As we ready ourselves for the new, female-led Black Christmas, I’m reminded of some of the outstanding performances by women in holiday horror flicks over the years. Imogen Poots and company have some big shoes to fill…

**Margot Kidder, Black Christmas (1974)**

Someone recently tweeted that Kidder “invented drinking in movies” for her hilarious, show-stopping rant in the original Black Christmas. As “foul-mouthed, drunk sorority slut” Barb (as described in Danny Peary’s 1991 book Cult Movie Stars), Kidder’s high point comes when she launches into a wholly inappropriate diatribe about turtles fucking at the zoo. But Kidder is hilarious and bracingly real throughout the entire film, spouting some of the screenplay’s choicest dialogue—“No, Clare, that’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir making their annual obscene phone call!”— and being unapologetically hedonistic.

“I remember her as being very bold in her personality, using a lot of risqué, suggestive language,” co-star John Saxon told Fangoria’s Keith Bearden for a 1996 retrospective. “Like she was making some kind of feminist statement. She was really something.”

[Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen Black Christmas—and if you haven’t seen it yet, what are you even doing with your life?] Her death scene is the most memorable one in the film, involving glass unicorns, raspy screams and bone chilling soundtrack dissonance. [End of spoiler. Seriously, get your life together and see Black Christmas.]

Margot Kidder may be best known for Superman, but between this, Amityville Horror, and Sisters, she’ll always be horror royalty to me. Rest in power, babe!

**Joan Collins, Tales from the Crypt (1972)/Mary Ellen Trainor, Tales from the Crypt episode “And All through the House…” (1989)**

Two actresses played the same gold digging murderess 17 years apart, and delivered distinct but equally compelling performances. In case you missed these EC comics adaptations, the plot concerns a wife who offs her husband on Christmas Eve so she can have his money; when a killer in a Santa Claus suit comes calling, she can’t call the police for fear of her crime being exposed.

It’s a great premise exploited in both the classic Amicus horror film and the camptacular HBO series. Collins acts nasty and looks good doing it; she kicks off the segment by braining her husband with a fireplace poker (and getting pink blood all over his newspaper), then deadpanning “Merry Christmas!” in a bitchy whisper. The fact that she’s wearing one of those goofy hats the Brits apparently all wear on Christmas makes it even better. I covet both her swinging ’70s wardrobe and her retro futuristic phone.

Mary Ellen Trainor’s performance in the later Crypt episode is notable not just for being completely different from Collins’, but for delivering just the right touch to make her cheesy dialogue, and the adaptation’s bizarre tone, work. Whereas the Amicus film plays things fairly straight, director Robert Zemeckis’ take on “And All through the House…” leans into the silliness. His amazing wife Trainor pulls off this approach with flying colors. After a stylish, cozy intro, things get wacky immediately: grumpy Joseph (Nightmare on Elm Street 2’s Marshall Bell) unwittingly asks glamorous wife (Trainor) to “let me have it.”

“It” being the poker.

“What did you say?” she intones dramatically, before doing just that. “Merry Christmas, you son of a bitch!” she declares before struggling to remove the poker from his head in an amusing splatstick bit. Before long, she’s run afoul of the killer Santa (Larry Drake, chewing the scenery and milking the “drooling lunatic” persona for all its worth) and must cover up her crime so she can call the authorities. This version allows for more physical combat between wife and psycho—there’s a bit at the door reminiscent of last year’s Halloween—and Trainor delivers a highly physical, comedic, energetic performance.

She has the bright idea to pin the murder on Santa—we know because she breathlessly practices telling them, “Oh, no, officer, I didn’t kill him! Santa did it! Didn’t you, Santa??”—but even this cleverness isn’t enough to prevent her innocently oblivious daughter from letting in Kris Kringle. “Naughty, or NICE?” he growls after revealing himself. Trainor then screams, a touch suggested by original Tales from the Crypt publisher William Gaines. “We took that to heart and in the last scene Mary Ellen gave us one of the greatest onscreen screams ever,” Zemeckis recalls in Digby Diehl’s fantastic book Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives (1996). Sadly, the talented actress, who appeared in films like Lethal Weapon, Romancing the Stone, and Death Becomes Her, died in 2015.

**Toni Collette and Krista Stadler, Krampus (2015)**

I went back and forth over who to highlight from Michael Dougherty’s modern Christmas horror classic. Collette, who played long-suffering mom Sarah three years before her Oscar caliber turn in Hereditary? Or Krista Stadler, whose subtle work as German grandmother Omi anchors the film’s premise? In the end, I decided to cheat and list both; hopefully you’ll forgive me, considering the film is pretty much loaded with outstanding performances, female and male. I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out Conchata Ferrell, whose hilarious, boozy Aunt Dorothy my friend David once described as “my five-year plan.” But the entire ensemble is terrific, perfectly cast to complement each other and emulate a real family.

Collette can chew scenery with the best of them, but here she’s got a trickier, less flashy part, and she achieves it perfectly. No surprise there—she’s a phenomenal actress. (My love affair with her began with The United States of Tara and was cemented when I watched her get filmed walking up a stoop in Brooklyn Heights for the short lived series Hostages. She was then draped in a robe and whisked away immediately in a van—it was the most Hollywood thing I’ve ever seen in my life.) Sarah’s mix of love and frustration for her husband, children, and sister—the fraught relationship with Allison Tolman’s Linda really resonates—are vividly conveyed, and she gets a tear jerking moment with son Max (Emjay Anthony) during the finale.

Stadler, meanwhile, is endearing and utterly real as the loving Omi. She surely reminds audiences of their own grandmothers, and fulfills the ideal—unconditionally loving and always cooking up yummy treats in the kitchen. She’s the one who explains the threat to the characters and audience, narrating the movie’s signature animated flashback to her first encounter with Krampus. She also conveys tremendous sadness and regret, and is a key element in the film’s moody, oft-debated ending. Family is at the heart of Christmas and Krampus, and these two women make that heart beat.