Before Art the Clown donned Santa’s apparel last year for Terrifier 3, the idea of a killer Santa Claus was so distasteful to audiences that a number-one film at the box office was pulled from all US movie theaters. The year was 1984, the film was Charles Sellier Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, and the story was… not great. The film became a cult classic due to the controversy, not the quality, and it resulted in four remakes that are astonishingly awful. Seriously—one has a killer with an exposed brain, and another has Mickey Rooney as an evil toymaker.
Thankfully, this year has remade the lackluster ’80s slasher into a film worthy of the reputation of the series. Silent Night, Deadly Night surpasses its source material and delivers a satisfying slasher that is unlike anything else that’s come out this year.
The story is a carbon copy of the Hallmark holiday movie model: a guy from far away finds himself in a small town at Christmastime and has to work at the Christmas decoration store with a beautiful single woman and her wisecracking and kind father. However, this fish-out-of-water guy is Billy Chapman (Rowan Campbell). Like in the original 1984 film, Billy’s origin story is one of tragedy: after their car stalls on Christmas, a shotgun-toting murderer in a Santa suit kills eight-year-old Billy’s parents right in front of him.
Rowan Campbell knocks his portrayal out of the park. He exudes the charm and “aw shucks” energy of the Hallmark leading men while adding enough off-balance moments to remind the viewer that he is a disturbed man that is compelled to kill someone new every day of Advent (and he has the macabre calendar to prove it). He has elevated his game since he broke out (and got a lot of unfair internet hate) for his role as Corey Cunningham in Halloween Ends.
Possibly outshining Campbell, however, is Ruby Modine as the small-town love interest Pamela Sims. Serial killer love interests are hard to get right—they have to be complex enough that the murdering psychopath would fall for them yet also naive enough that they don’t realize they’re dating the killer. Pamela Sims takes a different path and, shortly after she is introduced, shows that she has her own demons. Modine strikes the perfect balance between sweet ingenue and unhinged mess, and this will hopefully be her big break in Hollywood.
The rest of the cast is solid, as the casting pulls from both horror films and (no surprise here) Hallmark Christmas movies. Character actor David Lawrence Brown of Orphan: First Kill and Time Cut is delightful as Pamela’s widower father and ends up being the heart of the film. Sharon Bajer (known for Always and Forever Christmas and Incident in a Ghostland) and Tom Young (veteran of The Christmas Club, Christmas at the Plaza, and We Wish You a Married Christmas) excel in their short amount of screen time as a couple of Billy’s targets.
However, the MVP of the supporting cast is Canadian actor Mark Acheson as Charlie, the voice in Billy’s head that helps him maintain a semblance of normalcy while telling him which victims he needs to add to his naughty list. This is a great addition to the film because he gives Billy someone to talk to as he stalks his victims, which helps the film avoid the long stretches of silence found in the ’80s source material. I was very surprised to see that Acheson hasn’t done voice work before because he nails the gruff but soothing grandfatherly voice that feels just as believable telling someone to have a fresh-baked cookie as it does for giving instructions on how to dismember a body.
Unlike many recent slashers, where the actors are elevating weak material, the writing and direction by Mike P. Nelson are top-notch. The script has enough similarities to the original to be worthy of the Silent Night, Deadly Night name but focuses on character and story logic over cheap thrills. I forgot that Pamela and her father were even characters in the original film, but this movie makes them memorable and complex.
This isn’t to say that the horror is tame—one of the film’s distributors is literally named Bloody Disgusting, so the film needs to live up to that name. However, this is no Terrifier (despite the marketing team pushing the film’s production connections to that franchise). There is blood and gore with beheadings, disembowelment, and the franchise’s signature kill, a woman being impaled on deer antlers.
However, these moments are sudden, quick, and unexpected, which is probably a result of the small budget. Still, they make the horror very effective—whereas Terrifier and its ilk are striking because of their excess, this film’s horror is created by its control of knowing when to show and when to let the audience imagine what’s happening. The lack of nondiegetic music over most of the film also adds to the tension of these moments, as the silence really makes the terror feel real.
Despite its conservative use of gore, this film racks up a huge body count that outshines all of the others in the franchise. A lot of this has to do with a completely bonkers mass murder scene that is both over the top and feels like a perfect swerve. The film isn’t camp like the ’80s originals but still plays into the heightened reality of a Hallmark Christmas romp. Gone are the gratuitous sex scenes and inexplicably evil nuns of the original, and in their place is a bonkers twist to the story that gives the story a completely new set of stakes and an interesting gimmick to the killer that can set Billy apart from its slasher brethren. The film should be watched for this twist alone.
Horror heads will smile at the homages to Black Christmas, but this is also a love letter to Christmas films. Not a single cell phone is seen in the film, which makes it feel timeless, like the best Christmas films. There are also, bizarrely, callouts to Jingle All the Way and The Santa Clause. This is bound to be a yearly yuletide classic for a certain breed of cinema fan for reasons that would spoil the film.
Nelson’s script is tight as a drum and blends the two genres of romance and horror (rom-hor?) really well. It’s easy to root for the love story at the center of the film, and there are moments that are downright heartwarming. There are also moments that made me gasp aloud at its sudden brutality. This is a great follow-up to his psychological horror segment “No Wake/Ambrosia” from V/H/S 85 and his radically different remake of Wrong Turn, and like Campbell and Modine, this film will hopefully launch Nelson’s career to greater heights.
For film lovers that like their Christmas movies more scary than merry, this year’s remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night is worth the trip to the theater, if for nothing else than to bring attention to the lead actors’ and director’s excellent work. There’s no need to watch any other film in the franchise to enjoy this one, so go in as blind as possible and prepare for the bloodiest version of a cozy Christmas treat.
