TINSEL & GORE

How Christmas slasher flicks revel in the darker side of capitalism and family anxieties

The first time I saw Silent Night, Deadly Night I was 12. I was spending the night at my friend Dustin’s house, a pretty thrilling experience because we were mostly unsupervised. Not only that, but his very sweet mom gave us free rein at the local video store, allowing us to rent the most depraved R-rated horror movies available in a 1980s video emporium tucked in the back of a small-town Oklahoma gas station. This meant that our adolescent brains were allowed to consume hours upon hours of slasher movies like I Spit on Your Grave, The Hills Have Eyes and every permutation of Friday the 13th. Dustin’s mom would occasionally flit through the living room while chatting on the phone or delivering a snack, but she was impervious to the content on the screen, undisturbed by the din of chainsaws or the relentless screams of teenagers that held the two of us in thrall. It was only after she caught a glimpse of a Christmas-themed horror movie one night that she finally became appalled. As she watched a woman being impaled on a pair of reindeer antlers by a sneering murderer in a Santa suit, she switched off the VCR, announcing, “You guys, I’m sorry, but this is really sick!”

I would come to learn that the film in question, Silent Night, Deadly Night, while perhaps the most notorious Christmas slasher, is but one in an ever-expanding subgenre of holiday horror films. As it turns out, there is a horror movie for literally any special occasion. While Judeo-Christian holidays snag the lion’s share, there are horror movies about Jewish holidays (2019’s Hanukkah), Easter (Rottentail), Valentine’s Day (My Bloody Valentine), Mother’s Day (the aptly named matriarch slasher Mother’s Day from 1980), Independence Day (Uncle Sam), April Fools’ (April Fool’s Day), Halloween (obviously) and Thanksgiving (1981’s Home Sweet Home, ThanksKilling, and most recently, Eli Roth’s 2023 hit, Thanksgiving). This list doesn’t even scratch the surface of movies dedicated to exploiting the trauma of birthdays, proms or graduations.

Horror movies are often remarkably prescient at reflecting back the social mores and cultural attitudes that other films aren’t willing to address (as evidence, take a peek at the volumes written about 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, its influence on cinema and what it says about post-Vietnam youth culture of the 1970s). That fact in mind, it makes sense that holidays—and Christmas in particular—are especially ripe for the killing. The pressure to be merry, the anxiety of dealing with family and the need for perfection are all stressors to drive any sane person to violence. Holiday horror movies offer an alternate version of the festive experience that, if we’re lucky, makes our own holiday seem a little less scary. 

Unsurprisingly, Christmas-themed horror has become its own cottage industry, and every year as the holiday season approaches streaming platforms are flooded with a fresh glut of yuletide B-movie offerings. Demons and the vengeful souls of serial killers routinely take up residence in the form of snowmen (1997’s Jack Frost), gingerbread men (The Gingerdead Man), murderous elves (Rare Exports, 2017’s Elves), cursed gifts (Demonic Toys, Snowmageddon), a killer shark that dons a Santa hat (Santa Jaws) and even a possessed Christmas tree (The Killing Tree, in which an executed killer is accidentally reincarnated in the form of a now-murderous evergreen dressed up in ornaments). 

Yet no figure looms larger in the pantheon of Christmas horror than Santa Claus. Also known also as Father Christmas, Saint Nick and Kris Kringle, Santa as we currently know him is a cultural amalgam of myths and stories that thread back through Western Christian culture all the way to the Roman Empire of the 4th century. Various cultures have put their own respective spin on this mystical gift-giver, but all of them lean heavily on the notion of a godlike list-maker rewarding good behavior. The idea of Santa that looms largest in culture—the benevolent, red-suited toymaker who lives in the North Pole and has omniscient knowledge of every child’s secret behavior—is so ingrained in our consciousness that it’s easy to dismiss how weird it actually is. Santa is supernatural. He commands a pack of flying animals and an army of elves. He knows when you’ve been sleeping and when you’re awake. A visit from Santa is an inverted home invasion in which he leaves presents rather than stealing them. Given all of this, it’s easy to see how the myth of Santa can be easily reverse-engineered by filmmakers—and why, particularly in a capitalist America suspicious of free anything, he is so frequently recast in the role of a murderous psychopath.

