At the end of a year that’s felt a little lacking in glad tidings, at least there’s no shortage of Christmas movies to escape into. Whether you’re running back the entire Home Alone saga, revisiting one of the many, many iterations of A Christmas Carol or simply relaxing with a formulaic rom-com about a woman with a Big City job falling for a charming small-town Christmas tree salesman, you could easily watch festive films back-to-back all December and still have plenty of movies to spare.
If, however, you’ve reached the point where the sight of yet another real-life Santa is enough to have you reaching for the off switch, there are still plenty of darker, stranger alternatives on offer. Beyond the perennial debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie (Macaulay Culkin says no), there are plenty of other great movies ripe for a rewatch, thanks to a latent Yuletide theme or just because splattering the walls with blood is their idea of putting up the decorations.
Here are five underrated dark comedies and festive horrors worth enjoying this Christmas:
1. In Bruges (2008)
Almost a decade before the Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, writer-director Martin McDonagh made his feature directorial debut with this sublime tale about a pair of hitmen hiding out in the lovely Belgian city of Bruges. The hilarious, sweary dialogue is endlessly quotable, as Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell’s Ken and Ray potter around the “fairytale town” like an Irish update of The Odd Couple.
But is it a Christmas movie? Of course it is! Not only does the holiday provide the setting, with Ray lamenting of one of his victims that there’s a “Christmas tree somewhere in London with a bunch of presents underneath it that’ll never be opened”, but the whole story is deeply infused with religious themes. It’s no accident that Ken and Ray go to visit a church said to contain a vial of birthday boy Jesus Christ’s blood. This is ultimately a film about transgression, forgiveness and the possibility of redemption. What could be more Christmassy than that?
2. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Robert Downey Jr famously made his comeback from Hollywood exile in this highly enjoyable comic take on a hardboiled detective neo-noir, starring opposite the late, great Val Kilmer and a memorably Santa suit-clad Michelle Monaghan. The film was the directorial debut of Shane Black, a blockbuster screenwriter with a penchant for setting films, including Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Iron Man 3, during the holidays.
Speaking to Empire in 2022, Black traced his obsession back to watching Christmas-set Seventies spy thriller Three Days of the Condor as a child, recalling: “It struck a spark, to take a holiday and make it not just a backdrop but a character itself.” As for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, he added: “Christmas helped a lot. The idea of this lonely guy in a brand new city at Christmas, wandering… It’s a bizarre, ironic take on Christmas in LA.”
3. Krampus (2015)
Horror-comedy Krampus sets itself up as a conventional Christmas delight. The film opens with Bing Crosby crooning “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” while families squabble over toys in supermarkets and sweet-looking grandmothers bake cookies in front of A Christmas Carol. It’s only after a forbidding storm gathers and the power goes out that things take a turn for the mythologically terrifying.
A great cast led by Adam Scott and Toni Collette makes this a likeable watch, as their family does battle with adorable but deadly CGI gingerbread men and a truly horrifying child-eating Jack in the Box. The film also features an endearing animated sequence explaining the origin of Krampus, “the shadow of St Nicholas”, who comes “not to reward, but to punish.” A good reminder to make sure you’re nice, rather than naughty, this year.
4. Trading Places (1983)
“Christmas, huh?” spits Dan Aykroyd’s Louis in this screwball rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags comedy. “I’ll give him a Christmas present he’ll never forget!” That’s shortly before he turns up drunk to the company holiday party dressed in a disheveled Santa suit, shoveling beef into his pockets, attempting to plant drugs on Murphy’s character, Billy Ray, and waving a gun around. Despite this, director John Landis has revealed he never meant Trading Places to be seen as a movie for the holidays. “The image of Dan Aykroyd as a reprobate, drunken, suicidal Santa is indelible, and we wanted to make it seem like Christmas,” he told Forbes in 2020. “But it was not my intention to make it a Christmas movie.”
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Whether Landis intended it or not, the film has become an annual tradition for many. In Italy, the film is regularly aired on Christmas Eve, and it isn’t hard to see why. Beyond the holiday setting, there’s more than a touch of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to the way Aykroyd’s character is forced to learn what’s really important in life by being shown an alternate reality, even if in this story it’s because he’s the victim of an elaborate wager between his wealthy bosses. Not everything about the film has aged well: Murphy’s character uses the same homophobic slur that gets “Fairytale of New York” in trouble, and another scene features Aykroyd disguised as a Jamaican in Blackface. Beyond that, however, the film remains a consistently hilarious and quotable festive treat and a welcome reminder of the talent that made Murphy the biggest comedy star of the era.
5. Terrifier 3 (2024)
Even if you really want to shake up your Christmas movie list this year, a word of warning: Do not, under any circumstances, show Terrifier 3 to small children. It may feature mute serial killer Art the Clown dressed up as Santa Claus, but this unrelentingly gory slasher sequel is definitely not fun for all the family (just wait until you find out how Art got hold of Santa’s beard).
For those who are prepared to dive into the bloody mess this December, you may be wondering whether you need to have seen the first two Terrifiers. While it might be helpful to know a little of the fantastical backstory, particularly that Art was decapitated by our hero Sienna at the end of Terrifier 2, frankly, the whole thing operates under the sort of nightmare demon logic that you just have to go along with. One thing’s for sure: You’ll never look at snow angels the same way again.
