Every list of 80s christmas movies is the same list. A merch store ranks a dozen of them and hands out superlatives. A movie database lists every TV special from 1980 to 1989 in date order. A ten-year-old top ten still links to a big online retailer. Somebody on a forum asks for the obscure ones to show their kids, and forty people answer with the same six titles.

Fine. Nobody needs another ranking. Here’s the thing none of them mention, and it’s the first thing you notice if you rewatch a couple with someone born after 2005: these movies are mean. Not “edgy.” Mean. A mall Santa boots a kid down a slide. A family pet multiplies into something that ends up in a microwave. A pair of rich old men ruin a stranger’s life on a one-dollar bet. A network executive fires a guy on Christmas Eve for disagreeing with him in a meeting. And at least once a December, the kid next to you on the couch turns and asks, quietly, whether you were actually allowed to watch this.

We were. Nobody had softened them yet.

80s christmas movies had teeth

Start with the one that’s on a loop for twenty-four hours every year. It’s remembered as warm. Watch it again. The kid gets his mouth washed out with soap. A bully with yellow eyes corners him in the snow. A department-store Santa, at the end of a long shift, puts a boot on his forehead and shoves him down a slide. The kid who gets triple-dog-dared freezes his tongue to a flagpole, and when the bell rings the whole class files back inside and leaves him there, stuck, until the teacher happens to glance out the window.

That’s the gentle one. The rest of the decade’s holiday shelf includes a small furry Christmas present that turns into a town-wide massacre, a holiday party in a skyscraper that ends with the building half blown up, a Santa suit worn by a ruined man eating smoked salmon through the beard on a city bus, and a ghost story starring a man who suggests stapling antlers onto mice to save on effects. All of them are set at Christmas on purpose. None of them are sorry about it.

The standard explanation is “it was a different time,” which is true and explains nothing. Different how? The meanness in 80s christmas movies wasn’t one thing. It was three things that happened to be true at the same time, and none of them are true anymore:

• The rating that would have warned your parents didn’t exist yet.
• The adults on screen were allowed to be the bad guys, not just the clueless ones.
• Nobody had decided yet what a “Christmas movie” was supposed to feel like.

Take those one at a time and the decade starts to make sense. It also explains a little about the people who grew up watching it, which we’ll get to.

The rating that didn’t exist yet

Until the summer of 1984, the movie rating system had one setting between “fine for anyone” and “bring a parent.” It was PG, and it covered an enormous amount of ground. A talking-animal movie got PG. So did a movie with a man’s heart being pulled out of his chest. Parents read the two letters on the newspaper listing and made a judgment call based on almost nothing.

Then, on June 8, 1984, a Christmas movie opened. In June. It was rated PG. It starred a small, wide-eyed, extremely marketable creature that a father picks up in a back-room shop as a present for his son, along with three rules that the son breaks in roughly the order you’d expect. By the second act the creatures have multiplied and gone bad, and the boy’s mother is alone in her kitchen dealing with them using a blender, a carving knife, and the microwave. In the same movie, the girlfriend delivers a flat, unhurried monologue about why she hates Christmas, which involves her father, a Santa suit, a chimney, and several days before anyone noticed the smell.

The studio wanted that speech cut. They felt nobody would know whether to laugh or not. The director refused, on the grounds that not knowing whether to laugh was the entire movie, and the speech stayed. If you saw it at the right age, you remember exactly where you were sitting.

PG-13, more or less because of us

Parents complained. Loudly, and not only about that one: a jungle-temple adventure that came out a couple of weeks earlier had drawn the same complaints for the same reason. Two PG movies in a single season had sent a lot of young kids home unable to sleep. The industry responded fast for once. On July 1, 1984, less than a month after the creature movie opened, the PG-13 rating went into effect. The first movie released under it came out in August.

Run the math on who was in those theater seats. In the summer of 1984, Gen X was somewhere between three and nineteen years old. The new rating was a fence built specifically around the ages most of us happened to be. It went up a few weeks after we’d already been let into the yard.

That’s why so many 80s christmas movies from the first half of the decade feel like they’re getting away with something. They are. They were rated under a system with no middle, and the middle was where we lived. By the time a 1988 ghost story about a cynical TV executive got its PG-13, the fence was up. The early-decade stuff had already been on cable a dozen times, and it was never going to be re-rated.

When parents picketed Santa

Five months later the decade found the line. It was a horror movie about a killer in a Santa suit, and it opened on November 9, 1984.

