12 best holiday horror movies

9. Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972)

This 1972 horror film centers not only on the horror of Christmastime murder but also on an appropriately spooky mansion, serious family drama, and an ax-wielding murderer. It’s got everything for the family, assuming every member of your family is really into late 20th-century slasher films.

The film opens on Christmas Eve, 1950. Wilfred Butler dashes out of his Massachusetts mansion, engulfed in flames. He dies and the home passes to his grandson, Jeffrey. Twenty years later, Jeffrey sends his lawyer, John Carter, to sell the house.

It looks like Carter has sealed a deal to sell the home to the local townspeople, when he and his mistress, staying the night at the mansion, are horribly murdered with an ax. Jeffrey eventually arrives in town to meet with Carter and quickly gets caught up in the increasingly complicated plot. Later, the local sheriff finds Wilfred Butler’s grave disturbed. He is then quickly killed by an unknown assailant.

After a few more murders, Jeffrey and Diane (the mayor’s daughter) soon learn the truth: Wilfred Butler never died. Instead, he faked his own death and has been living in a nearby mental hospital ever since that fateful night in 1950.

Why fake his own death? Apparently, Wilfred is at the heart of numerous crimes, including fathering a child — Jeffrey — with his own daughter, Marianne, and committing that same daughter to a mental institution. When he got upset with the hospital staff, Wilfred released the patients there and inadvertently caused a riot that killed Marianne. Many of the murdered people are some of those former inmates.