It’s Christmas! Do you know what grim, gory holiday-themed movie you’re going to watch after you finish ripping through your presents? Horror streamer Shudder has an excellent selection, so it’s our annual go-to when deciding on frights to fill those long, cold winter nights.
io9 did a variation on this list a few years ago, which you can read here. There’s some overlap in the list below—especially among the classics—but there’s no genre that lends itself more to watching every year than seasonal favorites, particularly ones that mix candy canes and twinkling lights with a high body count.
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 (1987)
A reboot of this classic slasher series from Mike P. Nelson just hit theaters, but no new entry could ever take the place of what came before: a movie about a kid so traumatized by seeing his parents murdered by a crook dressed as Santa that he himself takes up the murderous-Claus mantle once he’s old enough to hoist an axe of his own. The sequel incorporates a laughable amount of flashbacks, but it also has its own catchphrase (“Garbage day!”) to go with the original’s immortal “Punish!”
Black Christmas (1974)
Bob Clark also directed 1983’s A Christmas Story, which has its own demented elements, but far creepier is this proto-slasher that helped pave the way for Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream, and many more. Just before the holiday break, sorority sisters start going missing from a house that’s been receiving obscene phone calls—a premise that barely begins to scratch the surface of a wonderfully disturbing film that more than lives up to its tag line: “If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight!”
The Advent Calendar (2021)
Mean-spirited in the very best way, this 2021 French-Belgian release took us by surprise when it first arrived on Shudder, and it’s one we still look forward to re-watching with the season. A woman whose dance career was cut short by a terrible car accident receives an unusual gift: an antique wooden advent calendar that holds a sinister but tantalizing secret. A clever script and a tense, disorienting atmosphere make The Advent Calendar a truly diabolical holiday treat—the equivalent of a Christmas cookie with its head bitten off.
The Sacrifice Game (2023)
The “boarding school where a couple of kids must hang out over the holidays” trope has been done a lot, no offense, Paul Giamatti. Also, the “cult performing ritualistic murders to raise a demon” trope is nothing new. But who would ever think about putting the two together? The Sacrifice Game did, and the end result is a gruesome and ghoulish (yet still seasonal) yarn.
Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)
An animatronic Santa malfunctions, breaks out of a small-town toy store, and goes on a killing spree. That’s already a fun setup even without the introduction of Christmas Bloody Christmas‘ unconventional heroine, who’d rather be out drinking at the bar on Christmas Eve but will certainly fight for her life using every badass trick in the book when robot Kris Kringle locks onto her like the Terminator.
The Haunted Season (2024, 2025)
Shudder’s ongoing holiday horror series celebrates the tradition of telling scary stories at Christmas, though the short films themselves aren’t actually Christmas-themed. They are chilling, though, and this year’s entry, The Occupant of the Room, directed by series creator Kier-La Janisse, does take place in late December. Last year’s, Sean Hogan’s To Fire You Come at Last, just might make you think twice about walking home in the dark after the festivities are over.
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