A clown walks into a bar. Seriously. Bear with me a minute here.

The clown sees a Santa Claus impersonator propped up on a stool with a beer. The clown gambols across to sit on Santa’s lap, and then pees his pants before shooting everyone else in the bar. He steals Santa’s costume, ties him up, douses him with liquid nitrogen and proceeds to smash him to bloody pieces. Ho ho ho.

Welcome to Christmas at the Syvrets, where it is an inviolable tradition that such scenes of yuletide carnage – in this case from the horror movie Terrifier 3 – play across the living room television screen late in the day every 25 December.

Most families have Christmas traditions. Maybe it’s making a gingerbread nativity scene, midnight mass at the local church, hauling the kids and a bucket of prawns to the beach for the day or a slightly intoxicated game of back yard cricket in the arvo. Whatever floats your esky.

Our family is a bit different. At that stage of the day, when the postprandial torpor sets in, it’s time for the annual Christmas horror movie, of which there are hundreds – of vastly varying quality, entertainment value and........

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