is because they're christian conversion narratives. This is almost a tautology as the hallmark style movies are made by weirdo evangelicals but even with other classic "christmas" stories you still see it: A Christmas Carol, Dinner For One, A Miracle on 45th street, Trains Planes & Automobiles, David Cronenberg's The Fly, Die Hard, Its A Wonderful Life, The Irony of Fate, The Snowman, The Grinch etc... The crux of a "good" christmas story seems to be that:

usually over the course of a night, generally christmas night or near christmas,

someone or a group is changed as people by events outside their control,

which causes them to be transubstantiated into "good people" or at least "better" people (the cop in die hard learns to kill again, for instance)

This is one of those things that I end up thinking about during hanukkah because the concept of a "chanukka movie" has had a few dybbuks inflicted upon it in the form of the Adam Sandler movie "8 Crazy Nights" as well as the weird christian-media style "Channuka movies" that are produced with equal artlessness to any hallmark christmas movie, because you gotta trick grandparents desperate for jewish media into buying them. The standard model for these supposed chanucha movies has the exact same stupid christmas narrative of any overt christmas movie; someone learning "a lesson" and becoming a "better person" because of the holiday: again, basically a conversion story, and even worse in 8 Crazy Nights because Adam Sandler is in it.

But enough about just what a chanukah movie isn't, it's important to go over what Chanukha itself is and isn't: it's not a "festival of lights" (it's not really about the light, and I feel a festival of light by its nature tends to very specifically not limit the maximum number of candles involved) but it is about lighting things on fire and them burning, nor is it really a winter festival despite it's timing in winter, but it is about persevering longer than expected which works as a thing to have in mid winter. That persevering element also comes along with the sanctification/reclamation of a space that has been violated or threatened in some way... and also it's really a hyper-specific celebration of specifically the minorah itself. In theory there really should be some sort of nationalistic, militaristic aspect to the holiday but even if you try to focus on that as a core feature it collapses back into just a "resanctification/reclamation" because it's not really about the maccabi revolt itself (except for when minorah makers take liberties and put an elephant motif in reference to that one son of the high priest who got stepped on), it's much more about the revolt ending and the hasmonean kingdom beginning the rebuilding after the war. It's V-E or V-J day, not pearl habour or D-day.

So taking all that and condensing it down again and trying to apply it to movies, a hanuchah movie we should be looking for themes of:

A community or communal space suffering some sort of tragedy or threat

2. Survival against the odds (ideally over multiple nights) ideally through their own abilities rather than external forces

3. at the end of the story the community or space must be reclaimed or strengthened by the events of the story

This gives us some weird condidates: a lot of zombie movies work slightly too well for this, as do a lot of creature feature type movies... not Alien or Aliens on account of... the obliteration of the colony and the ship respectively (and alien is Thanksgiving movie because of the dinner scene), but Tremors and Tremors 2? WEIRDLY, yes, John Carpenter's The Thing brings a lot of flame, and while the research base is fucked, they save the world. By lighting more and more things on fire as the nights pass.

Anyone who brings up Mad Max 2 or any other Mel Gibson movie is getting shot. Can't we all get beyond thunderdome?!?

On a brighter note, probably the best example of a movie that fits the bill for a khanucha movie is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - you could object to it on the basis that the movie SORT OF is about the main characters being changed by the events of the movie but a christmas movie where the protagonists are all deeply traumatised at the end would form almost a negative image of a christmas movie. On the other hand, Gondor and the battle of Pelennor Fields? Survives longer than anyone expected. And what saves it? that's right, the beacons were lit, one after another.

And was not Denethor covered in oil? And did not Denethor burn longer than anyone would have expected?

(C)han(n)uk(k)a(h)

I tried looking up all of the spellings once, and apparently there’s also a spelling with an X and also one with a Q.