The 10 Best Christmas Movie Villains, Ranked

Let’s face it: the best Christmas movies aren’t complete without a good villain. In fact, for as many beloved Christmas characters as there are, more than half of them are the villains of the story. I suppose nothing gets us in the Christmas spirit more than watching it be defended from the Grinches and Scrooges of the world. So, to definitively rank them all is quite a task. Cinema’s greatest Christmas villains range from the deliciously malicious to the just straight up terrifying. However, we here at /Film are up to the task.

There’s an easy way to qualify for this list — be in a Christmas film — but we wanted to ask ourselves some deeper questions. When we think of the holiday season, do we think of these villains? Are the characters themselves strong or memorable? Are they embedded in the iconography of Christmas? Better yet, do they threaten the jolly comfort of the most wonderful time of the year? If they fall within some combination of these qualities, they were in strong consideration for this list. However, it also means the film itself is less-than-relevant to our final countdown, so there are some notable exceptions. Sorry, Hans Gruber.

We surely won’t please everyone, so no use delaying the inevitable. Here is our definitive ranking of cinema’s best Christmas baddies.

Is “The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause” a bonafide Christmas classic? To many people, no. However, as previously noted, the strength of a good villain goes beyond the movie surrounding them. In fact, truly iconic villains can redeem an otherwise subpar movie if they themselves raise the bar. Enter Martin Short’s Jack Frost, the delightfully conniving antagonist that, as more and more millennials come of age, has emerged as not only a saving grace for “The Escape Clause” but also a fan-favorite character across the Christmas movie canon. Don’t believe me? Take a quick perusal across the film’s most liked Letterboxd reviews.

Short was already a bonafide comic genius. However, his work as the overlooked winter character, here portrayed as subservient to Santa (aka Scott Calvin, played by Tim Allen) but striving to steal the big man’s job, is some of his most memorable. He transforms the character into a delightfully boastful showman, imbued with hypnotic charm that veneers a genuinely conniving menace. His look only adds to the charade, complete with freeze-dried hair and a chilly velvet suit with an icicle tie. He even sings in the film, crooning a parody of the song “New York, New York” titled “North Pole, North Pole.” What’s not to love about this guy? It may not reach the heights of his work on “Only Murders in the Building,” but you cannot deny Martin Short has cemented his foot into the door of Christmas cinema as Jack Frost.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” was once considered a box office bomb, yet its replay value over the years has turned it into an all-time classic, let alone a holiday staple. Despite that, the film’s long-held success hasn’t quite ushered Mr. Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the film’s primary antagonist, into the upper echelon of memorable Christmas characters. That’s primarily why he’s not higher on this list. That said, Mr. Potter is still quite despicable, an advantageous autocrat whose lack of empathy for the poor feels all-too-familiar in a year where wealth inequality is at an all-time high.

From the very beginning of the story, Mr. Potter’s penchant for criticizing the generosity of The Bailey Brothers Building and Loan feels pretty scummy. Clearly a lonely man with no source of love in his life, he hoards all of the city’s wealth and then feels zero remorse when other people are down on their luck. It’s like Scrooge, but before the important stuff. However, Potter thoroughly becomes the WOAT (worst of all time) when he decides to keep $8,000 of the Baileys’ income that is mistakenly given to him by Uncle Billy after a simple mistake at the bank. To effectively be the catalyst for George Bailey’s (James Stewart) complete breakdown and, eventually, near-suicide kinda makes you the ultimate villain. However, the fact we never follow-up with Potter is another slight detriment to his ranking here. After all, no Christmas villain is quite complete without comeuppance.

The holidays are meant to be a relaxing time spent with family and friends. We simply can’t think of a threat to that peace more horrifying than the Gremlins, the goopy green stars of Joe Dante’s beloved 1984 horror comedy of the same name. When inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) buys a strange but cute creature called a “mogwai” and gives it to his son, Billy (Zach Galligan), for Christmas, it unleashes a swarm of demonic creatures that wreak havoc on their town during Christmas Eve. Not only do they wrack up a body count of innocent civilians (including the utterly horrid Ms. Deagle, who is an honorable mention on this list for wanting to strangle an innocent dog who is a very good boy), but they leave genuine destruction in their wake, from dilapidated houses to flipped police cars.

Beyond this debaucherous violence, however, is a more subtextual attack on the very traditions of Christmas. Many viewers have argued that “Gremlins” is a sendup of the archetypal Christmas movie, including all of its shallow, suburban holiday niceties. Do you enjoy caroling at your neighbors’ doorsteps? Do you enjoy shopping for Christmas presents? Do you enjoy cooking a delicious Christmas meal? Maybe you even enjoy going to the movies with your family! Well, the Gremlins are here to destroy all that you hold dear as they sacrilegiously make a mess of each of these sacred activities and more across their hedonist rampage. This is what makes them true Christmas villains — except Gizmo (Howie Mandel). Gizmo innocent.

