Before the recommendations, an anecdote: Beginning my research for this column, I searched Amazon Video using the term “Christmas Movies.” About 20 pages in, I saw “Zombie Lake” listed. Now, “Zombie Lake” is an unusually tatty 1981 film by the director Jean Rollin (whose best work, of which this is not an example, is grisly and poetic with a lot of erotic obsessiveness) about dead German soldiers who rise out of a lake where they’d been dumped by the French Resistance fighters who’d killed them. It is not good (even Rollin nuts rate it low), but I checked it out again to see if there was some Christmas or holiday theme I’d missed before. No dice. There’s a brief winter battle scene, atrociously cut into a narrative that takes place largely when trees are in bloom, but that’s it.

How did Amazon Video wind up recommending “Zombie Lake” as a Christmas movie? As I’m new at covering this field, I asked a couple of colleagues if they could steer me to someone at Amazon who could take my question. They responded in a way that struck me as even more curious, acting as if I’d asked them for their credit cards.

Some seemed frightened, as if there were somebody at Amazon who, if asked an unpleasant question, had the power to banish you to a cornfield. Eventually one brave soul stepped up, I sent a couple emails, and was put in touch with a very pleasant Amazon rep who commended me for my doggedness in confirming the non-holiday content of “Zombie Lake.” As this column closes, however, I still await confirmation of my surmise that the presence of the movie was a result of, as plausibility suggests, a glitch in the Amazon search algorithm. In any event, I offer a caveat emptor to users of Amazon Video: If “Zombie Lake” comes up on your own search of Christmas or holiday movies, do not be persuaded. It is not a Christmas movie.