Arguably the most controversial slasher of the Golden Age of the much-reviled sub-genre, Silent Night, Deadly Night caused an uproar, the likes of which have rarely been seen before or since. Contrary to popular opinion, it was not based on a book, typically referred to as Slayride, which was actually the film's working title. It all began when writer Paul Caimi submitted a script to producers Ira Richard Barmak, Scott J. Schneid and Dennis Whitehead at Tri-Star Pictures.
Though the producers didn't buy the script, they did seize upon a line in it that referenced a killer dressed as Santa Claus. Sensing something bigger there, the producers gave Caimi a "story by" credit and hired screenwriter Michael Hickey to flesh out the story, thinking to themselves that a Halloween-style holiday horror piece could help them cash in on the then-current slasher craze.
Little did they know what would happen next. Hiring Charles E. Sellier, Jr., then best-known for the book and television series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, to direct, the production was relatively easy, though the director was so squeamish about shooting the gorier scenes that the producers ended up letting editor Michael Spence step in to do it instead.
Given that the idea wasn't completely unprecedented- the British anthology film Tales from the Crypt featured a segment in which a killer dressed as Santa terrorized a pre-Dynasty Joan Collins (which she would later reprise on TV's American Horror Story) and an American film called Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out!) likewise mined the psycho Santa concept without much fanfare- the producers didn't expect much hoopla to surround the film.
They basically just wanted to do the same thing many other Hollywood producers were doing at the time- to get some of that sweet slasher movie money for themselves. Unfortunately for them, a lot of critics had gotten fed up with the slasher craze, with Gene Siskel & Robert Ebert arguably the most visible and prominent of them all, having a weekly TV show in which they railed against almost all things horror.
The terrible twosome even went so far as to urge viewers to write the filmmakers and the actors appearing in such films and complain, having done so with Friday the 13th previously, among others. Up until Silent Night, Deadly Night, the two hadn't had much success in their endeavors, with slasher films continuing to make money hand over fist, despite their best efforts to curtail the popularity of such things, including devoting an entire show to what they called "women in danger" films.
This from Roger Ebert, who, mind you, used to write for notorious Russ Meyer, including the X-rated film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which features a crazed killer that would probably offend today's audience's delicate sensibilities infinitely more than any given slasher film you could toss at them, thanks to its troubling depictions of homosexual/transgender characters as homicidal whack-jobs. Don't get me wrong, I do love the movie, but he's certainly one to talk about iffy gender politics, as he does at length here.
However, when the distributors advertised SNDN during a football game one fateful day- a day in which a host of families happened to be watching with their kids- the uproar was immediate, as angered parents had to sit their kids down and explain why they were seeing Santa portrayed as a homicidal maniac and how it was "just a movie."
Never mind the fact that, um, that's sort of a parent's job, and it's not as if any responsible one was actually planning to take their kids to see such a thing- there's no denying that the backlash was immediate and fierce. Moms in particular took to the streets at the urging of Siskel & Ebert and others, picketing the opening of the film with such fervor that it was pulled from theaters in a matter of weeks- despite the fact that it was a huge success, even out-grossing the seminal slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street at the box office on opening weekend.
Ultimately, the film made around $2.5 million in theaters before it was taken out- not a bad return investment on a film that cost only about a million to make, which it made back in its first weekend. And that's not even counting the brisk sales and rentals on home video, where it did so well it ultimately spawned four more sequels and eventually, a loose remake.
The truth is, the film's controversial status really comes down to a bad marketing strategy, combined with a bunch of self-righteous a-hole critics ticked off that their fave foreign and/or Oscar-bait movie-of-the-week was getting roundly trounced at the box office by a bunch of no-budget horror films they saw as being beneath them, but which, they nonetheless had to review every week.
I suspect that a lot of them didn't even bother to watch said films, given the clueless descriptions they often give of them. Note how, in the special I linked to above, Siskel & Ebert talk about how the films are all about the targeting and raping of young women. Granted, this film does feature some of that, as do a few other slasher films, but as any fan of the sub-genre knows, it's almost always the woman that ends up defeating the killer- hence the post-slasher term "Final Girl."
As such, it's ridiculous to suggest that all slasher films can just be dismissed as excuses to rape and kill women. Most of the ones I love don't feature rape at all, and in the vast majority of them, at least as many men are killed as women, if not more so. The reason people having sex are killed in slasher movies often comes down to the fact that they're not paying attention, not some ham-fisted "sex is bad" morality. (Check out the commentaries/documentaries about the original Halloween, for instance- that was not director John Carpenter's intention at all.)
Even in Silent Night, there's actually a pretty complex psychological back-story going on here. The story actually revolves around a little kid named Billy, who has the misfortune to witness his father killed and his mother raped and killed by a psycho robber that flags them down for help when his car breaks down.
Interred at an orphanage- along with his little brother, Ricky, who was just a baby at the time- the poor kid is then terrorized by a demented Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin), who is all about the punishment, especially for those who are being "naughty," which she constantly sees Billy as being, especially- you guessed it- around Christmas time.
As such, the kid is consistently subjected to beatings by the nefarious nun, especially after he inadvertently witnesses some horny teens fooling around at the orphanage behind closed doors. This, I'm guessing, combined with the emotional trauma he suffered watching his own mother be raped and killed, causes Billy to associate sex with pain, not pleasure, as evidenced by the scene later on, when he tries to fantasize about a cute co-worker and it devolves into violence in his mind, as he is "punished" by the killer Santa that haunts his dreams and memories.
So, you can image the repercussions that arise when his boss asks him to don the Santa suit for the holidays, when his regular Santa calls in sick. At first, the odd interaction with children notwithstanding (one parent witnessing such a scene hilariously notes how "good" Billy is with kids, lol), Billy handles it like a champ, but after trying booze for the first time and having the misfortune to witness yet another rape- this time of the aforementioned cute co-worker- he snaps, and goes on a killing rampage, taking out all his co-workers and continuing his reign of terror throughout the town as he makes his way back to his old orphanage to kill his ultimate foe: the dreaded Mother Superior.
Along the way, there's some great Christmas-related murders, the most notable of which include a wayward babysitter (Linnea Quigley, in her Scream Queen prime) being impaled on the antlers of a reindeer head on the wall, and a bully who steals a kid's sled being decapitated on his way down a snowy hill.
In its uncut form, it's a gory good time, but it's hard to justify all the rancor the theatrical edit caused back in the day, as it's no worse than a lot of what did make it past censors back then. (Maniac, Evil Dead and The Prowler certainly come to mind, though I think the former two might have been released unrated.)
The truth is, it's actually a pretty good little slasher flick that takes the time to build a solid line of reasoning for its killer's motivations, unlike a lot of such films at the time, where motivations either weren't explained at all or were shown barely as an afterthought, i.e. a prank gone horribly awry, an accidental death of a relative, etc. Not saying that there weren't some elaborate back-stories in some of these movies, just that it's rare to see one that spends a good half of the movie developing them, which is certainly appreciated.
Factor in decent special effects, relatively good acting for the most part, a solid score by Perry Botkin- now available on CD and vinyl here- and one of my favorite horror movie elements: bad music written especially for the film, of which this film features a veritable feast of- and you have what is easily one of the better slashers of the Golden Age. It's also one that I've watched fairly regularly around the holidays since I was a kid. (I sometimes substitute Part Two, as it's basically like watching a highlight reel of the first film with bonus footage- more on that on Wednesday.)
In the lead, we have Robert Brian Wilson, whose film career was decidedly short-lived- this was it- though he did work fairly steadily on TV, including a recurring role in the soap Santa Barbara for several years. In 2016, he even ventured back into holiday waters with the decidedly more family-friendly (or at least, mom-friendly) sounding A Husband for Christmas, alongside none other than Eric Freeman, his SNDN brother, in an amusing gift-wrapping scene.
Though Wilson's performance is admittedly somewhat personality-free, he does capture emotional trauma well, portraying it as something akin to a 'Nam flashback, which seems about right. (His younger counterparts, Jonathan Best (Billy at 5) and Danny Wagner (Billy at 8) are also pretty good, especially the latter.)
Sadly, Wilson disowned the film for some time, telling friends and family to avoid it like the plague, but he eventually came around, later attending a 30th-year-anniversary screening of the film and making the round of various horror conventions, sometimes alongside the aforementioned Freeman, who was similarly hesitant to embrace his cult status.
As the nasty nun, Mother Superior, French actress Lilyan Chauvin is legitimately scary, and probably gave more than a few Catholic kids a few flashbacks of their own. A looker back in her day, she co-starred in many American films, including two with the King himself, Elvis- King Creole and Tickle Me- as well as films like Funny Lady (with Barbara Streisand), Yours Mine and Ours (with Lucille Ball), the decent horror pic The Mephisto Waltz, Private Benjamin (with Goldie Hawn), Born in East L.A. (with Cheech Marin), Predator 2, Universal Soldier, Pumpkinhead II and Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can.
As the more sympathetic Sister Margaret, there's actress Gilmer McCormick, best-known for her appearance on stage and screen in the musical Godspell, showing that she has a knack for playing holy women. Other notable films include the movie adaptation of the classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the Burt Reynolds vehicle Starting Over and the much-acclaimed domestic abuse TV-movie The Burning Bed, alongside Farrah Fawcett.
The rest of the cast features mostly unknowns, but there are a few ringers scattered amongst the rest, including, as Billy's boss, Alabama-born character actor Britt Leach, who fellow 80's kids might recognize from movies like The Last Starfighter, Weird Science and The Great Outdoors; Nancy Borgenicht (Halloween 4, The Deliberate Stranger) as Mrs. Randall, the store's assistant manager; horror regular Leo Geter (Near Dark, The Stand, Halloween 6) as Tommy, the guy Billy chucks out a window; and yet another Halloween vet in Don Shanks, of H5 fame- he was Michael Myers himself- and he was the killer in I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer as well. He's the guy who makes an ill-advised and even worse-timed appearance in his daughter's bedroom dressed as Santa who almost gets himself shot.
Other familiar faces include the lovely Tara Buckman, as Billy's mom, who was also in the Burt Reynolds movies Hooper and The Cannonball Run (she was the hottie in the sweet car with horror royalty Adrienne Barbeau), as well as the sci-fi/horror opus Xtro II; and if Grandpa Chapman looks familiar, that's because actor Will Hare was also in Back to the Future around the same time as this film, as well as Enter the Ninja, Eyes of Fire and Grim Prairie Tales.
And, of course, there's Scream Queen Supreme Linnea Quigley, whose list of genre credits is endless, but she's probably best-known for the likes of The Return of the Living Dead, Graduation Day, Night of the Demons, Savage Streets, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and the immortal Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. But trust me, there's plenty more where that came from, which you can read about here.
Despite its nasty reputation, Silent Night, Deadly Night really isn't the childhood-trauma-inducing movie that critics of the time claimed it was. Having grown up on a steady diet of horror and especially slasher films, I turned out just fine, and I can certainly think of other films that freaked me out way more than this one, some of them even ostensibly "kid's films" like certain Disney movies (looking at you Black Cauldron), The Dark Crystal, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and especially the full-on nightmare fuel that is Watership Down.
By today's standards, you can see worse on TV, especially on shows like American Horror Story, which featured a far-scarier killer Santa, but even by the standards back then, it pales in comparison to a lot of other horror of the time, especially in terms of gore. In addition to the films I already mentioned, there's also The Re-Animator, Basket Case, Videodrome (which DID traumatize me a bit back in the day) and indeed, almost every one of Cronenberg's early films, to say nothing of Clive Barker's Hellraiser series.
In short, SNDN is just a solid little Christmas-themed horror flick that is only one among many other such type films, and that includes films released before it, like Silent Night, Bloody Night and Black Christmas. In fact, there may be more Xmas-themed horror films than those revolving around any other holiday, even Halloween, so I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. Such was the 80's, I guess, what with all the "Just say no" nonsense and "D.A.R.E." and so forth.
Not unlike today, people back then just had to have something to be outraged about, be it heavy metal lyrics or video games or what have you. Nowadays, it's political correctness and cultural appropriation and so on and so forth. It's always something, I guess. But trust me, this film is small potatoes compared to some other horror movies I've seen.
That said, if you're even remotely a slasher movie fan, and you haven't seen this, it's a must, for sure. Try and get a hold of the uncut version if you can. Thankfully, it's readily available on both DVD and Blu-Ray, with a nifty new one of the latter available from Shout! Factory, featuring both the theatrical and uncut versions, plus loads of bonuses.
By all means, check it out! 🎅🔪😱💀
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