The best alternative Christmas movies that will put you in the festive mood

Ah, Gremlins. The anti-Christmas movie that has one of the creepiest stories ever told about Santa getting stuck down a chimney. Couple this with Gizmo playing keyboard with a Santa hat on, numerous gremlins carol singing and Mogwai being the ultimate ‘a pet isn’t just for Christmas’ present and Gremlins is as festive as your Uncle Charles’ ruddied face trying to sing to Fairytale of New York while his mouth is full of volovants.

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Nothing says Christmas more than a heady dose of existential dread, and that’s exactly what you get with In Bruges. Set over the Christmas period and focusing on a pair of hitmen shipped to Bruges, for the most part the movie is about two killers trying to figure out whether they should be pardoned (or, in other words, on the naught or nice list) for the amount of sin they’ve committed in their lives, all to the backdrop of the fairytale architecture of the Belgium town.

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Set amongst the festive season, Batman Returns oozes frosty appeal. It’s a snow-flecked movie packed with red, white and black (the only colour Tim Burton seemed to use in the ‘90s) and its most memorable scene is the tree-lighting ceremony where a white-haired Max Shreck is flanked by evil circus people jumping out of oversized presents.

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We all know Mel Gibson is a big fan of the, er, big guy in the sky, so it’s apt that Lethal Weapon is set at a time when Christmas is in town, even if that town is LA. Again, this is a movie with an iconic scene set to Jingle Bell Rock and Riggs even spends Christmas with Roger “I’m getting too old for this shit” Murtaugh’s family. There’s even a ruck in a Christmas tree lot, midway through the movie.

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Trading Places is set mere days before the big day and features one of Dan Aykroyd’s best scenes ever, where he is drunk and dressed as a bedraggled Santa Claus, crashing his old job's Christmas party and stuffing buffet meat into the big pockets of his outfit. Which is pretty much how we act when the Boxing Day buffet is unleashed.

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Another Burton classic. Christmas doesn’t come into play in Edward Scissorhands until the end of the movie but it feels like a festive film throughout, especially when Edward (Johnny Depp) cuts up the ice statue for Kim (Winona Ryder) and the scene when he’s trying to wrap some presents and he has a bit of tape on his 'scissor' hands that he just can’t get rid of. We may have made that last bit up.

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Rocky IV takes place in the middle of a Siberian winter and that’s all we need for it to feel like a Christmas movie. But there’s more: the main fight takes place between Rocky and Ivan Drago on Christmas Day, which scuppers both of their plans to overeat and sup their weight in port but it makes for fascinating viewing. Oh, and Paulie is given a terrible present of Sico, a rusty robot butler which sums up Christmas to us.

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If you’re looking for an excuse to stick a sci-fi classic on, remind the family 12 Monkeys is set at Christmas Eve. OK, so it’s also set in 2035 and 1990, and is about a virus that all but wipes out the Earth’s population in 1996. But we do get to see a Christmas tree in an airport so it’s definitely a Christmas movie of sorts. Mildly mind-bending and super-engaging time travel features heavily in one of Terry Gilliam’s best films. It packs a lot into its just-over-2hr run time.

Even Marvel has admitted that Iron Man 3 is pretty much a Christmas film. It has all the trappings: it’s set over the holiday season and Tony Stark is visited by a number of ‘ghosts’ from his past and he comes out the other side redeemed and a new, better person. Oh, and a lot of it is just him and a slightly annoying kid which adds a good deal of schmaltz to proceedings.

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You know what makes a Christmas movie truly festive? Home invasion. David Harbour stars as a Santa who finds himself caught up in a violent robbery while delivering presents. And that doesn't fly, but the criminals sure will. John Leguizamo stars as head baddie Jimmy Martinez in a fairly gore-soaked flick that still, somehow, manages to feel quite festive. It's Christmas spirit for the grinch crowd.

Terrifier has become a surprise box office hit, despite being downright nasty. The third film was released in 2024, and is set around Christmas. Art the Clown dresses up as Santa, spilling blood across Miles County. We’ll not spoil any of the set pieces here, as there’s some real out-there stuff in this gore-fest. Make sure your audience is ready for it.

A dig sit in Finland uncovers an ancient tomb, believed to be the resting place of the “real” Santa Claus. But what they find is altogether more horrifying than expected. This is a horror film, but one laced with a strain of comedy. You’ll have to turn on the subs for it, unless you can understand Finnish, but it’s not absolutely packed with dialogue, as you might imagine.

Sure, we don’t get to see hobbits celebrating Christmas in Lord of the Rings. But this trilogy is definitely a festive film on a few fronts. First up, each of the three movies came out just before Christmas (more than 20 year ago now). And a festive holiday is just about the only time we have enough spare hours for a re-watch, without leaving days or weeks between the viewings. The only question left: do you go for the extended or theatrical cuts?

Of course Eyes Wide Shut is an adjacent Christmas movie. It’s set over the festive period and begins with the pair coming home after a Christmas party, where they make love while fantasising about other people. Personally we prefer a kebab and snuggling up to a sick bowl on the sofa post Xmas party drinks but we don’t think Kubrick would have made a movie about that.

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“Ugh, lip gloss!” You will never be able to hear Jingle Bell Rock the same way again once you watch Santa’s Helpers (AKA The Plastics) doing a dance to it in Mean Girls. It’s a perfect, if completely misjudged, routine for a school talent show. Mean Girls is a fantastic film to watch any time of the year but it has enough Christmas in it to watch repeatedly in December.

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