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SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT
Rating: 
USA. 1984.
Director – Charles E. Sellier Jr, Screenplay – Michael Hickey, Story – Paul Caimi, Producer – Ira Richard Barmak, Photography – Henning Schellerup, Music – Perry Botkin, Special Effects Supervisor – Rick Josephson, Makeup Effects – Karl Wesson, Production Design – Dian Perryman. Production Company – Slayride Inc.
Cast:
Robert Brian Wilson (Billy Chapman), Lilyan Chauvin (Mother Superior), Gilver McCormick (Sister Margaret), Danny Wagner (Billy at 8), H.E.D. Redford (Captain Richards), Britt Leach (Jerome Sims), Toni Nero (Pamela), Linnea Quigley (Denise), Will Hare (Grandpa), Tara Buckman (Ellie Chapman), Jeff Hansen (Jim Chapman), Randy Stumpf (Andy), Leo Geter (Tommy), Charles Dierkop (Killer Santa), Jonathon Best (Billy at 5), Nancy Borgenicht (Mrs Randall)
Plot: Christmas, 1971. Five year-old Billy Chapman goes to see his grandfather in a psychiatric institution. While his parents are away, Billy’s grandfather asks him if he has been good and warns him that Santa punishes bad children. Driving home, they are stopped by a man dressed in a Santa suit who has just robbed a convenience store. The man shoots Billy’s father and then rapes his mother and slits her throat. Billy thinks that this is Santa come to punish him. Afterwards he is placed in a Catholic orphanage where he is subject to cruel abuse by the authoritarian mother superior. Growing into a strapping teenager, Billy is given a job in the storeroom at a toy store. When the store’s Santa falls ill, the manager makes Billy put on the Santa suit. This causes Billy’s mind to snap. He kills all those in the store and then goes out into the street with an axe and dressed as Santa, determined to punish those who have been bad.
Silent Night, Deadly Night attracted considerable controversy when it came out. Concerned parent groups picketed theatres where it was showing, demanding its banning for turning such a lovable family icon as Santa Claus into a psycho. The film was for a time withdrawn but this didn’t stop the producers exploiting the controversy and turning out a whole series of sequels (see below). In fact, Silent Night, Deadly Night was one of a whole host of films tailing on the success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). Like many other copycat slasher films, it exploits a holiday date. In fact it was one of several slasher films exploiting the Christmas date – others included To All a Good Night (1980), You Better Watch Out (1980) and Christmas Evil (1980), although all of these had been beaten by the earlier proto-slasher film Black Christmas/Silent Night, Blood Night (1973), while the psycho Santa was first conducted in an episode of the Amicus horror anthology Tales from the Crypt (1972).
As slasher films go, Silent Night, Deadly Night is above average. It is certainly made by someone with a darkly sardonic, anti-sentimental take on Christmas. The opening scene cuts from the young boy being scared by his grandfather who warns him that Santa punishes naughty children to a man in a Santa suit conducting a convenience store hold-up only to find “$31! Merry fucking Christmas,” and shooting the clerk. And then in a startling scene we see the killer Santa stopping the boy’s parents’ car on the highway, shooting the father, raping the mother and slitting her throat and then coming after the kid, who believes it is Santa come to punish him, as carols plays on the soundtrack throughout. The jumble of imagery and reversals, not to mention the sheer outrage the scene contains, quite takes one aback. The subsequent scenes, portraying the cruelty and systematic abuse that goes on at a Catholic orphanage, do an excellent and for once quite credible job in establishing all the cod psychological motivation that these slasher films thrive upon.
Thereafter the film follows standard slasher movie formula. All of the scenes with Robert Brian Wilson stalking victims come with a Christmas theme – thus he strangles one victim with Christmas tree lights, impales a topless woman on a pair of mounted deer antlers, beheads two sledding bullies. Beneath it all there’s a darkly acerbic anti-Christmas spirit – none more so than the scenes of Robert Brian Wilson as Santa threatening a misbehaving child sitting on his lap with punishment or stalking one victim through a toy store while chanting “Twas the night before Christmas ...” Here even the cops, in their hunt for the psycho, manage with iconoclastic regard to shoot the wrong Santa outside a children’s school, not just Santa but one that also happens to be a Catholic priest who is dressed as Santa.
The sequels were:– the hilariously bad Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987), which featured the killer’s brother; Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: You Better Watch Out (1989), wherein the killer brother is brought back to life by a mad scientist; Brian Yuzna’s entertainingly gonzo but almost entirely unrelated Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation (1990), featuring the activity of an Egyptian witch cult; and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1992), with Mickey Rooney as a toymaker who creates living toys. As part of the current fad for remakes of 1970s/80s films, a remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night has been announced.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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