When you think of Christmas movies, you think of James Stewart surrounded by his family on Christmas Eve, Will Ferrell in a silly, green suit wandering around New York City, Hugh Grant extolling the virtues of David Beckham’s feet while the dude from The Walking Dead bothers Keira Knightley with problematic placards. What you almost certainly don’t think of is a group of Scottish schoolkids singing catchy songs and beating zombies to death with enormous candy canes.

That’s not the sugar-induced daydream of a bored north pole elf, but the concept behind the yuletide musical Anna and the Apocalypse, which arrives in UK cinemas at the end of November. It’s the latest film to take the lightness of Christmas and bash it against the macabre thrills of the horror genre in the hope of producing something that’s as freaky as it is festive. Movie history is littered with stories that have twisted the sweetness of Christmas, splattering blood on the baubles and thrusting carnage into the cranberry sauce.

Christmas-set early shocker … Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night

It’s a movie tradition that stretches back at least to the 1970s with the British anthology from 1972 Tales from the Crypt – which features Joan Collins battling a homicidal Santa – and the underseen but very creepy early slasher Black Christmas: directed by Bob Clark and released in 1974, it originated many of the conventions of the teen slasher four years before Michael Myers ran riot in Halloween. Even earlier, in 1945, the Ealing Studios horror anthology Dead of Night featured a scary story set at a Christmas party.

However, the roots of seasonal horror go back even further than that. “The tradition of the gothic at Christmas goes way back in literature with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol,” says Dr Darren Elliott-Smith, senior lecturer in film at the University of Hertfordshire. “You have the various BBC adaptations of MR James short stories, including Whistle and I’ll Come to You in 1968. Essentially, most of these dark tales tap into a history of our pagan past and the odd fusion of Christian celebration around Christmas that has supplanted the earlier celebration of the winter festival. But despite the historical elements, there are also the obvious ideas around darkness over the Christmas period and the ‘nightmare’ of spending time with loved ones.”

Finnish horror … Peeter Jakobi in Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Elliott-Smith also points out the re-emergence of darker European Christmas myths in the festive cinema of recent years. Finnish horror Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale from 2010 presents Santa as a devilish, horned being in a block of ice, while the European Krampus figure – a half-goat, half-demon antithesis to Saint Nicholas, who punishes children for misbehaving – has become a fixture of cult cinema. There have been five direct-to-DVD Krampus movies since 2013, as well as a cinematically released horror-comedy in 2015. The horned demon’s Christmas cinema dominance is set to continue in the coming years, with the Jim Henson Company working on its own Krampus-inspired tale.

It’s not just Krampus, though. Last year, audiences were treated to the incredibly nasty Better Watch Out, a macabre take on Home Alone in which slapstick is replaced by bloodshed. The direct-to-VOD market, meanwhile, has been saturated with dark Christmas titles over the last few years, from the risible Once Upon a Time at Christmas in 2017 to this month’s outrageously violent and riotously enjoyable black comedy Secret Santa, which is being released under the Frightfest Presents banner.

Home alone at Christmas … Levi Miller and Olivia DeJonge in Better Watch Out. Photograph: Vision/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Elliott-Smith adds: “We like the idea of watching films that offer an alternative to the saccharine films we are encouraged to watch over the festive period. Like a good Christmas movie, a good horror also ultimately encourages survival against the odds and a sense of community that is restored at the end of the film. I think that Christmas horror films particularly are often comedic, or indeed camp, in nature – they’re often not overtly or obviously scary. The campness of Christmas lends itself well to the excessive, OTT and comedic horror that we see in films such as Gremlins and Krampus.”

There’s also a sense that Christmas is enough of a selling point that it makes experimentation and genre-bending more palatable to audiences. It’s into this world that Anna and the Apocalypse swaggers. John McPhail’s film combines the charm of a movie musical with the tacky camp of Christmas, providing a side order of zombie violence for those who like a bitter edge to their festive cinema.

“Christmas is such a happy time, a fun time and a family time, and you’re focusing on these kids that just want to get back to their loved ones,” says McPhail of his movie. “The season just heightens that emotion. We all relate to Christmas and understand it. The themes also focus on teenagers dealing with death because, when you hit that age, it’s like you’re told that Santa Claus isn’t real and that death is everywhere. When I was making this film, I wanted to make this generation’s Gremlins – the anti-Christmas movie you could put on and still feel good afterwards. It doesn’t make you feel horrible or rotten.”

Anna and the Apocalypse aims to continue the trend. The film premiered more than a year ago at Fantastic Fest and currently has a 92% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes as it approaches a cinema release.

McPhail says he hopes that his film has the entertainment value to become a bona fide Christmas favourite that families can watch every year, so long as they have the stomach for gore. “I just hope people enjoy it and they have a laugh and come together watching it. To have a family or a bunch of friends around at Christmas doing that would be a dream come true, because that’s why I made the film. It’s for them to enjoy and to throw themselves into this crazy world.”