How on Earth (good will towards men) did we get from good-hearted classics like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life to this schlocky mid-'80s slasher film from the dregs of the human spirit? Once again, I blame my heroic holiday intake of Christmas cocktails. As it happens, I was getting a little burned out on decency and kindness by the time I reached this point in the marathon, so I was more than happy to see a guy dressed up as Santa Claus take an axe to a bunch of innocent bystanders, but that's just how I roll. Don't show this to any children you may happen to have lying around the house; I saw it for the first time when I was 15, and look how I turned out. Revolution Number Nine in the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: the controversial cult classic Silent Night Deadly Night.
The movie, starring an astonishing array of actors you have never heard of before or since its release, generated a massive amount of controversy on its release. Its premise is simple enough: a traumatized young boy, whose childhood is marred by a bunch of unlikely coincidences involving Santa Claus, grows up to be a mad killer who takes the St. Nicholasian imperative to reward the good and deny the bad rather beyond its normal purview. Taken as high camp, it's actually not that bad, though hampered by some grade-Z acting and direction that it would be a compliment to call perfunctory. The script, based on a Paul Caimi novel called Slayride (!), is lively enough and clearly doesn't take its moments of high drama very seriously, but the movie caused a sort of national paroxysm of moral panic.
It's hard to say why, exactly. Sure, it's violent and exploitative -- but no more so, and indeed a bit less so, than plenty of other slasher films that were released around the same time. And yeah, the killer (played by Robert Brian Wilson, who, like many in the cast, never appeared in another movie again) dresses up like Santa Claus, but weren't we sufficiently jaded by 1984? In fact, it wasn't even a particularly novel concept: 1974's Black Christmas and 1980's Christmas Evil had covered the same territory. Still, the nation's critics and parents went collectively apeshit over Silent Night Deadly Night: the PTA attempted to have the movie pulled from theaters; the Moral Majority singled it out for vehement condemnation; Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert read its production credits on the air, uttering "shame, shame!" after each name; and Leonard Maltin speculated that the next step would be a child-molesting Easter Bunny, an appealing notion that has yet to be picked up by Todd Solondz.
The tidal wave of outrage that greeted Silent Night Deadly Night was way out of proportion to both its cultural presence and its content. It made very little money in a limited release (although it later picked up a cult following based mostly on its infamy), it was a minor studio release with no big-name stars attached, and its violence and nastiness quotient was well below what you'd see in a typical installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. And it's not like the deranged killer was dressed up like Jesus -- although part of his backstory, involving being abused by the Mother Superior of the Catholic orphanage to which he was sent after the death of his parents, was read by a number of critical as anti-religious bigotry. Combined with the detournement of Santa Claus (who was suddenly recast as a religious symbol instead of a commercial one), it struck a lot of religious right types as an all-out attack on the birthday of our Savior.
Curiously enough, though, director Charles E. Sellier Jr. has always denied that this was the case. The Catholic orphanage scenes, he insists, were always just a gimmick to get the plot rolling along, and had no anti-clerical intent; and, as if to atone for his sins in making Silent Night Deadly Night, he spent the rest of his career writing and producing direct-to-video religious fodder like The Case for Christ's Ressurection, In Search of the Historical Jesus, and The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark. Still, despite a flood of truly abysmal sequels, his creation remains a curiously watchable little aberration, and has given us one of the all-time great movie taglines in "He's dreaming of a red Christmas". The movie is set to be remade next year by Alexandre Aja, who no doubt will ruin its ragged charm by taken it completely seriously.
12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An odiferous, fat, and clucking three French hens. Honestly, this isn't a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it can be enjoyably hooty if you're well in your cups on Christmas Day and looking for a break from the non-stop good feelings. Cram it into your DVD player, banish the kids to go play with their new toys, and warn them afterwards what can happen to little boys and girls who are naughty.
Related Posts:
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: Bad Santa
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas