Silent Night, Deadly Night, 1984

So starting a new blog in December, with all the busy-ness and celebrations and general merry-making was probably overly ambitious, but, oh well, there’s enough Christmas horror for at least a few years, I’ll be happy if I get the big three done this year! On to the film. For some reason, 1984’s Silent Night Deadly Night, captured the hearts and minds of the good God-fearing people all over this great nation more than any other killer Santa movie. And by ‘captured’, I mean, infuriated and incensed. Parents and critics were pissed. Hey, blame the ultra-conservative 80’s. People definitely didn’t want to see a sweet, innocent young boy repeatedly and systematically traumatized ’til he grows into a strapping young All-American dreamboat who then goes on a murderous rampage on Christmas. Or maybe they just didn’t want to see Santa impale a topless girl on a stag head. How much did everyone hate this movie? I recommend you-tubing Siskel and Ebert’s on-air review of it. (Shame! Shame! Shame!)

But now we know better, and can fully enjoy Silent Night Deadly Night not just for its camp or supposed shock value, but for being a solid slasher with some genuinely great moments. Oh yeah, I said it. I meant it. And I’m here to represent it.

At the top of the film we have a family on the way to visit catatonic Grandpa at an institution. Ma and Pa leave our hero, young master Billy in a room with Grandpa. Alone with Billy, Gramps is suddenly totally lucid and warns Billy that Santa doesn’t just give out presents, he PUNISHES those who are naughty, and if Billy sees Santa, he’d better run. By the way, every time someone in Silent Night Deadly Night says the word “punish” or “punishment”, it always sounds like it’s in capital letters.

Billy is suddenly terrified of Santa (and now old people too, presumably), and his fears are confirmed when Billy’s parents decide to pick up a random Santa on the side of the road on their way home. Santa, fresh off of holding up a convenience store, only wants to kill Billy’s Dad and – presumably, rape his Mom, but it isn’t so much a rape as it is a perfunctory 80’s horror tit shot. You just can’t make a horror movie without one.

Flash forward to a few years later, Billy grows from a wide-eyed child to a homely ginger kid and he and his baby brother (who will one day grow into internet meme fame as GARBAGE DAY guy), are carted off to an Catholic orphanage. Mother Superior is of the opinion that Billy doesn’t so much need to heal from the horrific trauma of seeing his parents killed by Santa Claus, he should just ignore it, and any residual anti-social behavior should be disciplined away. She also dispenses with some good advice for raisin’ up your child – “When we do something naughty, we are always caught and then we are punished. Punishment is absolute, punishment is good.” Stick that on your cross-stitch.

Freeze-frame on ginger Billy wanting to be a good kid. Fast forward to years later, where Billy pretty much grows up to be Ken.Nice Sister Margaret, the Dr. Loomis of the picture sets him up with a job at Ira’s Toys. SNDN then launches one of its most sterling moments: the Billy working girl montage. Billy lifts kids up to reach the high shelves, he punches his time-card, he straightens books while the boss nods – “Way to straighten those books, Bill!”, Billy opens a box with a box cutter (FORESHADOWING), douchey employee offers him J and B, and he holds up a carton of milk (“No thanks – today I’m having MILK!”), and then… Billy goes a bit green seeing the Christmas banner, possibly feeling PUNISH rising in his chest. The whole montage is perfect.

See, Billy is basically functional 11 months out of the year, but things start going rapidly downhill when his Boss forces him to play Santa. He’s a sweaty, nervous Santa but the more he threatens squirmy children with punishment the more compliant they are, so maybe he’s not that bad of a Santa after all.

Shit gets real at the company Christmas party, when douchey J and B co-worker guy (poor man’s Joe Pesci) tells Billy’s love interest (that is, the girl he has shame boners over), that he has a special present for her and he has to give it to her in the back room. Just so you know, ladies, when a gross guy wants to give you a Christmas present in secret, it’s going to be his wiener, and you don’t want it.

The moment we’ve been waiting for finally happens – Billy snaps and strangles poor man’s Joe Pesci with Christmas lights. He then finishes off the rest of his co-workers – they’re drinking, they’re sinning, they fall under xmas PUNISH code. Whoa, what’s a real bow and arrow doing in that toy store?

NOO! JOE PESCI!!!

He moves on to a residential neighborhood to dispose of aforementioned topless girl and her boyfriend. I should mention, it’s not just any topless girl, it’s b-Scream Queen Linnea Quigley! Here you get to see her in one of SNDN’s more classic moments – Quigley wearing nothing but short-shorts and antlers through her abdomen. Merry Christmas everyone!

SNDN’s other classic holiday-themed death is -spoiler, by the way – headless tobogganing. Essential. By the way, this shit out-grossed Nightmare on Elm Street on its opening weekend.

Well, it all ends up back at the orphanage, where more children are traumatized on Christmas and tragic and misunderstood Billy meets his untimely end. That is, Bill is misunderstood by the other characters, not us – we’ve had a good 45 minutes of exposition preceding the eventual holiday blow-up.

Controversy? What Controversy?

Occasionally, SNDN isn’t quite sure of the movie it’s supposed to be. It’s both a dead serious treatise on what precisely would cause someone to dress up like Santa Claus and kill a bunch of people, you know, aside from just for funsies because that’s lazy storytelling (and pretty much the premise of the extremely loose craptacular 2012 rehash), as well moments of intentional humor and camp. The filmmakers are obviously well aware of the implications of having a clean-cut young man stalk around in a dirty Santa suit demanding PUNISHMENT for babysitters who are having sex on pool tables that don’t belong to them.

