—make it all the more terrifying.
And even in the case of “so bad it is good” horror, the holiday setting can add to the campiness, especially in the case of 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, where an 80s hot dude, Billy, understandably has PTSD after his parents were murdered by a drunk killer Santa. That PTSD is worsened after he’s raised in an abusive Catholic orphanage, so to say that Billy isn’t, well, troubled would be an understatement. Unlike Black Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night perhaps accidentally plays its horror for laughs, so when Billy is triggered by having to dress as Santa at the holiday party for the department store he works at, and ends up donning the same suit that murdered his parents to murder a bunch of other people—it’s kinda funny (the cheesy dialogue doesn’t help).
The sequel to the film doubles down on the holiday “cheer,” and once you get past the whole first movie (yes, they put the whole first movie in the sequel), you get Billy’s long-lost brother Ricky, now the perpetrator of many murders of his own. Creatively titled, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 takes some, um, narrative license to fit Ricky into the story of the first film before we get his story, like his brother, they both kill “naughty” people. And Ricky terrorizes everyone who is naughty (which is just about everyone ranging from regular people to nuns) which results in one of the weirdest kill scenes in horror history.
Yeah, these movies aren’t cinematic genius (well, maybe they are), but they really lean into the holiday spirit of Christmas horror. And these are just a few examples. So instead of rewatching Love Actually (which could be Christmas horror in its own right), maybe take a look at a more blood-drenched holiday option for mandatory drunken family viewing this year.
