Horror For Christmas? Here's a little bit of the good, the bad, and the ugly for your holiday season.

Horror for Christmas? Why not? If you are a Halloween and horror movie fiend like me, you often look for ways to inject monsters into your other favorite holidays. What follows is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather represents the scary pictures I have watched (so far) this season.

It’s a Wonderful Knife

The title alone on this one makes it worth a watch. As you would expect, It's a Wonderful Knife roughly follows the basic idea of the perennial classic It's a Wonderful Life. In this version, a year after the murder of her best friend by a mysterious slasher called "The Angel," traumatized teenage Winnie Caruthers goes to a local town bridge, wishes she'd never been born, and is, you guessed it, transported to an alternate reality where the killer is still on the loose (she electrocutes him in her universe), and many in the town do not recognize her. The look of the killer is cool, the production values are not bad, and there are a couple of recognizable actors in this film, all of which combine to make it watchable.

Black Christmas

A classic slasher in which a house of sorority girls is tormented by a frequent prank caller who is actually in the attic and killing them one by one. The film is dated but genuinely disturbing. The phone calls from the killer are extremely disturbing, perhaps because they come across as frighteningly accurate, and some of the murders give you the willies, at least they did me. This is one of those horror films, as many slashers are, that at times feels like a misogynistic massacre of young women. Watch it with the lights off. Except the Christmas lights, of course.

Black Friday

You could actually make the argument that this is a Thanksgiving movie, as it starts on that holiday and continues into, yes, Black Friday. An alien-thingy lands on Earth and starts infecting people, turning them into slobbering, leaky, ravenous monsters. One part The Mist, one part Dead Alive, a dash of Carpenter’s The Thing, a pinch of Argento’s Demons (let me be clear, this movie isn’t as good as any of those, it’s just that some of the gore and sfx reminded me of them), and you have a marginally entertaining picture that features genre favorites Michael Jai White and Bruce Campbell as the store manager. While low budget, some of the creature makeup isn’t bad. Can’t say the same for the Big Bad at the end, though.

The Mean One

There’s been a recent trend to make gory horror films out of classic and beloved cartoons, kid shows, and characters. Everyone from Popeye to Mickey Mouse have been turned into blood thirsty killers. The Mean One is a slasher picture take on How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In it, a young woman returns to her hometown after spending years away due to her mother being murdered by a Santa-suit-wearing killer. Turns out it’s “the Mean One,” a homicidal monster that lives outside the city of Newville (yes, you read that right).

A dreadful production in almost every way, The Mean One has bad acting, terrible production values, bloopers galore, and a concept as idiotic as it sounds. That being said, if you’ve always wanted to see the Grinch – er, the “Mean One,” massacre a room full of drunken, douchey Santas, this is the movie for you. The Mean One hacks up his victims with the best of them, and like only a horror fiend can, I found the image of eyes gouged out with Christmas bows and the impaling of a smiling inflatable Christmas tree costume (yep, there’s a dude in it) genuinely hilarious. While his makeup isn’t great, it’s obvious that it is where some of the budget went. There’s even a Britishy-sounding narrator that rhymes throughout the movie. And the ending, also directly inspired by Seuss ... pretty damn hilarious, too.

Krampus

   It wasn’t all that long ago, at least in this country, that everyone didn’t know the name Krampus. Now, he seems to be everywhere this time of year. Krampus, released in 2015, was directed by Michael Doughtery, the man behind 2007’s Trick r’ Treat (which has become a spooky-season staple for many),  and is both predictable while also offering a fresh take on the Christmas horror trope. After a dysfunctional family Christmas Eve meal, a freak storm blows in, bringing along with it Krampus and all his minions, ranging from the creepy snowmen and dark elves to the homicidal Gingerbread men. Thematically, it is close to Trick r Treat. In that film, people who don’t respect the traditions of the holiday are punished. In Krampus, people who have lost the true meaning of the holiday face old Krampy’s wrath. While no sort of masterpiece, Krampus is one of the best on this list, a Christmasy film that is at the same time a decent horror flick.

Violent Night

    Over the last few years, there’s been a tendency to modify the portrayal of Santa Claus in films. Almost gone is the obese, kindly old grandpa, replaced by gruff, fit, manly men. In the vein of Mel Gibson’s Fatman, Violent Knight features David Harbour as an extremely cynical, burnt-out, and quasi-alcoholic Santa Claus that ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, stopping at a wealthy family’s house as it is taken over by terrorists out for the family’s ill-begotten loot. The title is accurate, for what follows is an extremely bloody, violent, and occasionally hilarious battle between Santa and the terrorists (turns out this version of old Santy was a Viking warrior). There are homages in this film to Die Hard, Die Hard II, and Home Alone, mostly all to good effect. This is far from your traditional Christmas yarn, not one you watch with the kiddies. But it’s pretty damn fun.

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Profane and gratuitous in just about every way, Silent Night, Deadly Night, is something of a cult classic, I suppose, and perhaps the film that popularized, for lack of a better word, the idea of the ax-wielding Santa, a trope worth exploring in a future post. On Christmas Eve, a young boy named Billy is repeatedly traumatized, first by his psychotic Grandpa, who plants the idea in his head that Santa is going to "punish" you if your bad, then, in what can only be described as the shittiest timing possible, his parents are flagged down and brutally murdered by a killer in a Santa suit. Years later, after growing up under the puritanical eyes of nuns in an orphanage, Billy, who has always struggled with his trauma, eventually snaps when he's forced to put on a Santa suit for work and goes on a blood-soaked killing spree.

I remember watching this film as a kid and remembered it as "funny," which probably says a lot about me now AND then, but like a lot of rewatches of eighties films, especially horror ones, I found myself surprised by the gratuitous nudity, the sexism, and the brutal massacre of young women. Don't get me wrong, Billy is an equal-opportunity killer, he hacks up plenty of dudes, but the disturbing trend of slasher pictures as a platform for the punishment of sinful women is on full display here. For gore hounds, there are a couple of funny things here - the headless guy riding his sled down the hill comes to, er, mind, pun intended - and Billy's battlecries of "NAUGHTY!" and "PUNISH!" are outrageous, but there's a lot of disturbing stuff, too, and I found it somewhat cringy to watch. I was also today years old when I found out that there are SEVEN Silent Night, Deadly Night films out there, counting sequels and remakes.