This is supposed to be the season of goodwill, eggnog, and the kind of joy you’re only ever forced to feel in December. But what do we actually get? Sleigh bells drowned out by sirens, cinnamon-scented pandemonium—yes, Virginia, it’s time for movies that crank the holiday insanity to eleven. If Christmas is a circus, why settle for gentle elephants when you could have rabid reindeer? My Christmas list, this year, is for those who like their tinsel twisted: Gremlins, Violent Night, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and, yes, Terrifier 3. Fasten your seatbelt with a candy cane.
From mischievous creatures to a festive (but rough) Santa, here's my lineup: Gremlins, Violent Night, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Terrifier 3. Buckle up your reindeer harness because this ride is gonna be wild.
Gremlins
Forget Frank Capra—try Joe Dante, who slips a little anarchy in your stocking and runs cackling into the night. Gremlins is the Christmas movie that teaches you never to trust a mogwai—those plush-eyed, purring little stress-balls from the mall. You stroke them, feed them after midnight, and—surprise!—out come the monsters. Suddenly your snow-globe of a town is ransacked by pint-sized Wise Guys who seem to have watched Animal House and read Kafka in the same sitting.
It’s a Christmas card gone grotesque, full of razor-wire jokes and slapstick horror. The decorations are shredded, the carolers get pelted with snowballs, and Dante’s camera is drunk on the gleeful desecration of all things wholesome. The best part? It reminds you how quickly the holidays’ piety can curdle into chaos. The rule is simple: don’t spill water, don’t feed after midnight—but it isn’t the rules that stick, it’s the sense that Christmas is dangerous fun, the way you always suspected as a kid.
Violent Night
Now, Santa Claus has always inspired a certain awe—a fat man who surveils your home and prefers cookies and milk to FBI wiretaps. But Violent Night hands St. Nick a sledgehammer and lets him loose. David Harbour isn’t playing your mother’s Kris Kringle; he’s more like Thor after a divorce, nicotine-stained and ready to break bones for the holiday spirit. Burglars don’t stand a chance. The joke, of course, is that the coldest winter nights call for blood-spattered cheer.
The film is an absurdist delight—a spiked punch of Home Alone and hard liquor, lit by gunfire and twinkling fairy lights. You laugh because you can’t quite believe the audacity, then blush because you enjoyed it too much. It’s not peaceful, it’s not silent, but my God it’s Christmas for our times: desperate, ridiculous, and a little bit heroic if you squint. If decking the halls means what I think it means, this is easily the most honest Santa we’ve had in years.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Maybe you pine for old-fashioned sweetness—the kind that swaddles you in nostalgia like a blanket you never washed after college. Enter the Grinch, who’s made bitterness a high art. It doesn’t matter if you choose Chuck Jones’ animated fever dream or Jim Carrey’s rubbery, pyrotechnic pantomime; the story is simple, relentless, and improbable: a heart grown three sizes by the power of collective sentimental singing.
The Grinch’s arc—from cucurbit to communal—is shameless wish fulfillment, but it touches a nerve. (If you’ve ever found yourself sneering at Christmas only to end up weeping over tinsel, you know what I mean.) Carrey’s version is Broadway burlesque on amphetamines, while the original is pure, hallucinogenic Seuss—yet both uncork the sucker in you. And those songs? Like aural glue, you can’t scrape them off your skull for weeks. “You’re a Mean One” is the anthem for every cynic half-hoping for a reason to believe.
Terrifier 3
And now, into the abyss. In Terrifier 3—if you believed the holidays were sacred, Art the Clown is here to raze your tree. The air smells less like gingerbread, more like ozone and dread. After binging the earlier Terrifier flicks, I stumbled into this one the way a kid opens what they hope is a toy and instead finds a live wire: confused, thrilled, and a little afraid for the living room upholstery.
The miracle here is the collision of twinkly lights and absolute carnage—Sienna coping with her scars, Art the Clown riffing on Santa’s bad list, and Christmas itself becoming one giant dare. It’s sick, it’s funny, and—like all good holiday stories—it shows you how darkness and laughter coexist under the same ugly sweater. Nobody leaves unscathed, yet you can’t help but smirk. Fa-la-la-la-loo-nacy.
The Takeaway: Christmas as a Carnival, Not a Cure
So there you are: my Christmas canon. It isn’t soothing. It isn’t safe. But then, did you ever really believe December would be tidy? Gremlins lets mischief in the back door; Violent Night gives heroics a swift uppercut; the Grinch, bless him, sells us on soft hearts; while Terrifier 3 is the Christmas ornament you hide from your relatives. Watch them with friends, or alone, or half-drunk and in pajamas. Just remember: Christmas is the perfect excuse for letting movies run riot—until someone, inevitably, spills the eggnog.
Joy to the world—or at least to those of us brave enough to laugh through the chaos.
