SilentNight, Deadly Night (1984)

Silent Night Deadly Night is one of my all-time favourite movies. As far as I am concerned it is the quintessential Christmas horror movie. Watching it was an annual tradition at Christmas time during my twenties. I had no idea the franchise even existed until my late teens. I may be a little bit biased, but a lot of cool stuff came out in 1984 (regardless of what George Orwell thought).

It starts out on Christmas Eve 1971 with 4-year-old Billy, baby Ricky, and their parents Ellie and Jimmy on their way to visit Grandpa at a mental institution. They never explain why, but Grandpa can’t speak and isn’t even aware they are there visiting. After maybe a minute a doctor comes in and asks to talk to the parents in a separate room and they make little Billy wait with Grandpa.

So naturally Grandpa wakes up to ask Billy about Santa and proceeds to tell him Santa punishes bad children. The doctor and parents come back in the room and G-pops goes quiet again and the family just leaves. After about a 5-minute visit, hours of driving each way… (I understand wanting to visit, but what is the point of spending all of Christmas Eve driving to have a five-minute visit when you think he doesn’t even know you’re there? It is both too much effort and not enough)

On the drive home they see a Santa broke down and a terrified Billy begs his dad not to stop. He should have listened because Santa just kills the parents. No real reason but to make sure Billy gets an extra dose of trauma and really sink in the fear of the big man.

A few years later, 1974, and little Billy and Ricky are in Saint Mary’s home for Orphaned Children. Billy gets sent to Mother Superior for drawing an awesome picture of dead Santa and a beheaded reindeer. Sister Margaret tries to help Billy and reason with Mother Superior but winds up with Mother Superior beating the crap out of Billy in true Catholic form. Mother Superior’s plan is to force Billy to like Santa and Christmas through brute force. When a Santa came to visit the children, Mother Superior decided Billy needed more trauma and forced him to sit on Santa’s knee. Billy punched Santa and ran away. 

We jump ahead 10 years to 1984, Billy is 18, and Sister Margaret gets him a job in the stock room of a toy store during Christmas time.

Knowing Billy’s issues with Santa, Sissy Marge decides not to tell the store owner, Mr. Sims. (Or anyone else for that matter….) 

We are then blessed by one of the greatest (subjectively) montages of all time. Billy working in the store slowly going crazy at the Santa displays while Andy the other stock guy, sits there doing nothing but drink. Only an 80’s sitcom could even hope to have a montage this great.

Christmas Eve rolls around, and Billy is asked to sit in for Santa at the store for pictures with the kids. (Seriously, everyone was asking for this to happen.) After Billy scared some children, the parents rejoiced, and the store shut down.

Good old Mr. Sims busts out the booze, and for a moment everyone is happy. ***(It just hit me while writing this draft {3} that Mr. Sims is giving Alcohol to an 18-year-old in Utah and according to SLC Punk alcohol was already hard to get in Utah) *** I don’t know what the drinking age was in Utah in 1984 but I bet it was over 18.

Finally, halfway through the movie Santa Billy gets his first kill when he catches Andy trying to rape Pamela. Andy was naughty and needed to be punished. And because this movie was made in the 80’s Pamela also had to die because it is the woman’s fault for being assaulted.

The next 30 minutes are somewhat empty aside from a couple kills. They are the best ones of the movie, but they are just there seemingly to fill out time. All it would have taken is a little more effort to justify them. Again, it feels like the movie is trying too hard and not enough at the same time.

We finally get back on track the next morning. The Police are out looking for a Santa Clause killer and Sister Margaret, playing the Loomis type roll, has finally got the police attention and they think Billy is on his way to the Orphanage.

If you think police in real life are dumb, the police in this movie are going to seem on point. As a cop gets to the orphanage, he sees that Santa is walking towards the children. When Santa doesn’t respond the officer opens fire TOWARDS the children, right in front of Billy’s brother Ricky, shooting Santa in the back.

After a scene of officer dumb ass searching the grounds of the orphanage, he catches an axe in the chest from Billy.

With no one left to protect the orphanage, Billy finally gets to the front door and a kid lets him in. He IS dressed as Santa after all. (These kids are way too relaxed given they already saw one Santa murdered a few minutes ago.) Billy finally gets to Mother Superior and as he raises his axe, another cop shoots Santa Billy in the back, also TOWARDS CHILDREN!!!!

With his dying breath Billy tells the other orphans that they are safe now, Santa is dead. This is now the second time in a half hour Santa has been shot in the back, MURDERED right in front of Ricky. The second time it was his older brother. Closing out the movie with a GREAT shot of Ricky to set up a sequel. And oh boy WHAT A SEQUEL!!!

This movie was all over the place. I love it for what it tried to do, and less for what it did. For a killer who was supposed to be killing naughty people, he killed a bunch for no reason. Like I said before, they tried too hard with some things, and not enough with others. There are a lot of areas where the movie drags on taking too long. There are many times where the gaps in logic ask too much of your suspension of disbelief.

I found myself feeling bad for Billy as he was a victim of some nasty childhood trauma, and he was only 18 when he finally snapped. The only people who cared about him at all were his little brother and Sister Margaret. Rickey was too little to do anything and Margaret could have easily done a little more. The antler impaling and the toboggan decapitations were classic scenes but felt out of place from the rest of the story.

It's lack of love shouldn’t bother me as much as it does, but I really do think there is a great slasher movie in there with a little more attention to detail. Nothing shy of brain damage will take away the great memories I’ve had from watching this movie and franchise.

Billy may not be able to compete with Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger, or Michael Meyers. However Billy never got anywhere near the love the others got. Not to say the others didn’t get their share of hate as well. Silent Night, Deadly Night just couldn’t stand up against the controversy of a murdering Santa and their (terrifyingly accurate?) portrayal of the Catholic orphanage. To top it off it didn’t help matters that the movie just simply isn’t good. It is AWESOME, it has some good moments, some good ideas, some classic kill scenes, but all in all it is not a good movie.

I love this movie, and I love this franchise. Not because I think it is good, but because I know it is awesome.   

 Feel free to check out The VHS DOOM Podcast where I join Mikey and Dylan and we chat about Silent Night, Deadly Night. *LOTS of swearing, if you aren’t genuinely Interested in horror movies and the like you won’t enjoy it. If you are Catholic, you will not enjoy it.

Listen on Spotify or Apple (I don’t know how to link to apple podcasts) or where ever else you want. Click over there and check out VHSDoom.com