A little boy witnesses his parents getting killed by a Santa-looking murderer and grows up to be a deadly Santa himself.
A B-movie like they only knew how to make… Obviously, this is just a reminder if you want to go back to the classics. Why not? It’s that time of year. Silent Night, Deadly Night is a masterpiece of that kind of cinema, responsible for dozens of holiday horror slashers that followed over the decades. Sodomisation of the Christmas spirit, blood and guts, bad script, acting, directing, and everything else more or less describe Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s hour and a half of massacre.
The film is so bad, it’s brilliant. It is so effective that it got banned when it first came out. The theatres pulled it, and it tanked within a couple of weeks. The controversy behind it was phenomenal. The axe-wielding Santa murdering everyone on Christmas Eve was something to protest against. It was unthinkable (even though it had been done before), and the uproar was nothing like we have seen since. All that information, though, speaks volumes about society rather than the film itself. More specifically, about the kind of morals and ethics that define it. The film could have gone two ways: One, focus on the child trauma, the way it was addressed (not), and how it escalated. Or the maniac Santa on a killing spree. I guess we all know which one the studios went for.
It would be interesting to see what would have happened if it had gone the other way, but then, it wouldn’t have created all that kerfuffle, and it wouldn’t be a classic. It’s ironic that they made so many sequels after all that commotion and even more interesting that the 2012 remake got so much acceptance. Censorship has taken so many different shapes and forms over the years. Still, all it does is prove society’s intolerance to anything different to what they are used to or narrow-mindedly doesn’t fit the majority’s narrative.
Silent Night, Deadly Night will always remain a classic despite its all-white cast and depreciation of women. Well, it was films like that that, years later, brought to the fore the marginalised voices and the rise of the female gaze movement. So, yes, it’s a classic, but I’m so glad they don’t make them like that anymore.
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