There are literally dozens of killer Santa movies. Yet 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night remains the undisputed granddaddy of the genre. And in many ways it is still the most disturbing. Released on the same day as Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (which it initially outgrossed), the film sparked outrage before it ever hit theaters, due to its shock-and-awe ad campaign: Print ads featuring Santa Claus descending into a chimney with a double-bit ax and the iconic tagline “He Knows When You’ve Been Naughty” were paired with a trailer (“You’ve made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas”) that aired relentlessly on prime-time television during family fare such as Three’s Company and Little House on the Prairie. This deranged but effective marketing strategy resulted in a deluge of complaints from parents and religious organizations, who loudly groused that the ads terrified their children and legitimately caused them to fear Santa Claus. Despite retooling the ads and promotional spots, the film continued to be a cultural lightning rod, garnering vitriol from critics (Leonard Maltin famously quipped, “What’s next, the Easter Bunny as a child molester?”) and prompting parental groups to protest in what is arguably the most apt way possible—by showing up outside theaters and singing Christmas carols. 

The movie tells the story of Billy, a boy who, after watching his parents killed by a man in a Santa suit, ends up becoming a ward of the state. After suffering at the hands of sadistic nuns, a now-adult Billy tries to assimilate back into society by taking a job at a toy store. Just when it seems like he’s managed to turn his life around, the stress of the holiday season proves too much, and Billy’s long-buried Christmas PTSD causes him to flip all the way out. Soon enough he’s donned a Santa suit and begins administering justice, via an ax, to anyone deemed “naughty” (typically while whispering the word “naughty” in the process). As slashers go, the carnage in Silent Night, Deadly Night is relatively run-of-the-mill, but director Charles E. Sellier Jr., who previously worked on upbeat television shows like The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, was so unnerved by the film’s violent sequences that he eventually handed off those scenes to the film’s editor, who tried to add some flair to the murders. These scenes involved everything from seeing a would-be rapist strung up by Christmas lights to a teenage bully getting his head lopped off while speeding down a snowy mountainside in a stolen sled. The film’s morality is murky at best, but in the guise of homicidal Santa, Billy’s primary targets are abusers, young people attempting to have any form of sex and mean nuns.

Despite being pulled from theaters after one week (during which it had already managed to twice recoup its modest $1 million budget), the movie would go on to spawn multiple sequels (four and counting) and have a long, lucrative life on home video. Having successfully subverted St. Nick—the spirit of giving personified—the floodgates were opened. The image of a maniacal, murderous Santa Claus would become one of horror’s most repeated tropes.

Part of the joy of seeing the killer Santa is simply the cultural heresy of watching one of our most sacred cows turned murderously on its head. In horror, we are frequently served an Old Testament notion of a Santa Claus rather than the touchy-feely Christian one. He is a figure generally less concerned with rewarding the good and very interested in punishing the bad. In the case of these films, “badness” is typically loosely defined and might range from actual criminal behavior to the simple malfeasance of not having enough holiday spirit. The vendetta is frequently personal, but across the board a killer Santa tends to hate cheats, liars and perverts, though his wrath can often be truly arbitrary, which is a pity if you just randomly happen to be the person at home putting out the milk and cookies when he comes sliding down the chimney. 

Two of the most gleeful depictions of a vengeful Santa come courtesy of Tales from the Crypt. The iconic horror comic has been adapted for the screen in a variety of incarnations, but one story—“And All Through the House”— has garnered two memorable and equally evil versions. In the story, a calculating wife makes the mistake of murdering her husband at the same moment an escaped mental patient (dressed as Santa, naturally) decides to pay her home a Christmas Eve visit. While the wife (played in the 1972 version by Joan Collins, chewing up the scenery in a mod townhouse) struggles to keep the homicidal Santa at bay, her young, unsuspecting daughter, excited to see Santa outside her window, decides to let him in. The 1989 version, directed by Robert Zemeckis, amped up the scare factor with a deranged Santa played by Larry Drake, whose toothy, drooly, grinning visage of St. Nick is truly the stuff of nightmares. In both adaptations, the unhinged killer Santa seems interested in bloodshed for its own sake. It just happens that the victim sort of deserves it.

Santa is, of course, only one facet of our shared Christmas experience, and horror movies are equally adept at poking holes at the various ways we do (or don’t) celebrate the most wonderful time of the year. A different but no less influential spin on the horror of Christmas was established with 1974’s Black Christmas. The movie, which follows a group of college coeds who spend the holidays in their sorority house (while stalked by a faceless killer, who has taken up residence in the attic), helped popularize some of the most memorable chestnuts in all of horror. The killer terrorizes his victims with a series of increasingly lurid phone calls, which eventually introduces the concept of “the calls are coming from inside the house!” (The killer apparently has his own extension in the attic.) The movie also includes incredibly effective sequences from the killer’s point of view, a conceit that is widely credited for inspiring the look and feel of Halloween, which would appear four years later.

