Bah Humbug! Five great anti-Christmas movies
Ah, Christmas, a time for all of us to embrace the true meaning of this magical time of year: a time for opening as many gifts as possible, silently judging anyone who doesn’t get us what we wanted, and making a mental shit list of any family member we decided didn’t spend enough money on our gift.
Almost from the very beginning of cinema, Hollywood has embraced Christmas as a subject for making movies, some of which are very good, like It’s a Wonderful Life, some of which are bad, like Home Alone 3, and some of which nobody can decide whether or not they’re even about Christmas at all, like Die Hard.
Not all of us like the festivities, of course; some of us are sick and tired of the whole shebang beginning earlier and earlier, the forced fun, the rampant corporate greed masquerading as togetherness and the ubiquitous ‘comedy’ Christmas number one made by the kind of people who win the local pub quiz every single week.
For anyone bored with it all, these are the movies you’ll want to immerse yourself in all the way up until New Year’s Eve, when you can briefly raise a glass to another year of ever-rising prices and Donald Trump nonsense before logging back in to work again.
The five best anti-Christmas movies:
‘Krampus’ (Michael Dougherty, 2015)
If what you want while you’re pretending to put mince pies out for Santa before inevitably just snaffling them yourself is a bit of light gore on Christmas Eve, then you can’t go wrong with this modern take on a faintly terrifying Bavarian festive creature who apparently smashes kids with sticks if they’ve not been good enough through the year. Standard.
How on earth they got Toni Collette and Adam Scott to star in this, we’ve no idea, but the Grinch in us loves the idea of ‘accidentally’ putting it on while the small people excitedly scribble their Christmas lists.
‘Violent Night’ (Tommy Wirkola, 2022)
Aside from serving as essentially the only movie that isn’t Stranger Things that we can remember David Harbour starring in, this was a bit of a word-of-mouth hit that looked terrible on paper but actually works very well.
An action comedy that sees Harbour as Santa, albeit a Viking warrior version that smashes some hostage taking mercenaries to pieces in a variety of increasingly gruesome ways, this did almost $80million at the box office, four times its budget, which earned it a sequel due to be released this time next year. It also stars Beverly D’Angelo from the peerless National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which is a nice touch.
‘Black Christmas’ (Bob Clark, 1974)
One of the first examples of an ‘anti-Christmas’ movie was this sorority sister slashing effort from the early 1970s that was made in Canada and inspired by some real-life killings that happened around this time of year. It has since earned cult status among horror film fans and was apparently an influence on John Carpenter’s magnificent first Halloween movie in 1979.
The low-budget graininess and general atmosphere actually make it way creepier and scarier than it has any right to be, which is probably why it spawned two remakes, one in 2006 and one in 2019. Neither is any good.
‘Bad Santa’ (Terry Zwigoff, 2003)
Billy Bob Thornton is satisfyingly caustic for (most) of this superb comedy about a department store Santa Claus and his bad-tempered small-person assistant who shag, drink and smoke their way through stealing as much from people over the festive season as humanly possible.
It’s very, very funny, it is very sweary, most of it is in pretty terrible taste, and it works perfectly as a complete antidote to anyone who has ever come up to you with a glass of fizz and entreated you to “Smile, it’s Christmas!”
Sadly, the same can’t be said for the sequel in 2016, which tried to repeat the trick but somehow just didn’t capture the magic in the same way at all.
‘Scrooged’ (Richard Donner, 1988)
One of the finest portrayals of a person who hates Christmas in movie history is undoubtedly Bill Murray in this Christmas Carol update from the ‘80s, as Murray’s uncaring TV executive Frank Cross hands out acerbic insults after put-down after temper tantrum to anyone who dares come near him.
He’s so fantastically horrible for the majority of the movie that you cannot wait for him to eventually see the error of his ways, although so nasty is he that even once the final ghost has taken him to witness his own death, you’re still not sure he’s actually really changed.
Plus, it features the late David Johansen of the New York Dolls as one of the best movie spirits of all time, the taxi driver from hell.
