This week's eerie mo-cap rendering of the ghostly, dark Dickens morality tale A Christmas Carol from director Robert Zemeckis is far from being the only yuletide movie where heartwarming ho-ho-hos are as likely as horrific moments. From Saint Nick battling Martians, Satan, takeover bids from misguided Halloween skeletons and alcoholism, to the holiest of holidays run amok with carolling, cackling little green monsters, suicidal family men, deranged slashers and WWF stars dispensing seasonal platitudes, we give you 10 grim stuffing stockers guaranteed to wish you a very scary Christmas. Pass the egg nog, the butcher knife and the animatronic reindeer...

63%

Fresh

Scrooged

Bill Murray is at his-dripping-with-sarcasm best as cold-hearted TV executive Frank Cross in this modern take on A Christmas Carol. While this is a black comedy, there's also some freaky stuff here, with Frank's mouldy-old dead boss Lou dangling him out a window, Carol Kane's Ghost Of Christmas Present kicking him in the nuts and the ghoulish Grim Reaper-style Ghost of Christmas Future's robes concealing the tortured souls of the damned locked in its rib cage. But it's actually Frank's ideas for yuletide TV that are truly terrifying -- he's producing a live version of the Scrooge story starring Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim, along with some half-naked dancers. His other Christmas specials? Lee Majors in the action special The Night the Reindeer Died, variety show Bob Goulet's Cajun Christmas and Father Loves Beaver. Perhaps scariest of all? Throughout the movie, Frank drinks vodka poisoned with TAB!

78%

Fresh

Gremlins

Joe Dante's crazy-critter sends up It's A Wonderful Life with its bucolic Christmas burb threatened by the title creatures -- and nods to The Wizard of Oz with its canine-hating rich old crone Mrs Deagle. In this cartoonish comedy, Stripe and his anarchic brethren unleash all sorts of hell, killing a teacher with a hypodermic needle to the butt, molesting Santa Claus, running riot in a cinema and sending Deagle flying out her second-story window. But the human response is pretty tough, too, with hero Billy's mom Lynn coming off like some sort of James Cameron heroine as she stabs a gremlin, forces another into a blender and explodes a third in the microwave. Perhaps the most frightening (and funny) moment comes when gorgeous Phoebe Cates reveals how she came to hate Christmas when her dad's down-the-chimney Santa act went so, so tragically wrong.

N/A

Christmas Evil

The Santa-slasher sub-genre is surprisingly well stocked, with offerings such as Don't Open Till Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night and the godawful Brett Ratner-produced Santa's Slay. But Christmas Evil -- which is one of Christmas-maniac John Waters' favorite movies -- is actually a serious take on the matter. Coming off like Taxi Driver, the anti-hero here is Harry, who's never been the same since as a kid he saw mommy having her, er, fireplace stoked by a guy in a Santa suit. Now grown-up, Harry lives alone in an apartment decorated year-round for Christmas and creepily spies on the neighborhood kids and lists their misdeeds in a big ledger. Then, as December 25 approaches, he finally cracks, gluing on a Santa beard, cackling crazily in front of the mirror and stealing toys from the factory where he works to give to the poor kids. Oh, and he uses a tomahawk to splatter the brains of his boss and a few other bastards on the front steps of a church in a hit that's more like something out of The Godfather than Halloween. The ending -- when he's pursued by a mob of New Yorkers bearing flaming torches -- is truly bizarre and (in a serial killery way) miraculous.

94%

Fresh

It's A Wonderful Life

Think of all the moments you remember about this classic. It's all bless us this and bells tolling with joy about that. But remember what it's all about up until that point. Good old Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey is so depressed over a banker-instigated economic meltdown that he wants to kill himself. It takes an angel to bring him back, and show him that as a man of keen eyesight, valorious war service and a financial officer actually interested in affordable housing for the poor, he has saved and enriched a lot of lives. Truly, a fantasy! That it ends with a popular bail-out of the bank (well, Building And Loan) is another reason this one won't be remade anytime soon. It'd be safer to greenlight Battlefield Earth 2.

N/A

Santa Claus

If you put Tim Burton in the wayback machine half a century with only the tagline "Santa Vs Satan", this might be what he came up with. Rene Cardona's Mexican yuletide epic has Santa and Co. pitted against Pitch, the little invisible devil who's doing the bidding of Lucifer. See, Satan wants all the boys and girls to rebel against Santa by doing evil -- and he'll even get Pitch to whisper in little ears the news that their jolly idol is a murderer. This is supposedly for kids but comes off as totally freaky, from the creepy animatronic reindeer that pull Santa's sleigh to his spooky floating castle that's decorated with pentagrams.