The Best Christmas Horror Movies to Make Your Silent Night Scream

Christmas and horror go together like hot cocoa and marshmallows you definitely should not feed a mogwai. It tracks: midwinter holidays sit in that weird space between celebrating life and staring down the dark, which makes them prime territory for spooky stories. The English were telling ghost tales at Christmastime long before we were arguing about whether Gremlins is a horror movie. That tradition had cooled by the early Victorian era, and then Charles Dickens basically zapped it back to life in 1843 with A Christmas Carol. Plenty of movies have cribbed from Dickens since, but for this roundup, I’m skipping any straight-up Carol adaptations. The good stuff uses the same themes — redemption, charity, salvation — without just replaying Scrooge beat for beat.

Best Christmas horror movies (as of 2025)

• Black Christmas (1974)

  Winter break, nearly-empty sorority house, and a houseguest nobody invited: someone has taken up residence in the attic. When one of the women vanishes, the cops drag their feet until a teenage girl turns up dead in a nearby park. Cue a relentless, unnerving run of obscene phone calls and escalating violence.

  Historically, this is one of the earliest true slashers and one of the first Christmas-set horror films. It’s also a wild footnote that director Bob Clark would go on to make 1983’s A Christmas Story. Beyond the trivia, the movie stands out for treating its young characters like actual human beings instead of interchangeable dumb choices — something Clark cared about in an era when teen fare was mostly beach parties and bikinis. There were remakes in 2006 and 2019; the original still wipes the floor with both.

• Gremlins (1984)

  Inventor Randall Peltzer is hunting for a memorable Christmas present for his son, Billy, and stumbles on a mysterious little creature in a backroom Chinatown shop. The owner refuses to sell; the owner’s grandson makes a secret deal anyway. Owning a mogwai comes with three hard rules: no water, no bright light (sunlight will kill it), and never feed it after midnight. All three get broken, obviously, and the mogwai multiply and mutate into chaos-gremlins who lay waste to Kingston Falls on Christmas Eve.

  People still argue whether this is real horror. Parents definitely did when they took young kids to a movie they assumed was cuddly because Steven Spielberg’s name was on it. The backlash — alongside outrage over Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom — helped push the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating. Given that legacy, calling it horror feels fair. Director Joe Dante certainly saw it that way.

  'So the idea of taking a 4-year-old to see Gremlins, thinking it’s going to be a cuddly, funny animal movie and then seeing that it turns into a horror picture, I think people were upset,' Dante told the AP. 'They felt like they had been sold something family friendly and it wasn’t entirely family friendly.'

• The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

  Jack Skellington, Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, is bored of staging the same scare-fest every year. He wanders into Christmas Town through a portal to other holiday worlds and gets dazzled by twinkle lights and good cheer. Jack decides his crew should give Santa the night off and handle the holiday themselves. Shockingly, that goes badly. Intentions: pure. Execution: catastrophic. Christmas: nearly ruined.

  This is the Tim Burton-iest non-Burton-directed movie ever made, complete with Danny Elfman earworms and lovable goth misfits who are spooky but not cruel. Credit where it’s due: Henry Selick’s stop-motion direction is a huge part of the magic. The end result is a mildly creepy Christmas staple tailor-made for kids (and adults) who wish Halloween never ended.

• Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

  Up in Lapland’s Korvatunturi mountains, reindeer are turning up slaughtered and kids are disappearing. Local reindeer herders blame a nearby excavation run by a company called Subzero, which is drilling into what turns out to be the literal tomb of Santa Claus. Not the Coke-commercial Santa — this one’s an ancient figure with feral helpers who steal children.

  Roger Ebert — not exactly a soft touch with horror — was all in on this one:

  'A rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking.' He also called it an 'original, daring, carefully crafted film' and 'an R-rated Santa Claus origin story crossed with The Thing.'

• Better Watch Out (2017)

  Luke is 12, in love with his 17-year-old babysitter Ashley, and absolutely not old enough (according to his parents) to be left home alone while they hit a Christmas party. Any grand plan Luke has to impress Ashley gets derailed by what looks like a home invasion.

  And that’s where I stop, because the fun here is in the surprises. This isn’t just another holiday siege movie; it messes with the formula in nasty, clever ways and leans on a small group of young actors who really deliver.

How I picked these: originality first. There are plenty of slasher Santas and Krampus-on-a-rampage movies — several are entertaining — but that well gets repetitive fast. I also skipped franchise detours where Part X happens to be set at Christmas. Most importantly, the holiday has to matter to the story; if you can strip out the lights and carols and the plot still works the same, it didn’t make the cut.