The Best Christmas Horror Movies To Make It a Dark Winter’s Night

As with the proliferation of cheery, romantic, and/or family-friendly holiday movies, the advent of streaming has created a real boom in subpar Christmas horror movies. From Santa slashers to Krampus attacks, slapping some Christmas imagery on your movie (or even just your thumbnail) is a great way to pick up some curiosity streams and/or places of prominence on, well, lists like this one. Not to pick on a specific movie, but take a look at Better Watch Out: It’s an average-at-best Christmas-set home-invasion thriller with few scares, dumb plot twists, and a tin ear for dialogue, but because it wasn’t widely reviewed upon its 2016 release, it was able to hit Rotten Tomatoes with an abnormally high score and get combed by every list-trawling meta-list looking for any and every Christmas horror movie available to stream. But you, the holiday horror watcher, deserve better than Better! You deserve movies that actually combine distinctive filmmaking with the many moods—dread, defiance, hope, hysterical panic—where a good horror movie can overlap with a more complicated Christmas. Here, then, are 11 good-to-great Christmas horror movies from the past 50 years (plus one that just turned 80!) with levels of holiday terror ranging from mild to unbearably intense.

The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

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The 1940s equivalent of the Christmas horror movie—the darker-hued counterpoint to the Christmas comedies and dramas of the day—was the Christmas noir, so there aren’t too many Christmassy horror movies in the first half-century-plus of U.S. cinema. But Curse of the Cat People is an early pioneer in this subgenre. A sequel to the 1942 classic, it follows the husband of the first movie’s glorious beast-woman as he remarries and has a child—who then, at the age of six, makes friends with the ghost of her dad’s deceased ex! Though multiple characters and actors from the first movie return, Curse of the Cat People has a decidedly different tone; more witchy, sweet-natured folktale than psychosexual werewolf riff, it’s basically a film about a (supernaturally) blended family spending the holidays together, complete with a climactic snowstorm.

Black Christmas (1974)

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It’s an obvious one, and a slasher picture good enough to make a master list of great Christmas movies, but it must be included here too. Bob Clark’s early American slasher beat Halloween to the punch and has an appropriately distinct vibe from that John Carpenter classic, drawing the connection between Christmas lights and lurid giallo reds (though the word “giallo,” a term for pulpy Italian horror, actually means “yellow”). The remakes will inevitably come up when you search, so here’s a quick guide: The 2006 redo from ace X-Files alumni Glen Morgan and James Wong is memorably grotesque (and co-stars their Final Destination 3 scream queen Mary Elizabeth Winstead) but cares far more about the slasher than the sorority girls he’s stalking; the 2019 version tries to tilt the balance back towards the ladies with a #MeToo-inspired story that doesn’t go quite as hard as you’d like, thematically or stylistically. So stick with the unnervingly beautiful original, which isn’t just a great Christmas horror movie, but a top-five slasher movie, full stop.

Christmas Evil (1980)

Look, there are a lot of Santa slashers out there. The most famous is probably Silent Night, Deadly Night, which inspired multiple sequels as well as some outrage for a marketing campaign that leaned into the image of a killer Santa Claus. But ridiculous moral panic doesn’t make a movie good, and viewed on its own, Silent Night, Deadly Night is low-rent shlock, while the less notorious Christmas Evil, which preceded it by four years, is weirdly delightful shlock. Though both movies turn on traumatic childhood backstory that drive a grown man to dress as Santa and murder people, Christmas Evil is both more parodically whimsical (with a terrifically bonkers ending) and, in its way, more committed to the bit, with a lead character who really does want to become Santa Claus, with a murderous rage that emerges as an offshoot of that misguided effort. It’s a holiday slasher that engages more directly with the spirit of the season than simply treating it with cynical mockery (while also working pretty well as a critique of the Christmas-cheer frenzy that can infect so many dysfunctional adults).

Gremlins (1984)

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Joe Dante’s hilarious desecration of small-town America is situated perfectly in the context of Christmas: a father gifts his son an exotic pet, which turns out to be a mogwai, an adorable creature who can only be properly cared for by following three simple yet impossible rules: no bright light, don’t get it wet, and don’t feed it after midnight. A few accidental slip-ups later, and the town of Kingston Falls is overrun with mischievous, murderous little creatures, tromping through the snow and terrorizing anyone they come across. (Even when the movie takes a pause from the mayhem, it’s for poor Phoebe Cates to reveal a gruesome Christmas-themed family anecdote.) In other words, the American id—ravenous consumption! Self-interest! Violence!—collides with our self-image as a bunch of folksy small-town sweethearts, which, with the anarchic but not completely cynical Dante in charge, is true about half the time. (The main characters really are good people; the nasty old lady does kinda get what’s coming to her.) That the climax takes place at a department store is even more perfect, given how much Gremlins merchandise was (and still is!) available. Honestly, this is nearly as much of a Christmas classic as It’s a Wonderful Life.

Night of the Comet (1984)

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It admittedly has far less Christmas content than the same year’s Gremlins, but Night of the Comet still makes for a neat double feature with its fellow horror-comedy. Set during the run-up to Christmas, it follows the teenage survivors of a cosmic disaster: Earth has passed through the tail of a comet, incinerating a lot of people and turning others into mixed-up zombies. There’s a charming holiday-break rootlessness to their subsequent adventures, and the movie’s juxtaposition of Valley Girl culture with fantastical horrors pre-visioned the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

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The ‘90s were a fallow period for the slashers that provide the backbone of the Christmas-horror economy. However, they were also a golden age for lavish and sensitive monster stories, with Tim Burton reigning as a master of the form. His Frankenstein-inspired Edward Scisorrhands is perhaps too gentle to count as horror, and of course, there’s plenty that’s kid-friendly, even cuddly, about The Nightmare Before Christmas, his beloved collaboration with director Henry Selick. But Nightmare is especially neat as an intro to the subgenre because it’s basically a Christmas-horror story where your sympathies are placed (at least partially) with the ghouls perpetrating crimes against the holiday order. A well-meaning weirdo trying to take over Christmas is basically the same story as Christmas Evil, only told here with an unconventional lesson about failure, and how it’s OK to experiment and screw up. As such, it’s a much-needed antidote to picture-perfect holiday stories for kids.