The Rankin/Bass Christmas film canon is packed with villains: Heat Miser, Burgermeister Meisterburger, and Professor Hinkle, just to name a few. Perhaps none of them are more recognizable than Bumble, the Abominable Snowman from “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.” It’s true, this towering yeti is one monstrous foe. However, we think it’s about time we reckon with the true villains of Rankin/Bass lore and, by extension, the entire Christmas season: Santa’s reindeer. You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, as the song says, but did you also know all of them are a**holes? There, I said it.

Most people think the story of “Rudolph” teaches us that our differences make us stronger, that Rudolph’s red nose was not a deformity but the very thing that helped save Christmas. That’s all well and good, but if you look closely, a more cynical message emerges. Does nobody find it bizarre that almost every reindeer has no issue mocking Rudolph to the outskirts of the North Pole — including Donner, his own father — simply because of a glowing nose that, let’s be honest, is actually super awesome? Does it then trouble nobody that, as soon as his red nose proves to be valuable for their needs, they suddenly herald him as a savior? His father even claims he loved him all along. Hogwash! The story of “Rudolph” is one of selfishness and duplicity, but I suppose that’s no stocking stuffer. We could all learn something from Santa’s reindeer: let’s be good to each other, yeah?

Though perhaps an unconventional pick for this countdown, anyone who has seen “Black Christmas” can attest to the harrowing power of its largely unseen male villain (played by Nick Mancuso). The film follows a group of sorority girls who fall prey to a serial killer who has covertly broken into their house around Christmas time. As the girls and their community begin to suspect suspicious behavior, they are quietly yet disturbingly killed off one-by-one, none of them aware that the culprit is in their midst. The character is so elusive throughout the film that he goes unnamed in the film’s credits, subsequently named Billy by later novelizations and, eventually, the film’s 2006 remake.

“Black Christmas” has already been thoroughly reappraised as a feminist horror masterwork, particularly in how the film’s central terror — how society’s ignorance toward Billy allows him to stalk and kill each character by complete surprise — is a larger metaphor for the lingering powerlessness women experience on a daily basis. However, by throwing it into a Christmas setting, screenwriter Roy Moore and director Bob Clark heighten the girls’ innocence with that of the holiday season, juxtaposing blissful yuletide ignorance with Billy’s deeply troubled, lustful acts. Some especially upsetting moments include a character’s death obscured by the melody of Christmas carollers outside, as well as the film’s ending, which sees Billy still at-large. This ambiguous sense of holiday horror, left to linger for all Christmases yet to come, makes Billy as formidable a Christmas villain as any other.

Who doesn’t love the Wet Bandits? Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but watching those tools be used to cause them great pain and suffering makes for one of the greatest Christmas films of all time. “Home Alone” is required viewing in countless households, in large part thanks to the slimy sleaze of the film’s antagonists, a team of two cockamamie crooks who seek to rob a block’s worth of houses while families are away on Christmas vacation. Thankfully, the bratty but clever Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is here to spoil their plans.

The Wet Bandits aren’t particularly great at what they do. Harry is consistently in over his head, while Marv barely has a head to be in over. However, great movie villains are not always defined but what they do but rather how they serve the story. “Home Alone” is very much a film about appreciating what we have, especially when we recognize what others may not have. Harry and Marv are the worst-case scenario for the have-nots of the world, a duo of schmucks who resort to taking during the season of giving. To see them be brutally beaten by a kid who has done the work to recognize his own arrogance is wildly satisfying, especially thanks to brilliant slapstick performances from both Pesci and Stern themselves. With every yelp that comes out of their mouths, a Christmas angel gets its wings.

My, my, my, what have we here? It’s only the coolest boogeyman this side of Halloweentown!

Oogie Boogie (Ken Page) has the rare distinction of being both a Halloween and a Christmas villain, which certainly earns you brownie points on this list. Though he is a resident of Halloween Town, his obsession with taking down nemesis Jack Skellington (Chris Sarandon) leads to him kidnapping Sandy Claws (Edward Ivory). In many ways, Halloween is the antithesis of Christmas, so watching Oogie exact his neon-lit, verminous torture onto Santa is the ultimate threat to Christmas. That alone would make him a great Christmas villain, but having one of the holiday’s most beloved films doesn’t hurt either – yes, it’s a Christmas film, suck it Tim Burton.

