A family accidentally summons the horniest Christmas devil since your mum.

2015’s Krampus was far from the first time the anti-Santa from German folklore had appeared in a festive horror flick, but its success has accelerated the rate at which Krampus movies are churned out, if not consumed. It even prompted opportunistic distributors to repackage their old Krampus landfill in the hopes of tricking people into thinking they were buying a real film, which is exactly the kind of cynical behaviour this Christmas creature feature tears apart.

Michael Dougherty’s take on the long-tongued legend stands head and horns above the straight-to-video incarnations (whose titles include Black Krampus, Granny Krampus and Bigfoot vs Krampus), not least because it has an actual budget and real actors (including Toni Collette, Allison Tolman and Adam Scott) playing the family members facing the most unpleasant Noel since Gallagher.

More than that though, it succeeds as a Christmas film, uniting two dysfunctional sides of the same family in a battle against the season itself. It subverts all aspects of yuletide iconography, imagining not only the bizarro Santa who gets his claws on the naughty list, but also what his colleagues would look like; demonic versions of children’s toys and gingerbread men straight out of an Evil Dead Christmas special, with twisted creature effects created by the elves at Weta Workshop.

From its ironic Christmas shopping opening to its bleak widwinter ending, Krampus follows through on its weird ideas and pulls no punches, unafraid to endanger and even punish its children, Roald Dahl-style. The result is Dante’s Gremlins meets Dante’s Inferno, a sleigh ride to consumerist hell whose theme of political polarisation tearing up families has only intensified in the 10 years since its release, when the thought of an evil man-satsuma was the stuff of festive fantasy.