20 Best Christmas Horror Movies You NEED To Watch

Silent Night, Deadly Night is built around a simple yet irresistible horror provocation: what if the axe-wielding maniac was dressed in a Santa suit? Yup, that's it.

The film's outlandish premise revolves around a traumatised young man (Robert Brian Wilson) who, after witnessing the murder of his parents by someone in a Santa outfit as a child, dons the suit himself and embarks on a killing spree as an adult.

Silent Night, Deadly Night has no pretensions to class - it's an unrepentant exercise in attention-grabbing schlock that goes out of its way to offend the most offendable folk in society - but it sure is fun. This thing is packed to the gills with inventive kills, ensuring you'll never quite imagine some of the season's most prominent iconography quite the same way again.

Granted, it's been vastly overshadowed by its infamous, memed-to-death sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, but the original remains a genuinely diverting slice of seasonal sleaze, and one effective enough to have been remade twice.