Silent Night, Deadly Night

Angry parent groups really had a lot to get worked up about in 1984. In addition to movies aimed at kids that were incredibly intense and scary for little ones, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins, there were sexy PG-rated films like Sixteen Candles, Splash, and Sahara. Plus, there was the inevitable onslaught of R-rated slasher pictures that plenty of teens got into without a parent or guardian because most suburban ticket-takers were pretty lackluster when it came to enforcing age rules in 1984. But the last straw for some folks was this movie. It wasn't so much the fact that some evil movie studio had made a slasher movie set at Christmas—after all, Christmas Evil had been released in 1980 without much of a peep from anyone—rather, it was this film's advertising campaign. The poster art showed a snow-covered rooftop with a chimney that Santa is clearly going down. All that's visible of Saint Nick is his red velvet, the fur-lined arm holding an axe. With this image gracing the local multiplexes and the TV spots that ran during the prime-time family hour, parents feared their kids would have nightmares about Santa coming in through the chimney and murdering the whole household, and those fears were probably well-founded.

But Silent Night, Deadly Night is an above-average slasher movie. Robert Brian Wilson stars as Billy Chapman, a young man who was traumatized when he was five years old by witnessing his parents’ Christmas Eve murder at the hands of a killer dressed as Santa Clause and then gets further physiologically fucked up by the sadistic mother superior who ran the orphanage where he and his little brother grew up after the death of their folks. Now, at age eighteen, a nice young nun has gotten him a job working at a toy store. But when Billy must dress up as St. Nick to fulfill his work obligations, he snaps and goes on a killing spree to punish those who've been naughty.

What sets this film apart from typical slashers is that it's told from the killer's perspective. The film takes a good amount of time to introduce us to Billy at different ages so that we can see what fucked him up so badly. The film takes a good two and a half reels before its protagonist picks up any kind of weapon, and that's a plus. Like so many of today's so-called "elevated horror" pictures, this movie is all about trauma. True, it explores this theme in a somewhat ham-handed, exploitative 1980s way, but the underlying psychological character study of how violence perpetuates violence and how many adults are haunted by traumas they experienced at a young age are fully present. These themes are kind of tacked on as dime-store psychology used as an excuse to show people getting chopped up, but there's somewhat of a real story here, at least by this genre's standards. It's also reasonably well-acted and full of amusing commentary about yuletide commercialization, which the film is arguably also an example of.