Naughty list: screen culture’s bad guys strike at Christmas

What is it about the season of goodwill that attracts diabolical evil? Christmas might only last for 12 days, but the queue of monsters and murderers trying to sneak down your chimney during the festive season is long. Just look at Violent Night (2022), a dark action-comedy where mercenaries take on an armed Santa (David Harbour). You can be sure he’ll be packing more than just tangerines and candy canes.

It won’t be the first time Father Christmas has gone rogue. Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa (2003) gave us Saint Nick as a mall thief, while early slasher To All a Goodnight (1980) was built around a faceless killer who’d swapped the hockey mask for the fluffy red suit.

Historically, Santa has always outsourced his dirty work. Since at least the 6th century, Bavarian legend Krampus imagines Mr Clause accompanied by a fanged bogeyman who birches unruly children. The character got his own monster movie with Krampus (2015), and has appeared as both a demonic force in survival horror video game Krampus Is Home (2019), as well as a snowball-shooting assassin in Call of Duty: Warzone (2020).

Luckily, not all Christmas villains are the stuff of nightmares. The two burglars who target Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone (1990) are effectively useless. Maybe that’s why THQ’s Game Boy adaption saw them accompanied by an army of health-sapping spiders, rats and – perhaps taking their cue from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – a ghost to fight in stage three.

Mr Dickens’ restless spirits have become a festive staple in themselves; whether you prefer Alistair Sim’s cold-hearted miser from Scrooge (1951) or Bill Murray’s ranting executive from Scrooged (1988), the last thing you want to wake up to on Christmas Eve is a spectre at the end of your bed. Between both adaptions, Lawrence Gordon Clark made seven Ghost Stories for Christmas for the BBC from 1971 to 1977, each of which saw amateur historians unleashing midwinter evil. Perhaps retro gamers should take note if trying to emulate Psycho Santa (1993), an Amiga shooter where the players has to bombard the Ghost of Christmas Past with snowballs.

More destructive than any phantoms are the respectable-looking human monsters who strike at Christmas. Christian Bale’s Armani-dressed killer Patrick Bateman decided to hack up a business rival under the mistletoe in American Psycho (2000). And of course it’s impossible to pull a cracker without thinking of the explosions and flashes caused by Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988) – and his bomb-laden legacy in Probe’s Die Hard Trilogy (1996) game.

Duke Nukem: Nuclear Winter (1997) is even more explosive, and a lot more distasteful. The first-person shooter sees the wisecracking Duke blast his way through Lapland to kill a brainwashed Father Christmas, and to eliminate his evil snowmen minions who have been possessed by the “Feminist Elvin Militia”. By comparison, Hitman: Blood Money (2006) – where the titular assassin chokes out a drunken Santa before stuffing him in a chest freezer – seems almost ethical.

Maybe the real scourge of Christmas isn’t aliens or even costumed serial killers, but market forces. In 1984, Commodore title Special Delivery: Santa’s Christmas Chaos let players experience the Christmas rush through Mr Clause’s eyes as he tried to grab presents to deliver to an unending scroll of customers. If the player touches a gift dropped by the “Red Devil”, Santa avatar is punished and loses points – working conditions that fulfilment warehouse staff will know all too well.

There’s a similar urgency to the top-down The Escapists: Santa’s Sweatshop (2015), where it’s Santa who’s the antagonist and the player is an elf trying to bust out of a toyshop run on modern slavery. Along with Gremlins (1984) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), it’s one of the more mischievous takes on the idea of the yuletide villain.

But the gong for the biggest Christmas spoilsport of them all is shared by two icons. The first is Black Mask from Batman Arkham Origins (2013), an action-adventure game which saw the skull-faced crime lord hijack Christmas Eve and offer $50 million to whichever criminal could bring him the cowl of Gotham’s dark knight.

The other is the aforementioned Alan Rickman. Yes, everyone knows him as terrorist party-pooper Hans Gruber from Die Hard (1988). Yes, his Severus Snape is grumpier than Ebenezer. But when the actor played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), he roared words that struck terror into the hearts of children, chocoholics and pretty much everyone except Oliver Cromwell: “Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans! No more merciful beheadings! And call off Christmas!”