What set it off wasn’t the movie, which very few of the protesters had seen. It was the ads. The studio ran television spots in the afternoon and early evening, including during a nationally televised football game, and the poster showed a Santa arm with an axe coming out of a chimney. A housewife in Milwaukee saw one, formed a group called Citizens Against Movie Madness, and coordinated protests nationwide. On opening day, protesters picketed a theater in the Bronx and sang Christmas carols outside it. A famous Chicago critic read the names of the production crew out loud on television and called the box office “blood money.”

The studio pulled every ad the day before the film opened. Within about two weeks, it had been taken out of theaters in Milwaukee, New York, and New Jersey. The following spring a smaller distributor put it back out with a poster that skipped the Santa art and sold the controversy instead, which is a very 80s solution to a very 80s problem.

The box on the bottom shelf

Here’s the Gen X part. Almost none of us saw that movie in a theater, because almost nobody did. We saw it, or didn’t, at the video rental store, where it turned up on tape about eighteen months later and lived on the bottom shelf of the horror section for the rest of the decade. We knew it existed because the adults had made such a fuss. The protest was the advertising. A generation that had never been told anything was off-limits got, for once, a clear signal that something was, and responded in the only way that generation knew how.

Worth noticing what the protest was actually about. Parents weren’t upset that a movie was violent; the decade had plenty of those. They were upset that it was violent about Christmas, on television, at an hour when their kids were watching. That’s a line about what Christmas was supposed to mean, drawn by the adults. Which brings us to what the rest of the decade’s movies thought the adults were like.

The grown-ups were the villains

The 90s holiday movies, as we’ve covered, were about grown-ups blowing it: distracted, overbooked, on the wrong plane. The adults in 80s christmas movies weren’t distracted. They were the problem, and they knew it.

Count the antagonists. Two elderly commodity brokers who swap a man’s life with a stranger’s on a bet, for one dollar, and then plan to throw the winner back on the street. The richest woman in a small town, who spends Christmas threatening to have a family dog put down. A network president who fires an employee on Christmas Eve for questioning a promo, and who is, technically, the hero. A company boss who cancels the year-end bonus and replaces it with a membership in a jelly-of-the-month club, so that a man can’t pay for the pool he’s already put a deposit on. These weren’t misunderstood people with a soft center that comes out in the third act. Most of them stay mean right up until the credits, and a couple of them never get better at all.

That’s not a coincidence of screenwriting. The 80s were the decade of the boss. It was the era of the corporate raider, the hostile takeover, and the leveraged buyout that closed the plant two towns over. Grown-up America spent the decade arguing about whether ruthless was a virtue, and the movies, written by grown-ups, did what movies do: they put the argument in a Santa hat. Christmas in these films isn’t magic. It’s pressure. It’s the night the bonus is due, the office party, the in-laws, the bill. The people with power use it the way they use everything else.

What a kid learns from that

If you were ten, you didn’t follow the commodities plot. You followed the shape of it, which was clear enough: the people in charge are not necessarily on your side, and holidays don’t change that. The adults who turn out okay in these movies are almost always the ones without power. The cab driver. The beat cop on the radio. The butler.

That’s a lesson a lot of us took to heart early and never really put down, and it’s not hard to see where it went. Distrust of anyone with a corner office, a decent radar for when you’re being sold something, and a sense of humor dry enough to survive both. It’s on most honest lists of Gen X characteristics, usually filed under “skeptical.” The holiday movies didn’t create it. They just showed up every December and confirmed it, with snow.

It’s also why, when this shop makes something, it tries hard not to sell at you. If a shirt from the GenerationX shop ends up under a tree this year, it should be because somebody looked at it and laughed, not because a countdown timer told them to. We learned from the movies who uses a countdown timer.

It opened in July, and nobody argued

Every December now there’s an argument about whether the skyscraper movie is a Christmas movie. You know the one. There are polls. There are think pieces. One of the competitor guides on page one gives it its own section and calls it a paradox.

Here’s the detail that ends the argument, or at least makes it funnier: it opened on July 15, 1988. In twenty-one theaters, in the middle of summer, as an action movie. Nobody walked out of an air-conditioned theater in July saying “what a lovely Christmas film.” They walked out talking about the bare feet and the broken glass. It came out on video the following January, after the holidays were over. For years it was simply a movie that happened to be set at an office Christmas party, like the creature movie happened to be set in a snowy small town and had opened in June.

