A fairly straightforward one this, as most of the references are actually spelled out for us on screen...
Before we get into them, the Doctor has previous form with Santa Claus.
In his Eleventh incarnation he claimed him to be a personal friend, and he knew him as Geoff. He kept a photograph of himself with Geoff and Albert Einstein in his wallet (A Christmas Carol).
The First Doctor - in comic form - encountered Santa in "A Christmas Story", which ran in TV Comic between issues 732 - 735. He and grandchildren John and Gillian helped Santa defeat an evil magician. Santa had been inundated with requests for toy TARDISes.
The episode title derives from the popular Wham! song of the same name, which gets rolled out every festive season since it first appeared in December 1984.
The bulk of the episode is set at a scientific research base in the Arctic. Such a base coming under attack from an alien threat naturally brings The Thing (From Another World) to mind. Based on the novella Who Goes There? by John W Campbell (1938) it was adapted for the cinema in 1951, and later remade by John Carpenter (1982). An inferior prequel / remake was released in 2011.
(The Thing was also a huge influence on the first two episodes of The Seeds of Doom. In the 1951 film, the alien is a plant-based lifeform).
The aliens here are the Dream Crabs, or Kantrofarri. In appearance and mode of attack they closely resemble the Facehuggers which feature in all of the Alien movies, starting with the original in 1979 and going up to 2025's Alien: Earth TV series.
Possibly the most famous cinematic appearance by Santa Claus (unless you count the so-bad-it's-good Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, once voted the worst movie of all time) is in Miracle on 34th Street.
This was first filmed in 1947, with Edmund Gwenn playing a department store Santa who claims to be the real thing. It won three Oscars.
This was also given the remake treatment, in 1994, when Richard Attenborough played the Santa figure, Kris Kringle. One or other version is screened most Christmas times. There is also a 46 minute made-for-TV version from 1955, available on YouTube.
At the end of Last Christmas, when Shona wakes from her dream, we get to see her "To Do" list. It includes watching Alien, The Thing and Miracle on 34th Street...
She also has a Game of Thrones watch planned. Shona is played by Faye Marsay, who just happened to later feature in the series as the Waif, who torments Arya Stark when she first joins the Faceless Men order.
(Shona was briefly considered as the new companion, if Jenna Coleman hadn't decided to stay on as she enjoyed working with Capaldi so much).
Michael Troughton is also in the cast - brother of David who featured in the series several times, and son of Patrick, the Second Doctor.
Dan Starkey usually plays Sontarans such as Strax.
The 2010 movie Inception was another inspiration for this episode, in that it features people who can enter the dreams of others.
The Doctor trapped in an environment which may or not be a dream was previously used in Amy's Choice.
Next time: The Doctor goes on the run when Davros remembers (probably because he's been watching old Doctor Who episodes)...
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