The night Santa went crazy: 18 killer Santas from TV and film

Christmas Evil stars Brandon Maggart as Harry, a Christmas-obsessed weenie that’s scarred—as they often are in these movies—after walking in on his mother having sex with “Santa Claus” (his father) when he was a child. Harry lives in a creepy apartment strewn with children’s toys and spies on the kids in his neighborhood, noting their behavior in books marked “Naughty Or Nice.” After being humiliated by a co-worker, Harry disassociates and becomes convinced that he’s actually Santa Claus. His new identity starts out relatively harmless, stealing toys from the factory where he works and giving them to kids at a state hospital, but turns dark when a trio of yuppie co-workers (the scourge of the ’80s) provokes him to commit ax murder on the steps of a church. Christmas Evil spends a lot of time focusing on Harry’s nervous breakdown, and has more in common with Maniac than the “faceless killer” kind of slasher movie. But it also has its moments of comic levity, capped by a bizarrely whimsical ending. Christmas Evil is a favorite of John Waters, who calls it “the greatest Christmas movie ever made.” If you’re only going to see one Christmas horror movie, this is the one.

Although it was far from the first Christmas-themed slasher, Silent Night, Deadly Night was the one that mobilized the moral crusaders thanks to a TV ad depicting an ax-wielding Santa Claus. The film was picketed by parents and condemned by religious groups, and eventually was pulled from theaters (after all that free PR ensured that the producers made their money back, of course). Siskel and Ebert added to the film’s infamy by calling it “sick, sleazy, and mean-spirited” and repeating the names of all involved with the admonition “shame on you” . The film itself is an exploitative argument for trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy: A boy whose parents were murdered in front of his eyes by a man in a Santa Claus suit is forced to draw pictures of Santa, sit on his lap, and ultimately work as a toy-store Santa until he snaps and murders those he deems “naughty” in a period-appropriate, crazed-killer fashion.

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 abandons the grim tone of its predecessor in favor of goofy ’80s excess, and has gained cult status among bad movie fans thanks to the hilariously eyebrow-based overacting of star Eric Freeman and the infamous “Garbage Day!” YouTube clip, which has been viewed over 5 million times. Most of the movie is actually composed of clips from the first Silent Night, Deadly Night (so much so that the cast and crew of both movies are listed in the credits) as Ricky (Freeman), the little brother of original Santa Claus killer Billy Caldwell, “recalls” events from the first movie—that there is no way he could possibly remember—to a psychiatrist. Eventually we catch up to the present and Ricky’s most recent killing spree, prompted by viewing Silent Night, Deadly Night—the only movie that exists in this universe, apparently—with his girlfriend at the local multiplex. Ricky doesn’t actually don the Santa suit until the end of the film, where he confronts tough old bird Mother Superior (Jean Miller), who could have prevented this whole thing by excusing those suffering from Santa-related trauma from the orphanage Christmas party. The remaining installments in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, all direct-to-video, don’t have killers in Santa suits but do have Clint Howard holding a giant animatronic grub in Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation and Mickey Rooney as an unhinged toy store owner in the surprisingly entertaining Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker.

Twenty-one years before he voiced Santa in the animated kids’ flick Christmas Is Here Again, Andy Griffith defended Santa Claus on murder charges on the first season of Matlock. The plot revolves around a heartless businessman, Alan Rollins (Linden Chiles), who has served eviction notices to the residents of an apartment building so he can build a parking garage on the property. When Rollins is bludgeoned to death with an ashtray (an old-fashioned way to die if there ever was one—good luck finding an office building that still allows smoking) in his office by a man in a Santa suit, building resident and semi-professional Santa Tom McCabe (Pat Hingle) is accused of the crime. Nobody seems to like McCabe much—not even Matlock—but that won’t discourage Atlanta’s folksiest defense attorney in his quest for Yuletide justice.

The TV version of Tales From The Crypt pays homage to its cinematic predecessor in “And All Through The House,” Robert Zemeckis’ re-imagining of the segment from the 1972 film. This one clocks in at 22 minutes, a full 12 minutes longer than its source material—some of that time is filled by the seasonal wordplay of every kid’s best pal, the Crypt Keeper, but we also get backstory on why Elizabeth (Mary Ellen Trainor) dispatches her husband with a fireplace poker in the first scene. In this version, Mommy kills (Step)Daddy so she can inherit his money and spend the holidays with her lover, a guy whose answering machine instructs callers to leave their “name, number, and measurements.” The 1989 version of “And All Through The House” is superior to the 1972 version in every way—it’s funnier, it’s scarier, it’s more visually interesting, and the psycho Santa gets way more screen time here than in the original. You might call it a Christmas… fear-acle! Get it? FEAR-acle?

Satan Claus could have been the Jason Takes Manhattan of killer Santa movies, if only you could tell any of it was happening in New York. This dark (as in it seems to be lit entirely by Christmas lights) tale is the end of the exploitation line, made about as cheaply as a movie can be and still be called “professional” by Italian director Massimiliano Cerchi. This killer has no origin story—he’s a homicidal cipher in the Friday The 13th mold, killing random people and collecting their body parts to trim a macabre Christmas tree. The police captain is without any leads, even though the killer calls him to brag about the murders in a series of long, seemingly easily traceable phone conversations. So it’s up to a struggling actor who witnessed one of his murders, his skeptical cop girlfriend, and a voodoo priestess to find the killer. Adding what appear to be Satanic rituals to Satan Claus further confuses things, although almost everything about this movie is confusing.

First of all—there are two movies called Santa Claws, and if you rent the wrong one you’re in trouble. The 2014 Santa Claws is a kids’ movie produced by The Asylum about a litter of talking kittens who have to take over for Santa when he suffers a cat-induced allergy attack. The 1996 Santa Claws is about Raven, a softcore actress currently filming Scream Queens’ Naked Christmas, played by Debbie Rochon, star of Scream Queens’ Naked Christmas. It’s very meta. (In one scene, someone asks Rochon/Raven what she’s been up to lately, and she describes the plot of Scream Queens’ Naked Christmas in great detail.) In the movie, Raven is married to a cheating photographer who keeps going out of town and leaving her alone with the kids. So she asks her friend Wayne (Grant Kramer) to help babysit, unaware that he’s completely, creepily obsessed with her (like, owns-a-bust-of-her obsessed). As Raven and Wayne spend more time together, his fixation grows until he takes to putting on a Santa suit and murdering her fellow models. That’s the ostensible plot, but most of Santa Claws consists of Rochon and friends shimmying in lingerie as the movie’s pseudo-metal theme song belts out, ”SCREAM QUEEN, a terror so sublime / SCREAM QUEEN, scare my pants off any time!”