1984, United States. Robert Brian Wilson, Starring Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Toni Nero, Britt Leach, Nancy Borgenicht, H.E.D. Redford, Linnea Quigley, Leo Geter, Randy Stumpf, Will Hare, Tara Buckman, Charles Dierkop. Directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr.

Although I'm a huge fan of horror, I'm not so hot on slasher films. Oh sure, I like the original Halloween, but that's like saying Curly is your favorite Stooge, or Curly is your favorite Globe Trotter. Who doesn't feel that way? But with precious few exceptions, I have very little patience with slasher films despite having cut my b-movie teeth on them as a lad during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the golden age of such films. When it comes to horror, give me a good ghost or zombie film any day, or even a bad ghost or zombie film.

With the recent glut of teen slasher films to hit the market in the wake of gratingly annoying Scream, things have been made even worse. Now you have to endure not only the age-old slasher formula, but you have to watch it being done with a ludicrously obvious "aren't we so clever" style of self-referentialism. Ha ha ha, sure it's a bad movie, but we all know it's bad, and because we tried to make a bad movie, and the movie is bad, it must be a good movie. Such is the reasoning in this era where any piss-poor flop of a movie will be repackaged as "witty satire and spoofing," and suddenly your hunk of head cheese is "smart and cutting edge."

About the only thing that could make the slasher films of the 1990s tolerable is if one of them was about a fed-up horror fan hunting down and killing everyone who ever had any involvement in Scream and it's seemingly infinite number of clones. Yep, that means you, to, Wes Cravens. You think we've forgotten that you not only gave us Scream, but also have titles like Shocker to your credit as well?

Slasher films have always been pretty lame, but the slasher films of today completely lack any guts -- figuratively as well as literally. One of the first things that struck me while watching Silent Night, Deadly Night, one of the sillier but also better films of the early 1980s slasher boom, was how much more you could get away with back then. I mean, we talk about how repressed the Reagan era was and how shockingly violent the films of today have become, but the truth is very much the opposite. We were living the high life in the 1980s, and the films of today, while featuring bigger and louder explosions, are relatively anemic and, well, wimpy when compared to their forefathers. Where's the grue, baby? If you're not going to challenge my intellect or bring on some scare, you better hit me with heavy doses of the red stuff. The modern slasher film is as tame as one of those muzzled bears that wears a tu-tu and rides around on a unicycle at a circus, but not even 10% as entertaining or morally offensive.

Even if the slashers of old were rather rotten films, at least they had running through them a streak of serious misanthropic meanness, which was far easier to swallow than the condescending, "See, we're goofing on the whole genre because we're so clever!" attitude that has ruined the horror film and become nothing more than a crutch for people to use in justifying their lack of creativity and talent. At least the old slasher films, dumb as toast though they may have been, were bold enough to sock us with a little brutal gore.

So, with that said, let's move on to our look at one of the better scary Santa films, and one of the better slasher films in general. Our film begins on Christmas Eve, that magical night, with little Billy and his family en route to visit crazy ol' grandpa in the nursing home. Unfortunately, gramps is a vegetable and doesn't respond very much to the visit. The adults go off to discuss grandpa's state, leaving little Billy to set next to the catatonic old man. Nothing says Christmas joy to a child quite like being left to sit in a room with catatonic drooling old men.

But hark! Gramps is not so far gone into the realm beyond that he can't snap out of it long enough to give the "cackling old man" warning that seemed to be part of all slasher films. In every one of them, our heroes encounter some goofball old man who laughs a lot -- but in an evil way, like how you laugh at Carrot Top, not in a funny way, like how you laugh at the pain of those around you. Grandpa cackles and tells Billy that Santa may bring toys to all the good little boys and girls, but he brings swift and brutal vengeance down upon those who have offended his sense of morality.

Gramps then lapses back into a state of coma just in time to not be seen by the adults, leaving Billy's opinion of Jolly Ol' St. Nick forever changed. Had the kid gone to see the abysmal Santa Claus: The Movie starring Dudley Moore as an alcoholic millionaire elf (or something), Billy would have already developed a healthy grudge against Santa. I mean, this is the guy who, when you want a new GI Joe Figure, brings you "GI Army Man," the K-Mart knock-off of a GI Joe figure. So what you get is just close enough to what you wanted, yet still so very far away, that your disappointment is far greater than if you'd just gotten some socks instead. This is what Santa does to us.

Meanwhile, a guy wearing a Santa suit robs a store, murders the clerk, then promptly breaks down on a dark and deserted road. Just as Billy is really getting worked up by a rather disturbing "Santa Claus is Creepin' Around" carol about how Santa is looking in your windows and watching you masturbate (well, those weren't the exact words, but it was the gist of it), the family stumbles across broke-down Killin' Claus. Being a murderous guy and all, he promptly kills Billy's dad. Billy escapes and hides, only to witness Santa rape, mutilate, and eventually kill his mother. Only Billy and his newborn brother survive. Fade to black.

