10 Best Christmas Horror Movies

Nothing says Christmas quite like fighting for your life against all manner of festive killers, monsters and dire circumstances. Between all the gift-wrapping and good cheer, sometimes you just want to settle down on a cold December evening with a nice cup of eggnog and watch a group of innocent people get terrorised around the Christmas tree.

There isn't an overabundance of entries in the holiday-horror sub-genre, but every now and then there comes along a frostbitten fright fest that turns out to be a formidable horror movie in its own right.

It's surprising that there aren't more movies in the Christmas-themed horror canon, seeing as the winter season is ripe for grisly and disturbing stories, given the natural darkness, the endless mythos surrounding the festival of Christmas itself and the tradition of families secluding themselves together for the holidays. It's easy to get Christmas movie fatigue when you watch Home Alone and Die Hard on repeat every year, so if you want to watch something a little darker this holiday season, these are the most popular holiday horror movies, ranked.

A year before the 1998 family comedy Jack Frost with Michael Keaton came out, an altogether different (but equally as bad) movie called Jack Frost was released.

I am of course talking about the 1997 comedy slasher movie in which a serial killer named Jack Frost crashes into a genetics truck (because that's a thing), causing the genetic material to mutate Frost's body and fuse it with the snow on the ground. He is then reincarnated as a vengeful snowman who sets out for revenge on a local sheriff over the holiday season, and thus a low budget slasher premise is born.

The film received predictably poor reviews and earned a measly 7% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it did come to gain a cult following after its VHS release due to the movie's cheesy special effects and comical death scenes.

While it may be fun for a holiday group watch, it does come dangerously close to being just plain bad, rather than so-bad-it's-good. Jack Frost was followed by a sequel in 2000, which also garnered a cult following.