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.
