Top 10 Alternative Christmas Movie Lists: Horror, Action, Comedy & More

Die Hard is a Christ­mas movie. That once-con­trar­i­an cat­e­go­riza­tion has increas­ing­ly been accept­ed over the past cou­ple of decades, at least since an edi­tor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTier­nan’s stur­dy piece of one-build­ing eight­ies Hol­ly­wood action may have dis­placed It’s a Won­der­ful Life as a hol­i­day home-video tra­di­tion in cer­tain house­holds. But it’s also stoked a broad­er desire for ever more alter­na­tive Christ­mas movies with sub­tle, even sub­ver­sive hol­i­day ele­ments. If you, too, can’t han­dle yet anoth­er view­ing of Mir­a­cle on 34th Street, A Christ­mas Sto­ry, or Home Alone this year, have a look at the top ten lists com­piled in these four videos, which offer a selec­tion of films beyond — some­times well beyond — the estab­lished sea­son­al canon.

These selec­tions come from a vari­ety of gen­res, includ­ing the super­hero pic­ture: if you haven’t seen Bat­man Returns in a few decades, you may have for­got­ten how thor­ough­ly Tim Bur­ton sat­u­rates it with Christ­mas imagery, albeit of a kind suit­ed to the dank, men­ac­ing Gotham City. Those who want to crank up the dark­ness fur­ther still would do well to put on the Cana­di­an soror­i­ty-house slash­er film Black Christ­mas, which also appears on more than one of these lists.

Joe Dan­te’s Yule­tide-set Grem­lins con­tains much high­er-bud­get spec­ta­cles of destruc­tion, albeit comedic ones; the humor of Ter­ry Gilliam’s Brazil, anoth­er elab­o­rate mid-eight­ies auteur project, runs to the dystopi­an, a sen­si­bil­i­ty cer­tain­ly present in the hol­i­day sea­son itself, if sel­dom treat­ed with such grotesque vivid­ness.

The work of no sin­gle pro­fes­sion­al makes these alter­na­tive Christ­mas movie lists more often than Shane Black, the writer of Lethal Weapon (with Die Hard, the mak­ings of a hol­i­day dou­ble bill if ever there was one) and The Long Kiss Good­night, as well as the writer-direc­tor of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and The Nice Guys. That all of those pic­tures are set at Christ­mas­time makes them feel — no mat­ter how height­ened, fan­tas­ti­cal, or visu­al effects-sat­u­rat­ed they may be — pal­pa­bly con­nect­ed to our own real­i­ty. It also tends to inten­si­fy the dra­ma: as Black remarked in one inter­view, “Christ­mas rep­re­sents a lit­tle stut­ter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and ret­ro­spect our lives.” Which hard­ly means, of course, that it can’t be enter­tain­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch San­ta Claus, the Ear­li­est Movie About San­ta in Exis­tence (1898)

Watch The Insects’ Christ­mas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Star­ring a Cast of Dead Bugs

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

The Junky’s Christ­mas: William S. Burrough’s Dark Clay­ma­tion Christ­mas Film Pro­duced by Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1993)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the Most Trou­bling Christ­mas Film Ever Made

Blue Christ­mas: A Cri­te­ri­on Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.