And fade back in some years later. Billy and his brother are in one of those orphanages run by abusive nuns. Luckily, all orphanages run by really abusive mean old nuns generally keep at least one cute and kindly young nun on staff. Something about quotas or something, I'm told. Billy is a fairly well-adjusted young boy, at least until the time o' Yule roles around. Then he starts drawing pictures of Santa murdering people. The good nun is suspicious that Billy may still be haunted by the murder of his parents, but the Mother Superior blows that off and says he remembers absolutely nothing about it, even though it happened when he was like seven years old and it's only been a couple years. You'd think that the whole drawing pictures of Santa slaughtering people, not to mention screaming like a banshee and running away any time he catches sight of a guy in a Santa suit, might be enough to disprove Mother Superior's theory that the murders did not affect him in any way whatsoever.

Her solution for his irrational fear of Santa, founded on nothing more than the flimsy fact that he once watched Santa rape and murder him mom and shoot his dad in the head, is to make him hang around people dressed as Santa all the time. In one of the film's better sequences, she tries to force a screaming Billy to sit on Santa's lap as Santa chuckles heartily. Little Billy hauls off and slugs Santa, knocking his fat ass out of the chair into into the Christmas scene. I don't know. I guess I'm easily amused, but I never get tired of that scene.

Not helping Billy's mental state out any is Mother Superior's obsession with punishing naughtiness, something that Billy also remembers St. Nick doing. She relishes beating the children, and nothing makes her day more than catching teenagers having sex and whipping them but good. Billy has the good fortune of watching some teenagers go at it and get busted, thus does he learn that sex is naughty.

We then skip ahead some years again, and find Billy has grown into a muscular and fine looking young man played by Robert Brian Wilson. The cute and kindly nun, who apparently does not age, gets Billy a job in the stock room of a toy store, which seems a rather stupid thing to do for a kid who sent into fits of convulsing and hysterics at the mere thought of Santa Claus. Sure things are fine through the summer because Billy does not have a deep rooted fear of guys on stilts dressed as Uncle Sam, but did they think that Christmas wasn't eventually going to roll around, or that maybe this toy store wouldn't really be into it?

Billy's a good worker, but his manager is a dick. He always makes Billy do the hard work, then takes all the credit. I think we can all relate to this, and I think we also know who's going to be the first to go once the mayhem begins. Billy also gets to flirt with the right cute Pamela (Toni Nero), but of course, even though Billy is handsome and buff and polite and treats her with respect and friendliness, she shacks up with the asshole guy. Ain't it always the case?

As Christmas approaches, Billy begins to get a little touchy. On Christmas Eve, the guy who was supposed to play the in-store Santa calls in sick, and everyone agrees that Billy would make a great Santa. he spends most of the day whispering to little children about how Santa will punish them severely if they do anything naughty.

After hours, the staff gathers together for a late-night party, presumably because none of them have any family of their own. The asshole guy tries to put the moves on Pam, but she resists, resulting in him slapping her around and tearing her shirt off in a scene that looks just like the one between the evil Santa and Billy's mom. Unfortunately for the asshole guy, Billy sees it, and it finally pushes him over the edge. Clad in his Santa suit, he assumes the powers of retribution and punishment granted Santa, or so he sees it. He makes quick work of the asshole, strangling him with some cords, but is so far gone that he can't help but see Pamela as anything but naughty. So she gets punished as well.

Being on a roll, he offs the owner of the store and the head cashier as well, all in fairly gory fashion. one thing I like about this movie more than many other slasher films is that the methods of killing, while sometimes a bit silly, never reach the level of absolute absurdity that they tended to in other films, where someone might wish that they could be a glowing star atop a Christmas tree, only to later be impaled by a glowing star atop a Christmas tree. For the most part, Billy just grabs whatever's handy, usually a hammer or an ax, and goes to town.

Meanwhile, in the Donald Pleasance role from Halloween, the cute nun realizes that Billy was made to play Santa, and it's driven him mad. So she pursues him across town with the cops, always one or two steps behind him and his mayhem. The role of these characters is twofold. First, they must provide exposition on the mental state of the killer. In this, it's all about how Billy's fear of Santa and his associating Santa with murderous punishment, has driven him to kill. In Halloween, Pleasance got to ramble about talking about pure eee-ville in the eyes of a boy.

Their second function is to show up at the scene of a grisly murder and mutter, "He's been here."

Billy is off having a field day of death while the cops bungle to and fro. Among his many Santa stops is a home where two teens -- one of whom is a young Linnea Quigley before age and drugs took their toll -- are getting it on atop a pool table while the young girl they are babysitting lurks about upstairs wondering about what Santa will bring her. Of course, Santa is bringing a stocking full o' pain this year, and he expresses his distaste for premarital sex by impaling poor Linnea on the antlers of a mounted deer head, then takes out her boyfriend as well. The boyfriend is played by that blonde haired dude who plays the sort of snobby blonde hair dude in all sorts of films during the 1980s. I think he got his ass kicked by Ralph Macchio.

