Ten Days of Terror!: Silent Night, Deadly Night

Film: Silent Night, Deadly Night
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

The more I think about it, the more the idea of holiday-themed horror movies makes sense to me. I don’t mean those movies that are built around a holiday (New Year’s Evil, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, etc.) but ones that are specifically about the Christmas season. Like it or not, horror is often about the subverting of innocence. It’s why movies with evil children are so effective. Christmas is a holiday of joy and childlike wonder. What could be more evil than ruining that? And so, we get a movie like Silent Night, Deadly Night. This is not just a slasher that takes place around Christmas, but one that dresses up our murderer like Santa Claus himself.

And really, that’s the selling point here. There are a number of horror and slasher films that play on the idea of an evil Santa, but none are more infamous than Silent Night, Deadly Night. It is an extremely transgressive film in that respect, even if the main plot takes about half the movie to get going. We’re going to get some nudity and violence right away, a building of trauma, and then our slasher goes hog wild while dressed as Saint Nick.

As the film starts, young Billy (Jonathan Best) visits his catatonic grandfather with his parents. When Billy is left alone with him, the grandfather wakes up and warns Billy to be afraid of Santa Claus because he punishes the naughty. When the family goes home, they are waylaid by a man dressed as Santa who has just robbed a liquor store and murdered the proprietor. When Billy’s father tries to drive away, he’s shot, and then Billy’s mother is sexually assaulted and murdered before the criminal drives off with Billy’s infant brother still in the car.

Jump forward a few years and Billy (now played by Danny Wagner) is now about eight and living in an orphanage run by a tyrannical Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) who believes strongly in punishing bad children. Billy, thanks to what happened a few years previous, naturally has some serious issues with Santa Claus. When he’s forced to sit in this Santa’s lap, Billy freaks out, which is entirely understandable to literally anyone except for Mother Superior no matter how much Sister Margaret (Gilmer McCormick) pleads his case.

Jump ahead another 10 years and Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) is now 18 and with Sister Margaret’s help gets a job at a local toy store. As Christmas nears, the store’s Santa is injured and Billy is told to put on the suit, which certainly causes some serious issues for him. Later that night, coworker Andy (Randy Stumpf) kisses Pamela (Toni Nero), the coworker Billy has a crush on. When Andy then tries to sexually assault her in the back room, Billy finally snaps and kills Andy with a string of Christmas lights. When Pamela reacts badly to watching Billy kill someone in front of her, Billy decides that she is naughty as well and kills her, too.

It’s worth noting that Billy finally snaps around the midpoint of the movie. We get a lot of him being traumatized when he’s eight to really help it sink in that eventually, Billy is going to have a clear reason to finally snap. True to the slasher style, once Billy starts killing, the bodies are going to pile up. There will be a series of people who exist simply as fodder for Billy’s rage. Primary in this is scream queen Linnea Quigley, who is here to take off her shirt and then be impaled. Believe me, this is not a spoiler. This is what Linnea Quigley did as a career through the ‘80s.

The truth about Silent Night, Deadly Night is that this film is pretty nasty in a lot of respects, which is probably why it has such a dedicated cult following. Having a degraded Santa Claus is pretty common (see Bad Santa and Trading Places for clear examples of non-murderous but horrifying Clauses), but Billy is really upsetting because he is so clearly insane and is so in a place where innocence is expected.

I often like movies that push boundaries, but Silent Night, Deadly Night is genuinely unpleasant. I get why people like this, but I also suspect that there are a lot of people who claim to like this because it’s kind of edgy to like a film with a killer Santa.

Why to watch Silent Night, Deadly Night: It’s the most notorious Christmas slasher for a reason.
Why not to watch: It takes forever to get going.