12 Spookiest Christmas Movies to Add Some Scary to Your Merry

These are the 12 spookiest Christmas movies we've ever seen — they add some chills to the holiday season.

Scrooged

Bill Murray stars in this 1988 comedy that takes a then-modern swing at Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol. Murray plays a TV executive who loses the love of his life because of his curmudgeonly ways.

But after he fires one of his employees on Christmas Eve, he gets visited by a series of ghost who show him the error of his ways.

What makes this one genuinely spooky — besides some genuinely scary ghosts — is that Murray's Frank Cross is unrepetentantly nasty almost to the very end, when he makes a seemingly manic reversal.

Krampus

This 2015 horror comedy follows the European folkloric history of Krampus, a horned anthropomorphic beast who punishes naughty children in December.

When the main family's quarreling causes a disruption in Christmas spirit, the demon comes to haunt them and they must band together to fight him off.

It stars Adam Scott, Toni Collette, and David Koechner, and was directed by Michael Dougherty.

Silent Night

This 2021 horror-comedy stars Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode as hosts of a Christmas dinner party before the end of the world.

Knowing that they're going to be killed by a cloud of deadly gas the next morning, the couple and their friends and children try to spend their last night on earth as well as they can without acknowledging the elephant in the room.

Directed by Camille Griffin, this one is as dark as it is funny.

Violent Night

In this 2022 action-comedy, Stranger Things star David Harbour plays Santa — but with a twist.

When a group of mercenaries hold a family hostage on Christmas Eve, Saint Nick comes to the rescue wielding a hammer. Turns out, he was a Viking warrior in the past named "Nikamund the Red."

I don't know about you, but that's who I would want on my side in this type of unforeseen holiday situation.

Black Christmas

The 1974 slasher Black Christmas is one of the earliest in the spooky Christmas genre. It's Canadian, actually, and directed by Bob Clark. Though it was remade in 2019, we're focusing on the original for this list.

It follows a group of sorority sisters who start receiving really creepy phone calls during winter break. When they start egging the caller on, things get serious when sorority sisters go missing and a local girl is murdered. They begin to suspect a serial killer could be on the loose.

The film helped popularize the slasher genre, and there's an added edge to this one when you realize that Bob Clark also directed A Christmas Story, one of the most beloved Christmas movies ever made.

A Christmas Story has a bleak sense of humor at times, but it isn't as bleak as Black Christmas.

Jack Frost

Among the goofiest films on this list is Jack Frost, a 1997 horror-comedy about Frosty the Snowman turned evil.

This malicious snowman is born when a serial killer has a supernatural accident on the way to his execution.

The snowman, of course, starts murdering people at an astonishing rate, leaving the snow drenched with blood.

A Christmas Horror Story

This 2015 horror-mystery features William Shatner in its cast. It's the second film on this list to feature Krampus, the folkloric demon we mentioned earlier.

But in this movie, not even Santa is safe from the creepy creature.

Directed by Steve Hoban, Brett Sullivan, and Grant Harvey, A Christmas Horror Story follows the town of Bailey Downs as evil spirits, zombie elves, and, yes, Krampus, descend upon its townspeople.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

A classic. This Tim Burton masterpiece features the voice of Chris Sarandon (and Danny Elfman during the sing-song parts) as Jack Skellington, a.k.a. The Pumpkin King, and Catherine O'Hara as his love interest Sally, a Frakensteinesque woman who was created by a mad scientist who's always trying to keep her locked up.

When Jack stumbled into a portal that transports him into Christmas-land, he becomes obsessed with recreating the holiday, Halloween-style.

But Jack finds that normal people don't necessarily like the same macabre things he does, and soon Sally needs to save the day by rescuing the real Santa.

The Lodge

Riley Keough stars in this very scary horror drama as the new girlfriend of a widower who's wife recently died.

Keough's character stays with her boyfriend's two kids alone in a remote house during a Christmas snowstorm — but they end up getting haunted by her past in a creepy cult. Things get very, very cold and very, very dark.

Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, this 2019 NEON film also stars Jaeden Martell, Richard Armitage, Alicia Silverstone, Lia McHugh and Danny Keough.

Christmas Bloody Christmas

This 2022 horror movie, directed by Joe Begos, takes place on Christmas Eve.

It's an interesting plot that involves an animatronic Santa that is recalled for defects including murdering people with an axe.

But the robot Santa doesn't just stop at one murder, going on a bloody killing spree throughout the night.

Terrifier 3

This one just came out earlier this year. In the third movie in Damien Leone's Terrifier franchise, Art the Clown is back after his Halloween spree to ruin yet another holiday.

It makes sense that the Terrifier films would be so scary, considering that the director is named after the Antichrist character in The Omen.

This is among the scariest and most gruesome movies on our list, so be warned. It opens with a scene that spawned immediate walkouts, since it crosses a line few horror movies dare to cross.

Better Watch Out

This 2016 horror-comedy features Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla Presley in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, as a babysitter who has to defend herself and the 12-year-old boy she's watching during the holidays when intruders come to attack them.

The cast also features Levi Miller, Ed Oxenbould, Virginia Madsen, Seinfeld's Patrick Warburton, and Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery.

Christmas just got a lot spookier, in other words.

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Editor's Note: Corrects credit.