Our favourite below-the-radar festive movies.

What makes a Christmas movie? Is it the particular cocktail of feelings it rouses – a quick and effective hit of happiness and comfort, a reminder of the importance of family and the potency of love? IMDB’s user-generated Ultimate Christmas Movie List certainly points to these ingredients, with big-hitters such as Miracle On 34th Street and A Christmas Carol opening as suicide-inducing odes to regret and selfishness and climaxing in serotonin-soaked universalisms, roast dinners, sozzled elderlies and hugs.

It’s arguable, though, that Christmas movies can be defined by subtler gestures than these. It’s arguable, even, that Christmas movies can be unsentimental, a little dark, blackly funny – a touch more like the real thing. Forget It’s A Wonderful Life for a second, here are five truly alternative Christmas films.

Why is Clue, the big-screen board game adaptation set in McCarthy-era Los Angeles, suddenly a Christmas flick? Well, it’s because it has all the fundamental tenets of the season: vaguely estranged people forced to dine together and play mind games among themselves – until one of them is murdered in a fit of panic, confusion and rage. Murder, or at the very least bloody-minded animosity between loved ones, is a key piece of the Christmas puzzle, isn’t it? It’s why this cultish, Mr Tim Curry-led 1980s caper is essential festive watching.

Set 21 years into the future, Children Of Men paints a truly harrowing vision of humanity on the brink of extinction. Civil Servant Mr Clive Owen must help the world’s last surviving fertile woman through war-torn England, and in doing so becomes the only wellspring in an otherwise brittle and unnerving mid-2000s masterpiece. His is a backwards take on Jesus Christ, our supposed saviour, but also a pointed and relevant ode to our times.

A film about middle-aged transgressions – infidelities, partner swapping, the relinquishing of responsibilities – Mr Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm is as much a story about bourgeois US in the mid 1970s as it is the feeling of Christmas. The holiday season is all about neighbourly affairs between rounds of Monopoly and cheese and generally feeling a bit freer and naughtier than you usually would, right? This sensitive and star-heavy drama (everyone from Ms Sigourney Weaver and Mr Kevin Klein to Mr Elijah Wood and Ms Christina Ricci appear) is a forgotten 1990s gem well worth inspection.

One silent night, a sleepwalker travels through lucid states in search of kicks and kink: cue raw meat, fistfights and, to finish, a melting Christmas tree. When it premiered in 1947, Mr Kenneth Anger’s mondo-trasho short was met with mass repulsion, culminating in Mr Anger’s arrest on obscenity charges. Nowadays though, it’s little more than a 12.12-minute journey through sexual exploration and Christmas-induced hallucinations.

Bad things happen to good people at Christmas. In 1984 dramedy Comfort And Joy, for example, Mr Bill Paterson’s kleptomaniac girlfriend leaves him shortly before the holiday season, and he spends it embroiled in gang politics between ice-cream traders in Glasgow. Mr Bill Forsyth’s nod to the most tragedy-prone time of year is a refreshing blend of real and surreal, and perhaps the most conventionally heartwarming film on this list. Still, radio DJ Mr Paterson’s wonderfully existential closing monologue about mundane city life, broadcast from a lonely station, is a million, million miles from Die Hard.

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