“Silent Night, Deadly Night” is a Slight yet Satisfying Stocking Stuffer of Holiday Gore
I’m a simple girl. As Christmas nears, all I want is a cute boy dressed in a Santa suit axing through the naughty. That’s why I love the original Silent Night, Deadly Night. Charles E. Sellier Jr. ‘s 1984 film follows a little boy named Billy (Jonathan Best, Danny Wagner, Robert Brian Wilson) who’s traumatized by a killer Kriss Kringle then grows up to repeat his crimes. After the death of his parents on Christmas Eve, Billy’s tormented by a sadistic nun whose brutal beatings instill a violent response to female sexuality that will plague him for the rest of his life. This unthinkable trauma comes to a head on Billy’s 18th Christmas. His fragile mind snaps and he transforms into a murderous Claus determined to punish sinners all over town. The film is a classic despite — or perhaps because of — its jaw-dropping perversion of seasonal iconography and dated adherence to holiday-centric slasher tropes. Twenty-one years later, Mike P. Nelson attempts to scratch our collective Murder Claus itch with Silent Night, Deadly Night, a remake that dramatically reframes Billy’s story.
We meet this version of Billy Claus (Rohan Campbell) well into his Christmas murder spree. In a hotel room covered with blood, he’s dreaming of the long-ago night when his parents were murdered by a sinister Claus after visiting his grandfather in a nursing home. Nearly a decade later, he’s become an axe-toting transient who marks each kill by smearing blood on each date of an Advent calendar. But upon arriving in an idyllic small town, he develops a crush on Pam (Ruby Modine), a rough-around-the-edges clerk at a holiday shop. Against the advice of Charlie (Mark Acheson), an internal voice that guides his way, Billy decides to stick around for a while.
Though the original Billy wields the axe, he is not the true villain of the original film. That honor belongs to the aforementioned Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) who rules his orphanage home with an iron fist. Nelson follows this thread and positions his Billy as a Santa avenger driven to punish those who are actually naughty thus preventing the death of an innocent person. He’s guided in this quest by Charlie, who gives him a series of murderous assignments leading up to December 25th. Nelson eschews the delightfully villainous Mother Superior, but adds a mysterious child murderer known as the Snatcher who’s also been terrorizing the tiny town.
This inversion allows us to more comfortably root for the Santa Claus killer as he chops through a series of unlikely victims, including a barn party filled with Nazis dressed in Santa suits. While the original film takes a while to get chopping, we’re thrust into Billy’s own holiday horrors just moments after the film begins. Each kill is sufficiently gruesome and Nelson does not shy away from the gore, seeming to recognize who his target audience is. He also plays well with seasonal iconography with playful nods to the carnage of Sellier Jr. ‘s film, including a play on the fan-favorite antler kill.
While fun, these splatter-filled scenes occasionally feel unfocused and flimsy, failing to capture cinematic weight. There’s an artificiality and shallowness to the staging and sets which keep the story from ever feeling entirely real. Plot holes are similarly frustrating and the story barely hangs together. While other SN,DN films are admittedly ridiculous, they each adhere to their own internal logic, no matter how wild the story becomes. But Pam has a nephew when it’s narratively and there’s almost nothing to the Snatcher sub-plot. Nelson’s film seems designed to string together a series of “hell yeah” Santa kills with flimsy story laced in between.
The Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise is admittedly bonkers, with each sequel increasingly bizarre. While most love the wild Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 — complete with its delightful “Garbage Day!” shootout — my personal favorite is the messy feminism of Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation despite the fact that it’s overrun by giant bugs. Nelson’s remake tries a little too hard to reach the peaks of this franchise’s insanity. Nonetheless, it’s a worthy chapter in one of holiday horror’s strangest series and, along with its brethren, will likely become a rewatchable fave.
Jenn Adams is a writer and podcaster from Nashville, TN. Find her on social media @jennferatu.