Other than helpful Billy montage and the obvious holiday themed deaths, there’s also a great scene of Billy (Robert Brian Wilson, who I maintain is actually quite good in this), interrogating a little girl about whether she’s been good this year and then gifting her a bloody box cutter. Here’s where Silent Night Deadly Night gets itself absolutely right – the image is powerful, the scene is malevolently tense and yet – resolves with a wonderful, horrific absurdity. Little children unconditionally believe in the goodness of Santa Claus. Little children are poor judges of character. So, incidentally, are Billy’s parents.

What, exactly, is the central thesis of Silent Night Deadly Night? Post-traumatic stress disorder should be healed through non-judgement listening and behavioral therapy? That people do evil shit regardless of the season of goodwill towards your fellow man? That teaching children to trust that an all-knowing super-being enters their home on a single evening to lavish them with material goods if they’ve acting appropriately is kind of a strange concept? That the system can and does fail, leaving mass tragedy and misfortune in its wake? Maybe. Or maybe it’s simply that if a kid sees his parents killed by Santa Claus, he’s going to need some therapy, stat. And that I’ll remember fondly any movie with a headless body on a sled.

Oh, and it features this timeless Christmas carol, which unfortunately never took its rightful place as a Christmas standard.

Silent Night, Bloody Night, 1972

 

If there’s anything low-budget shocker Silent Night, Bloody Night proves with certainty, it’s that the bulk of the scares are so strong that Bob Clark cribbed many of them for his 1974 opus Black Christmas, and that there’s no place like home for the holidays.

Possibly the earliest modern Christmas slasher (excepting of course that Tales from the Crypt segment with Joan Collins – maybe I’ll get to that slice of holiday cheer next year) poor Silent Night, Bloody Night has been wasting away on public domain for years, which means you can pull up a comfy chair, spike your eggnog and enjoy it right now:

(By the way, if you’d like to see a better version, there is a not-bad restoration from Film Chest. Personally, SNBN has my vote for a big Anchor Bay re-release)

In case you didn’t just watch it, here’s the synopsis which will contain spoilers:

It’s Christmas time, and super suave lawyer guy (Patrick O’Neal, PS.) and his Jane Birkinesque ‘assistant’ arrive at the old Butler mansion (a Death House, if one of the alternate titles is to be believed) with the intent to sell it on behalf of the grandson of the ex-owner (who set himself on fire, no big deal). They meet the town’s council, and intend to stay the night in the house. What should’ve been an extramarital copulation in musty sheets that haven’t been changed in years turns into quite a stylish and brutal axe murder. And it’s a felling axe, which are used specifically to cut down trees, which reminds me of Christmas trees, so you’d be hard pressed to find a more festive axe-ing. Up ’til now there’s been some marvelous killer POV tracking shots, but roundabout now is when you’re really going to want to take out your Bob Clark bingo card.

The killer then starts making whispery phone calls to the town council, introducing himself, chillingly, as “Marianne” and coercing the phone operator to visit the Butler mansion. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Butler, the grandson in questions meets up with the daughter of the mayor (cult favorite and Warhol superstar Mary Woronov) and they set out to find out what’s going on with the missing sheriff. Everyone more or less ends up at Butler Mansion eventually.

At the Butler Mansion, we’re treated to some major revelations (maybe there’s a reason Jeffrey has such strong facial features) in the form of a sepia toned Grand Guignol flashback made all the more effective with public domain degeneration. During Butler House’s mental institution days, Grandpa Butler set all of the crazies loose to parade down the walkway, Night of the Living Dead style, in order to crash a fancy Christmas party the resident doctors were having. Well, they didn’t so much crash the party as much as they brutally murdered the doctors and stole their booze. Keep an eye out for more Warhol superstars – Candy Darling and Ondine both make appearances.

Later, a misunderstanding ends in gunfire and we learn the true identity of Marianne – a person from the past, just looking to be with his daughter for Christmas and also to terrorize everyone who’s ever wronged his family. As one does.

Of note is Silent Night, Bloody Night’s use of the revenge motive, a device that would become tired and rote in later slashers. While many lesser slashers spend a couple of minutes revealing the traumatic event that led so-and-so to stalk cheerleaders, SNBN really earns its revenge motive, crafting a respectable mystery laden with scandalous small town secrets.

As far as 70’s drive-in cheapies go, Silent Night, Bloody Night has a lot of unexpected suspense, directorial skill, and style. Obviously, it’s not without its issues, there’s some stiff performances and the long-winded, freeze-framed expository parts aren’t exactly filmic, but nitpicking a film like SNBN seems feeble when the foundation is so strong. While Billy would go on to make terrifying, lewd, and schizophrenic calls in Black Christmas two years later, Marianne’s calm, cold whisper is frightening in its focus. Director Theodore Gershuny’s point of view shots are uncomfortably long. Part of what makes that initial axe murder so – ( I hesitate to say rewarding, but if you’re cool with me calling an axe murder ‘festive’ I don’t see how that would be out of line) rewarding is how long we’ve anticipated it. By that point, the gore clips are just gravy. It’s always a treat when a public domain film with a misleading cover such as this:

NOTE: Do not be upset when this young lady does not appear in the film. However, John Carradine is definitely in this film, so you have that to look forward to.

…ends up being so atmospheric and inevitably influential. Not to say Gershuny invented the slasher wheel, but dude had some impeccable influences, and Silent Night, Bloody Night sets an undeniable bar for all that followed. For all of its quirks, SNBN is relentlessly effective and certainly deserves a spot in the canon of early slashers that would go on to shape a subgenre.