Inside (2007)

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Christmas Eve is a relatively popular setting for horror movies, and in that sense, the French home-invasion slasher Inside is indulging in well-worn gimmickry. But it’s almost unnerving how little the movie actually cares about doing the cutesy-ironic Christmas-imagery-gone-wrong routine. Away in the suburbs, no crib needed quite yet, a widowed young woman (Alysson Paradis) prepares for her Christmas Day labor inducement on her own. Brushing off her own mother (and still mourning the car-crash death of the baby’s father), she has her boss coming over at 6AM to take her to the hospital. But a mysterious, menacing figure shows up at her door and pretty quickly makes it clear that she wants in: in the house, and in her uterus. She wants the baby for herself. Filmmakers Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo mix slasher-movie gore with home-invasion tension; this is pretty unrelentingly nasty stuff, to which the Christmas Eve timeframe adds discomfiting undertones. But Inside refuses to overdo it on the Christmas stuff, and that’s about the only area where that’s true.

Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

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There’s so much about Anna and the Apocalypse that threatens to feel like a hat on a (Santa) hat: It’s one of those irreverent zombie comedies everyone thought they could do in the wake of Shaun of the Dead; it’s a Christmas-set version, in what could be a potentially cynical move to differentiate itself from said zom-coms; and, on top of all that, it’s also a musical. Now picture just how charming a movie would have to be to (mostly) overcome the cutesiness of all that; that’s Anna and the Apocalypse, which maybe isn’t quite the revolutionary genre-buster it wants to be, but is, admittedly, a novel mash-up of oft-tired tropes. Ella Hunt plays a Scottish girl desperate to flee her small hometown, to the chagrin of her protective dad; a zombie-attacked holiday season, then, becomes something of a rushed apocalypse for Anna’s old life, a neat inversion of the home-for-the-holidays standby. As for the soul-baring tunes: They’re a little corny, but they sure beat hearing “The Christmas Song” for the umpteenth time.

The Lodge (2019)

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The second part of Riley Keough’s as-yet-uncompleted Naked Somewhere Cold trilogy after the underrated (but decidedly non-Christmassy) Hold the Dark, The Lodge is a perfect representation of the bleaker side of Christmas break, forcing Grace (Keough) to spend holiday family time at an isolated cabin with her soon-to-be stepkids after their dad lights out for a work trip. (Grimmer still: the kids’ mother committed suicide when her husband informed her that he would be divorcing her and marrying Grace.) The film becomes a mysterious battle between Grace, the hostile children, and Grace’s psyche, wounded by her years growing up in a cult, which she has since escaped. But is full escape ever really possible? Filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala ask that question via one of the most wintry desolation movies this side of The Thing, with forced holiday togetherness in place of a shapeshifting alien. It’s thoroughly disturbing stuff.

Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)

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Some might be put off by the self-consciousness of this low-budget slasher from writer-director Joe Beogs: not just its retro influences (a horror director who fetishizes ‘80s slasher movies?! You don’t say!) but the endless reams of reference-trading, profanity-laced dialogue, particularly between its record-store-clerk leads (Riley Dandy and Sam Delich). But beneath that perhaps-overwritten bravado, the movie has a surprisingly lovely sense of last-call Christmas Eve romance, reflected in the movie’s visual style, depending heavily on 16mm cinematography, Christmas-light glow, and swirls of grainy snow – a dependably gorgeous combination that Begos really milks for all it’s worth. Oh, and eventually a killer Santa-bot starts stalking and killing everyone in sight. But Begos really lets his characters breathe before the murders kick in, and Dandy makes a terrifically scrappy Final Girl. This is the rare slasher throwback that’s significantly better than most of the movies it’s throwing back to, and made with a lot more care than most quick-hit plays for streaming attention, too.

Terrifier 3 (2024)

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Damien Leone’s bozo slasher epic continues with the biggest-grossing holiday horror picture in years; yes, Terrifier 3 made more money than the recent hit Violent Night (as well as the non-horror The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, if we’re keeping track). Some theaters are even bringing it back on Christmas Day if you want to live the horror lifestyle to its fullest. Shot with a grainy warmth similar to Christmas Bloody Christmas, and a similar affection for its leading lady, but way more gleefully ghastly (maybe even self-satisfied) about its envelope-pushing kills, Terrifier 3 wants to be the hardest-core holiday horror around, and succeeds through sheer force of will (and, at one point, chainsaw). Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), that malevolent serial killer resurrected by demonic forces, returns to dress up as Santa and kill whoever he can (and yes, that includes children); it’s up, once again, to Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) to stop him. Craftwise, the Terrifier movies have improved with each entry, although this one lacks some of the dementedly overlong oddball grandeur of its predecessor, and feels even more like an installment in a series than ever before. Still, Art’s brand of deeply evil mischief is perfectly suited to holiday iconography, emphasizing that there is something weirdly merry about Christmas horror, even when it’s bloodying up a beloved institution.