Black Christmas also hinges on a particular character behavior that, in the realm of holiday horror, is often punishable by death. Namely, people who have decided to ditch their family gatherings and traditional holiday celebrations in favor of doing their own thing (that thing frequently includes drinking with their pals or having sex with their teenage boyfriends). It’s an oddly puritanical streak that runs through much of the horror of the ’70s and ’80s—young people who don’t abide by the rules of decorum get the ax, while the abstaining virgins end up surviving. In the case of movies like The Dorm that Dripped Blood and To All a Good Night, choosing to party with your friends instead of exchanging gifts with your boring parents is a crime worthy of being shot with a crossbow, suffocated with a plastic bag in the attic while your girlfriends sing Christmas carols or being gouged in the eye with a Christmas ornament. Of course, there are also movies that turn this notion on its head, wherein it would have been better to avoid family completely. Such is the case in a 1972 TV movie called Home for the Holidays, in which a young Sally Field goes home to visit her siblings for Christmas only to be menaced by a killer wearing a yellow rain slicker and wielding a pitchfork. Spoiler alert: It turns out to be her sister.

In a culture of cinema that idealizes the notion of the heteronormative family above all else, the idea of Christmas as a bloodbath is uniquely compelling. To eschew these revered, if somewhat calcified, holiday traditions is to find yourself unprotected and at the mercy of forces that want only to senselessly destroy you. The other side of this coin, of course, acknowledges that for many of us, home is not a safe space. An equally scary idea is that the places where we grew up can be hotbeds of inexplicable violence. In movies like 2016’s Better Watch Out (or even in 1990’s lighthearted home-invasion comedy juggernaut Home Alone), home is where the horror happens. 

Perhaps only second to Santa when it comes to doling out holiday terror is Krampus. A kind of anti-Santa figure tracing back to Bavarian and Austrian folklore, the mythology of Krampus is nearly as old as that of Santa Claus but far less cuddly. Early depictions of Krampus describe him as Santa’s accomplice, showing up to punish children who have misbehaved by beating them with birch rods (presumably while Santa looks on approvingly) and stuffing them into a basket he keeps strapped to his back to take them away. Depicted as demonic and hairy, with curved horns and a long, snakelike tongue, Krampus is the ultimate tool for scaring-straight those children who can’t be wooed into good behavior with the simple promise of gifts.

Though the story of Krampus is nothing new, a slew of American horror films over the past decade have elevated his popularity. In 2015’s Krampus, the titular holiday demon shows up to decimate a dysfunctional family (led by Toni Collette) after a disgruntled child inadvertently summons him into existence. Krampus shows up not only to punish the family of nonbelievers but to lay waste to their entire neighborhood. Given his backstory, it’s not surprising that Krampus essentially now constitutes his own genre. Not only is he a dream in terms of what a horrific Christmas beast should look like—hulking, horned and satanic—but his sole purpose is to punish. In the cosmos of Krampus movies, this punishment is not always for bad behavior but frequently for simply not understanding what the holidays are supposed to be about. Krampus is often a veiled attempt to mock the commercialization of the holidays and stick a fork (or, if the situation allows, a sharpened candy cane) into the notion of the bucolic family Christmas. When your values and principles have become too fully commercialized and corrupted, Krampus will teach you a lesson by literally stuffing you into a basket and toting you straight to hell.

Part of the pleasure in these films is seeing our own worst consumerist tendencies viscerally called out. I’m thinking of the bratty girl in 2012’s Silent Night who, after demanding a new Louis Vuitton bag, inadvertently offends a homicidal Santa who responds in kind by electrocuting her with a supercharged cattle prod until she foams at the mouth. In movies like Christmas Evil (another killer Santa movie from the early ’80s), it’s actually childhood trauma—literally the family itself—that turns out to be the root of all problems (surprise!), and the pressure cooker of the holidays provides the perfect catalyst for all of that repressed trauma to come flying out. In this film, the shock of learning that Santa is not real (along with seeing your drunken father in a Santa suit trying to grope your mother under the tree) proves so traumatizing to a young boy named Harry that he eventually becomes Christmas-obsessed, packing his apartment with holiday ephemera, taking a job at a toy factory and sleeping every night in a Santa suit. Ironically, it’s a holiday party—wherein he realizes how little the holidays mean to his coworkers—that sends him into a murderous fugue state, which is nothing if not relatable. Harry only wants to bring joy to the world, but the stress of the holidays instead causes him to kill everyone. 

