20 Best Christmas Horror Movies You NEED To Watch

The Lodge is the polar opposite of a feel-good Christmas yarn, being an intensely visceral psychological horror film that kicks off on an incredibly upsetting note and only gets worse from there.

The story follows Grace (Riley Keough), a soon-to-be-stepmother who is left alone with her fiancé's two children in a rural lodge over Christmas. Between Grace's troubled past and a recent tragedy haunting the children, the stage is set for a combustible situation once strange happenings begin occurring at the lodge.

Filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala do a masterful job of building up suspense in The Lodge's first two acts before letting loose with an utterly unhinged and genuinely surprising final reel. The grimness of the material belies the bleakly beautiful wintry setting, and it simply wouldn't work without the outstanding performances from Riley Keogh, Jaeden Martell, and Lia McHugh at its core.

The Lodge definitely won't be for everyone, but if you can stomach provocative and challenging horror, this is one of the best of the past decade.