The 2015 film Krampus ends with a family fighting for their lives against a hideous demon who is so relentless that he chases them through a blinding snowstorm, taking them out one by one (with some help from terrifying elves and evil toys). But the movie’s greatest horrors arrive much earlier. Directed by Michael Dougherty, Krampus opens with slow-motion images of Christmastime chaos as superstore customers play tug-of-war with hard-to-find items, kids cry in Santa’s lap, and zombie-like shoppers line up in unmoving checkout lines. A melee even breaks out in the living Nativity scene. All the while, Bing Crosby’s rendition of “It’s Beginning to Look Like Christmas” plays on the soundtrack.
It’s an ironic song choice, but only up to a point. Christmas can and often does look like this, even if Christmas movies don’t always tell the truth about the holidays. Sometimes it looks even worse. In subsequent scenes, Max (Emjay Anthony), the film’s young hero, grows so upset with his quarrelsome, harried family and their mockery of his belief in Santa that he tears up his letter to the beneficent patriarch. In the process he summons Krampus, the evil creature from Alpine folklore who punishes ill-behaved children and, here at least, those insufficiently filled with Christmas spirit.
The set-up works as an excuse for the film to introduce a scary-looking monster in a Santa suit, but also a potent metaphor for the pressure to get Christmas right and to be of good cheer—even when the experience of Christmas itself can involve familial conflict and reflection on everything that went wrong in the previous year. Who can stomach Love Actually or The Holiday in that frame of mind?
Fortunately, there’s a long if less-celebrated strand of Dark Christmas movies for those whose holiday disposition is closer to Ebeneezer Scrooge than Bob Cratchit—bad-mood films that sometimes find a way of capturing the spirit of the holiday anyway. That last element can’t really be found in Krampus, or in the many horror movies built around Christmastime, most of which are happy to deliver the cinematic equivalent of a lump of coal. But sometimes lumps of coal can be refreshing. Here are a few White Christmas and The Santa Clause alternatives for those in need of grimmer stocking stuffers.
Gremlins (1984)
Part of the pleasure of Joe Dante’s 1984 hit comes from the way it uses its puckish-but-deadly monsters to thumb a nose at everything from twinkly Steven Spielberg movies (even though Spielberg produced it and makes a cameo), to idealized small towns, to Christmas movies themselves. Gremlins all dressed up for the holiday serenade their would-be victims with carols. Mrs. Deagle (Polly Holiday), the film’s equivalent to the evil banker Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life, ends up face down in the snow. At one point, the film stops cold for a horrific monologue about how its heroine (Phoebe Cates) discovered there was no Santa Claus. It’s essentially a one-film war on Christmas.
Christmas Evil (a.k.a. You Better Watch Out) (1980)
By coincidence, Gremlins arrived the same year as Silent Night, Deadly Night, a slasher movie featuring a killer in a Santa costume that stirred an outcry strong enough for its distributor to pull it from theaters. It found a second life on home video, however, and inspired both a handful of direct sequels and countless direct-to-streaming knock-offs. Christmas Evil (a.k.a. You Better Watch Out), a truly unhinged killer Santa movie released in 1980, is far superior. Brandon Maggart stars as a deranged Santa obsessive who grows so enraged by the failure of those around him to honor the spirit of Christmas, he goes on a killing spree. The film ends on an image too bizarre to spoil that’s essentially a thumbs up from the cosmos, suggesting he had the right idea all along.
Krampus (2015)
Before taking on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, director Michael Dougherty seemed to be working his way through the holidays, following the Halloween-set cult favorite Trick ‘r’ Treat with this story of a Christmas Eve from Hell (maybe literally). It mostly loses its satirical edge once the monsters take over, but they’re pretty memorable monsters.
The Ice Harvest (2005)
There are plenty of darker options in other genres too. In Harold Ramis’s slept-on 2000 crime thriller The Ice Harvest (co-written by Richard Russo and Robert Benton), John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton play shady characters trying to escape Wichita with a fortune in cash on Christmas Eve. The only problem: the weather keeps them from leaving town, deepening their peril, and making it impossible to escape their enemies and Christmas itself.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005)
Screenwriter and director Shane Black has made a career-long habit of using Christmas as an ironic counterpoint, working it into his scripts for Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight and other films (even Iron Man 3). But the quintessential Dark Christmas movie remains Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, in which a small-time crook named Harry (Robert Downey Jr.) ventures to L.A., where he reunites with a childhood crush (Michelle Monaghan) and teams up with a private eye (Val Kilmer) to solve a murder. Christmas lights twinkle in the background all the time, but Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is as much about Harry’s alienation and quest for redemption as the mystery of who killed who and why.
Comfort and Joy (1984)
The thing about Christmas is it has a way of giving even the darkest stories an inspirational twist. John McClane bloodily takes out terrorist after terrorist in Die Hard but it’s all in the service of saving his estranged wife and ends with a broken family getting put back together. (Of course it’s a Christmas movie. End of debate.) Bill Forsyth’s great 1984 dark comedy Comfort and Joy drops its confused hero in the middle of a war between two rival Glasgow ice cream truck businesses. While nursing a broken heart, he finds himself playing intermediary between factions vying for control of Glasgow’s streets. It’s humor is understated, but rowdiness and violence always seem to be on the verge of breaking out, and the film ends with a moment of reconciliation and desert innovations that’s a gritty Christmas miracle.
Bad Santa (2003)
Even Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa, the greatest of all Dark Christmas movies, offers its own perverse version of a happy ending. Willie (Billy Bob Thornton), a criminal who’s made working as a mall Santa an annual part of his criminal enterprise, spends much of the movie in a verbally abusive drunken stupor, insulting everyone in his path (except when he’s having sex with customers in the changing room). His scheme takes an unusually violent turn and he ends up in a hospital. But, thanks to an act of generosity, there’s something like a family waiting for him when he gets out. It might consist of an awkward kid and a Santa fetishist, but a family’s still a family, and what’s a more Christmassy note on which to end a movie than that?
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Home Alone (1990)
A Christmas Carol (many versions)
Even some of the most revered Christmas classics go to some pretty grim places. It’s a Wonderful Life ends with hugs and bells that signal an angel getting his wings, but it’s set in motion by George Bailey’s suicidal despair. Sometimes Christmas Eve doubles as a dark night of the soul. Scrooge repents and lives a better life, but only after being shown the abyss into which his soul will tumble unless he changes his ways. Even Home Alone suggests the Wet Bandits would kill Kevin if his elderly neighbor didn’t show up in time.