A high benchmark for holiday-themed havoc is still set by Gremlins—a movie that, despite having been a huge box office success and mainstream cultural phenomenon geared toward children, offers a surprisingly cynical view of human nature. When a young bank teller named Billy is gifted an adorable mogwai—a small monkey-like creature (a kind of proto–Baby Yoda)—to keep as a pet, the only caveat is that he must abide by a few seemingly simple rules (keep them out of the sun, don’t get them wet and no food after midnight). After Billy predictably fails to abide by said rules, his cuddly mogwai quickly spawns a horde of snarling green goblins that set about destroying the entire town in the matter of a few hours, just as everyone attempts to celebrate Christmas. While the gremlins are themselves equal-opportunity destroyers, they do appear to take special joy in inflicting pain on those who particularly seem to deserve it. The town Scrooge, Mrs. Deagle (played by Polly Holliday, better known as Flo from the TV show Alice), is killed when her malfunctioning, gremlin-tampered electric chairlift shoots her through a second-floor window. Even though the gremlin invasion is eventually thwarted, the town of Kingston Falls is destroyed, and the entire chaotic episode becomes a teachable moment about how our human inability to obey even the most basic rules will invariably always be our downfall. In the end, Billy is all of us—a person who doesn’t properly appreciate or respect the gift he is given and as a result ruins Christmas (and lots of people die). Much like Poltergeist, another perfect horror film from the ’80s, Gremlins is a savvy take on consumerism, the have-and-have-not culture of the Reagan years, and a lampoon of the kind of sentimental small town idealized in It’s a Wonderful Life. Billy’s father is a gadget inventor so absorbed with trying to get rich quick that he can’t properly show up for his family. Meanwhile, the town itself is filled with drunks, grinchy rich people and lots of folks living on the brink of financial ruin. The stress and angst of Christmas provides the perfect toxic energy for breeding an army of holiday-destroying monsters.

It is hardly shocking that our holiday traditions are so routinely tied to the horrific and the supernatural. Arguably the most famous holiday story of all, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, is a ghost-filled tale that, much like Silent Night, Deadly Night or any of the countless B-grade Krampus movies, seeks to unpack the gross materialism of the holidays and our own frequently misplaced values. As it turns out, horror films can X-ray these ideas in a way that Hallmark Christmas movies and Mariah Carey cannot. In a season that, for many, is all about forced happiness, strained family relationships and untenable financial demands, scary movies refract and explode the holiday notions that are unattainable and completely unrealistic. They point out how the idea of a nuclear family gathered around the suburban Christmas tree, the holiday office party and simple Christmas shopping are basically tantamount to being eaten alive by sentient Christmas trees (a metaphor writ large in 2008’s 16-minute Treevenge.) Seeing the folly of these cultural norms beaten to a pulp can also be both satisfying (yes, fuck this stupid holiday) and validating (I am not the only one who kinda hates all of this). They give us a place to admit to things we’re not supposed to feel. A recent spin, 2022’s The Mean One, retells the story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by depicting the titular character as more than just a loudmouthed seasonal grouch, but literally as a murderous green-skinned monster hell-bent on destoying the holiday and everything it represents. In this case, you are compelled to root for the Grinch. 

While horror can often be a painfully repetitive genre, offering diminishing returns on the same timeworn formulas, the notion of the bad Santa continues to be fruitful for both horror and non-horror movies alike. Take 2003’s Bad Santa, which, while not technically a horror film, played on the comedic shock of seeing a not-very-nice guy in a Santa suit doing very bad things (drinking, stealing, having sex) before undergoing a change of heart, seemingly in no small part due to the jolly red suit he’s spent most of the movie wearing. Similarly, 2023’s Violent Night has Santa Claus (played by Stranger Things’ David Harbour) using his supernatural prowess when facing off against a crew of very naughty mercenaries seeking to rob a wealthy family. In both cases, it’s about subverting the power of the red suit and what it means. In Christmas horror films, the average Santa is much like a clown, and the films frequently play off the idea that, underneath the fake beard, wig and hat, you never really know exactly who—or what—is there.