10 Alternative Christmas Movies

It’s the most wonderful time of year, with the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you to be of good cheer. But this is 2021, so they can all go £$%& themselves.

Christmas is the ultimate middle finger to those burned by the last twelve months, and the idea that everyone can come together over mince pies, the Andy Williams Christmas Album and Mrs Browns Boys is a punchline worthy of Bill Hicks.

Your Christmas viewing should reflect the year you’ve just had – it should be violent, confused, bloody and very very strange. It should include movies with coke snorting Santas and Nazis who want to establish a Fourth Reich run by homicidal elves. Killer snowmen who attack Shannon Elizabeth in the shower. That sort of thing.

We need to avoid is the kind of disposable, insincere, crassly commercial movies that symbolize the holidays and focus instead on the films that turn frowns upside down. That make you want to party like it’s your last Christmas. Because it probably is.

This is a remake of Charles E Selliers’ Silent Night Deadly Night (1984), but all that remains is the plot device of a serial killer in a Santa costume and a sequence where a female victim is impaled on a set of antlers. Everything else has been jettisoned in favour of a more traditional (to say nothing of entertaining) narrative where a small town’s police force search for the killer.

The film’s LA Times review should’ve been plastered across the DVD box: “The movie’s intended audience will be satisfied by its parade of gory mayhem, cheap thrills and groan-worthy dark humour. Everyone else: you’re on your own.”

Considering that the original was picketed on its release by groups who took issue with the portrayal of Santa as a homicidal rapist, that was probably a good idea. Then again, Steven C Miller’s film gives Santa a flamethrower and in one sequence has him chase a naked starlet through the snow before feeding her to a shredder.

Miracle On 34th Street, this is not.