Grapevine: Christmas horror movies

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Christmas horror movies

In case you thought this is the season of goodwill, there’s a huge selection of new Christmas movies this year to make your toes curl.  This year it seems you can’t have a family fun reunion or open a gaily wrapped present or even kiss under the mistletoe without initiating a blood bath of epic proportions.  If you thought the 1939 Wizard of Oz had its horror moments with the wicked witch of the east, you ain’t seen nothing yet.



The Nights before Christmas

A murderous Santa and Mrs Claus play a cat and mouse game with an FBI special agent who is trying to stop them in their tracks, or tracksuits.  It transpires that the unholy duo met in an asylum for the criminally insane and decided to model themselves on characters from the season of good will.  They are soon slaughtering their way through a special guest list, hotly pursued by the overworked police woman.  Mrs Claus does give the impression she’s not the marrying kind.

Red Snow

A struggling novelist is enjoying Christmas alone at remote Lake Tahoe when she discovers an injured bat and brings it inside.  It turns out to be a vampire bat, in the literal sense, and needed to be invited into the cabin to start the ball rolling.  At first, the animal appears to be friendly and even offers to help write the novel.  However, it’s not long before more gruesome bats arrive to stress they are not overly impressed by what’s going on. A blood bath ensues.  You are left wondering if Bram Stoker had this problem.


The Advent Calendar

This is a chocolate-coated horror movie as a woman in a wheelchair.  When her friend gives her an antique advent calendar for Christmas, she foolishly starts munching an accompanying box of deliciously wrapped chocolates.  But the supernatural is hanging around: on the stroke of twelve a demon cuckoo appears to remind her that it’s feeding time.  The handicapped lady then finds out she can be completely cured provided that she agrees to let the monsters from hell carry out mass murder.



Silent Night

The blurb says this is a rare apocalyptic holiday movie with charm and horror in equal parts.  A group of friends gather for a Christmas reunion which is fine until they find out that an unstoppable and poisonous gas is spreading like fog round the entire world. Your painful end will be so terrible that you are advised to commit suicide before the fumes get you.  Bodies are soon piling up all over the place.  This movie is clearly beckoning you to believe that the gas is just a mutant variant of Covid-19.  Prepare to meet your doom.



Elves

A family decides to take a Christmas break, but on the way their car runs over something.  It looks like a tar stain, but one family member returns later and discovers there was in fact a casualty: a small and unusual elf called Kee-ko.  He’s not dead and certainly has a cute side.  But unfortunately his much larger and growling relatives aren’t too pleased to see mere humans causing all this inconvenience.  Before you know it, the massacre has begun.  The problem is that people are just no good at understanding supernatural goblins or keeping them calm.  Any comment would be superfluous.



13 Slays till X-Mas

On Christmas eve, five seemingly random men receive a curious email inviting them to a dive party.  When they arrive, they discover they haven’t got much in common except the overwhelming desire to tell scary stories.  Apparently this is a well-known tradition in parts of rural America.  Anyway it’s not long before the scream team appears with gore, offbeat killings and corny one liners to keep you amused.  The lesson of this movie appears to never open an email from a stranger.  You know it makes sense.


The Puppet Killer

While celebrating Christmas at a cabin the woods – where else – a group of high school students are stalked by a psychotic killer obsessed with movie horror movie icons.  You can guess the rest.  The tagline is, “Where one pink mother****er stains the ground red.”  But no real harm is done as the movie carries a parents’ advisory notice that it may not be excellent kids’ material.  The title means that the killer is a puppet not that he kills puppets, if you see the difference.