Oogie isn’t just a great villain, but he’s also a delightful character period. It’s rare that a character with such limited screentime feels so fully realized in its design, but every element of Oogie’s infectious spirit and macabre aesthetic coalesce together beautifully: his tightly sewn burlap body, his wriggling pink insides, his compulsive gambling habit, and, of course, Ken Page’s exceptionally bawdy baritone voice work. It all comes together in the character’s iconic jazz number, “The Oogie Boogie Song,” which sees him and his creepy-crawly friends tear the house down with a ragtime number so juicy it could rank as one of the all-time great Disney villain songs…but that is a list for another day. For now, we’ll let him sit close to this throne.

Plenty of Christmas villains are frightening, some even genuinely disturbing (I’m lookin’ at you, “Silent Night, Deadly Night”). However, very few of them are genuinely, pee-your-pants scary. Krampus is certainly one of them, and only one horror film has realized the mythological beast with all of the genuine terror they possess. Directed by Michael Dougherty (“Trick ‘r’ Treat,” “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”), 2015’s “Krampus” is a fairly middling film overall. It’s a generic studio film claiming it’s a horror comedy when, in reality, it isn’t all that funny nor all that scary. However, the film does have some things going for it, that being its incorporation of Bavarian folklore and Wētā Workshop’s beautiful creature designs, specifically of the big man himself.

Standing at seven feet tall and dragging much longer chains behind him, this film depicts Krampus as a hunching, elderly demon who comes to punish a family who have soiled the Christmas spirit. The movie’s version of the monster sports many of his trademark features: curly horns, sunken eyes, protruding claws, steep hoofs, and a stringy beard. However, Dougherty did mess with the monstrous mythos a bit, imbuing the character with a lingering gait and a draped cloak, for example. It gives Krampus a much more eerie, sinister aura, like a haunted night watchman. They also resemble a more emaciated Saint Nick – fitting for one who kidnaps kids for its cronies to eat whole. Though the character is stripped of screen time, the close-ups we do get prove that Christmas can have a dark side.

There are only two Christmas villains who are so synonymous with the holiday that their names are used as shorthand for people who suck. Both of them are among the most recognizable characters in all of fiction and, frankly, are interchangeable for the top two spots on this list. However, we’ll start with the hairier of the two, in reference to both the character’s body as well as their reputation across media. We are, of course, referencing The Grinch, one of Dr. Seuss’ most well-known avatars and an essential Christmas character. Though he goes through a redemption arc, his persona has gone on to represent anyone’s lack of Christmas cheer, making him a pop culture mainstay.

The Grinch has seen multiple well-known adaptations over the years, from the Chuck Jones animated television special to the Jim Carrey-led live-action film. Both are still the definitive versions of the character. Boris Karloff’s chilling voice work is unmatched, while Carrey’s explosive comic chops keep his portrayal beloved, not to mention the greater pathos brought on by the film’s expanded screenplay. 

These days, however, the character’s legacy has been somewhat wrung through the mud, from Illumination Entertainment’s subpar animated “The Grinch” film to his likeness being used in Wal-Mart and Capital One commercials. It can sometimes feel like the character’s wholesomeness has been co-opted against the very compassion he succumbs to. However, even amidst all of these misfires, the spirit of the character holds firm as charmingly goofy and altogether meaningful. His best iterations far outweigh whatever slop he may endure.

Bah, humbug! As lovable as The Grinch can be, there is no mistletoe miser quite as everlasting as Ebenezer Scrooge. The star of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” this stingy geezer goes on the ultimate cautionary tale to rediscover his holiday spirit, one that has engaged audiences for over a century. Whether live-action or animated, everybody recognizes his curmudgeonly personality, followed by a visit from three ghosts and a big change of heart. In fairness, the character does get redeemed by the end, which takes some edge off of the villainy. However, if you’re a Christmas hater, you’re a Scrooge. That kind of name-brand recognition makes you the Christmas villain to beat.

Most people’s first foray into Scrooge-dom was likely with either Alistair Sim in 1951 or Albert Finney in 1970, both classically trained actors who brought great gravitas to the role. However, many people’s favorite Scrooges come from more liberal adaptations, most notably Michael Caine’s luminous turn in 1992’s “The Muppet Christmas Carol” opposite Kermit the Frog. Other unique renditions include Bill Murray’s “Scrooged,” a cult classic reimagining in which Scrooge is a cigar-chomping television executive, and Jim Carrey’s motion-capture turn in 2009, in which he plays Scrooge as well as all three Christmas ghosts. And then, there’s takes like Scrooge McDuck, the beloved Disney anti-hero who has gone on to have a lore of his own. So long as you have a hat, a cane, and a shrewd frugality, the Scrooge-iness will shine through no matter what form it takes.