The argument is younger than the movie. It showed up decades later, mostly online, and the funniest part of it is who’s on which side. A 2017 British poll asked more than five thousand people whether the skyscraper movie counted. Only 31 percent said yes. The yes votes skewed under twenty-four. The no votes skewed over fifty. In other words, the people old enough to have seen it in a theater in July were the ones saying it wasn’t a Christmas movie, and the people who met it later, on a streaming menu in December, were the ones insisting it was.

The definition moved, not the movies

The reason the question even makes sense now is that “Christmas movie” became a genre with rules, and the rules are new. A certain greeting-card cable channel didn’t put its Christmas-movie programming under a single seasonal banner until 2009. Since then the format has become an industry: a small town, a big-city professional who learns to slow down, a bakery or a tree farm, a kiss in the snow around minute eighty-five, and nobody dies, ever. That template now starts showing up on TV the last weekend of October.

Measure 80s christmas movies against that template and almost none of them pass. Not because they’re bad Christmas movies, but because nobody had written the template yet. In 1984, “Christmas movie” just meant “a movie that takes place in December.” The decade’s directors were free to put the holiday in anything they liked, a slasher, a creature feature, a Wall Street comedy, a cop movie, and they did. Christmas wasn’t a genre. It was a setting, and settings don’t come with a promise that everything will be fine.

80s christmas movies: quick answers

The questions people actually type, answered without a slideshow.

What are the best 80s christmas movies?

The ones that show up on every list, described the way you’d describe them to a friend: the kid who wants the air rifle (1983), the two traders and the bet (1983), the creatures you shouldn’t feed after midnight (1984), the TV executive and the three ghosts (1988), the skyscraper (1988), and the family whose dad tries to throw the perfect Christmas and gets a jelly club for his trouble (1989). If you knew every one from the description, you were there. The order is your business. Any list that leaves off the ghost-story one entirely is just wrong, but we’re not going to argue about it.

What are some good older Christmas movies that aren’t on every list?

The deep cuts are mostly made-for-TV and early cable, which is why they’re hard to find now. There’s a mid-decade family-studio movie in which a father is shot during a robbery and his kids’ car goes into an icy river, all before the Christmas angel shows up to sort things out. There’s a late-decade one about a farm girl, a widowed dad who’s about to lose the farm, and a reindeer with a hurt leg. And there’s a whole run of TV movies where a grumpy old man learns something, usually with a lot of snow and not much budget. The forum threads asking for “obscure 80s Christmas films” are mostly people trying to find one of these from a half-remembered scene. Describe the scene. Someone will know it.

Is the skyscraper movie a Christmas movie?

It opened in July and came out on tape in January. You can decide what that tells you. For what it’s worth, the people who saw it first mostly say no, and the people who saw it later mostly say yes. Both sides are going to keep watching it in December either way.

Are 80s christmas movies okay for kids now?

Check the year before you check the rating. Anything from before July 1984 was rated under the old system, so a PG from 1983 can contain things a PG from 1990 wouldn’t. Several of the decade’s best holiday movies are rated R and earned it. The one on a twenty-four-hour loop is honestly fine, apart from the soap. For everything else, watch it first, or watch it with them, and enjoy the look on their face when the girlfriend starts talking about the chimney.

Why do 80s christmas movies feel darker than newer ones?

Three reasons: the PG rating covered too much until mid-1984, the decade’s adults were written as antagonists rather than bumblers, and the soft cable Christmas-movie format that defines the genre today didn’t exist until 2009. The movies weren’t trying to be dark. They just weren’t trying not to be.

Final thoughts: nobody had sanded it off yet

The easy version of this post would say the 80s made better Christmas movies. That’s not quite it, and it would be the kind of thing we try not to say around here. Plenty of them were loud, lazy, or both. What they had was teeth, and the teeth weren’t a choice. They were what a movie looked like when nobody had yet built the rating, the template, or the marketing department that would later file them down.

The decade’s nostalgia mostly comes back to us as a pastel version of itself, as we’ve argued before: the hair, the synths, the neon, played for laughs. The Christmas movies are one of the few pieces that come back intact, because they’re on every December whether anybody asks for them or not. Put one on this year and you get the real thing: the boot on the forehead, the blender, the bet, the bonus that turns out to be jelly.

How we used to watch them, off cable, taped over, half-remembered, is another story, and so is the annual special you had one shot at catching. What they said is this one, and the thing they said was simple: Christmas comes whether the adults are good people or not, so you might as well be ready for either.

Most of us were. We’d seen the movies.