8 Most Ridiculous Christmas Horror Movies

As the song goes, it's beginning to look at lot like Christmas: incessant jingles droning and excess glitter in every shop window, and masses of stressed out consumers prepared to fight tooth and nail for whichever items are the must-have gifts of the year, whilst picking up ugly sweaters and socks adorned with garish patterns. Oh, the horror.

Small wonder, then, that there's an enduring appeal to horror movies set at Christmas. As much as it may be the most wonderful time of the year, it can also be a complete nightmare, so there's definitely some cathartic pleasure to be taken from visions of would-be yuletide joy giving way to terror, madness and despair.

While there is a historical precedent for Christmas chillers - the season was traditionally the setting for ghost stories way back when - modern horror takes on the holiday tend to be designed at least in part to satirise seasonal traditions, and emphasise the fact that it isn't always so jolly an occasion as advertisers would like us to believe.

And let's face it; with all the tinsel, gaudy lights and tacky pop songs, Christmas can be pretty damn trashy and silly. It's only fitting, then, that Christmas-set horror films tend to take this trashiness and absurdity and turn it up to eleven, giving us some of the most madcap low-rent schlock you're ever likely to see.

No Gremlins, Black Christmas or Krampus here. Those are high-class by comparison with these low-hanging baubles.

When a horror movie is sold with the words 'from the co-creator of Night of the Living Dead,' you'd be forgiven for expecting something distinctly above-average and sophisticated. However, much like with the biggest and most impressively-wrapped gifts under the tree, best to lower those expectations pronto.

Writer-director John Russo's 1996 movie Santa Claws is an ultra-low budget, shot on video trashfest which casts B-movie icon Debbie Rochon as - erm - a B-movie icon, currently in production on an erotic horror movie called Scream Queen Christmas (which, just to get meta, actually exists and was also directed by Russo, utilising footage from this film).

However, she and her fellow small-time scream queens find their daily routine of performing stripteases in Santa suits interrupted when an obsessive fan dons a costume of his own and starts killing them off one by one.

It's thinly plotted, terribly acted, with production values lower than your average wedding video, and probably wouldn't even qualify as feature length were it not for the numerous extended seasonal striptease sequences. Still, Debbie Rochon's always fun to watch, and it's not as if anyone involved thought they were making a masterpiece.