The best part of this whole scene is when the little girl sees Billy as Santa sneaking out of the house. She stops him to say hi, and Billy asks her if she's done anything naughty as he slowly draws a utility knife. She assures him she is nice, not naughty. Appeased by her innocence, Billy gives her a gift: the utility knife. It's a priceless moment because Billy's face is so earnest, and whoever the little girl actress is has an absolutely wonderful look of confusion.

Billy then hauls ass out to some remote sledding hill where a couple of sled-hill bullies are picking on two other kids. I first laughed at the notion of teenage tough guys who hang out on snowy hills bullying people and stealing their sleds. I grew up near all sorts of sled hills and bullies, and none of them seemed to rank ruling the sled hill very high on their list of priorities. They had more important things to do, like airbrushing a picture of a half naked elf maiden on the side of their van or learning how to play "Beth" so they could sing it to their girlfriend. The first time I encountered the sled hill bully was in the film Jack Frost, and I made fun of it. But now I see this movie also has sled hill bullies, so I have to assume that these people do in fact exist. They have to be pretty damn low on the bully scale though, the wimpy bullies that other bullies make fun of. Sled hill bullies must be the bully equivalent of Lucky the Leprechaun, who had to guard a bowl of cereal when all the other leprechauns got to guard pots of gold.

Just like the sled hill bullies in Jack Frost, one of the sled hill bullies here goes sledding down the hill only to get decapitated, this time by the ax-weilding Billy. I don't know if Billy was following these two guys around hoping they would do something naughty, or if he was just crouching out there in the middle of the woods just hoping someone naughty might happen by. He could have been out there a pretty long time, and since Santa has to get all his death delivered before Christmas morning, you think he'd be more conscious of time.

The fuzz and their nun figure Billy is going to head for the orphanage to kill that annoying Mother Superior. Quite frankly, though I'd never advocate the ax murdering of cranky old nuns in real life, within the context of this film, it's really difficult to drum up any hope that she'll be saved in the nick of time. In a brilliant stroke, the police issue orders to shoot on sight all people dressed as Santa, which seems like a really stupid order to give on Christmas. Sure enough, a cop staking out the orphanage drops the first Santa he spies, which happens to be some poor priest visiting the kids. Do priests really dress up as Santa? I figured they would always dismiss Santa as some Pagan devilry, but I guess getting a Christmas day visit from a guy dressed as Jesus, while more religious, isn't as uplifting for the kids. besides, you'd have to find a real sucker to walk around in a loin cloth and crown of thorns in December.

The cop doesn't have much time to be wrought with Catholic guilt over having killed an innocent man, because Billy shows up soon thereafter and plants an ax in the guy. Then he moves on to Mother Superior. Billy is let in by his little brother, who weirdly enough, is still the same age he was when Billy was ten. Mother Superior, ever the cast-iron bitch, just keeps on shouting at poor Billy, even though he's dressed as Santa and carrying an ax coated with the blood of the naughty. This seems at least as smart as that drill sergeant screaming at a raving lunatic holding a loaded rifle in Full Metal Jacket, only this one is even worse because the guy is dressed as Santa. See, whether you believe in God or not, whether you feel your faith is like an aegis against all evil, one thing you should not do is insult a crazy guy dressed as Santa carrying an ax. I try to give you good advice, and this is pretty high up there.

Just as Bill is about to cleave the abusive nun in two, the cops show up and blow him away. Christmas is saved!

Of course, being a horror film, it has to have an open ending, so we zoom in on Billy's little bro, staring at his dying sibling, then pointing and chirping "Naughty!"

The thing that sets this apart from most other slasher films is that they really try hard to make an interesting character out of Billy, and they succeed. Although it's hard to get behind his ax murderin', we can certainly understand and pity him after all he has gone through. There is a depth of character not present in most films of this nature, and not present in any films of any nature these days.

There's also a pretty strong statement against the whole concept of "Catholic guilt," which keeps us ashamed of damn near everything we might actually want to do. The movie characterizes religion in the Mother Superior, who in her own way is as looney as Billy winds up being. Rather than chopping up the naughty with an ax, she abuses them mercilessly and subjects them to constant mental anguish. The one good nun we see is ineffectual against the greater notion of punishment for all sins real and perceived.

If you were crazy or stoned, or just really pretentious, or in need of an essay, you could also look at Murderin' Santa versus the nuns as being symbolic of ancient Pagan traditions fighting with Christianity. As just about everyone knows, I assume, Christmas was more or less an invented holiday. Jesus wasn't born on December 25th, or so say most Biblical scholars. But Christians needed a way to convince the wild pagans of the north -- my people, incidentally -- to become God-fearin', repressed, guilt-ridden Christians like everyone else. So they made up Christmas, and put it on December 25th, a significant Pagan holiday. That way they wouldn't even have to change their day of celebration. Santa remains a symbol of Christmas' pagan roots, which is why so many devout Christians don't care for the jolly fat toymaker. You can find hours of amusing reading material about how Santa=Satan, and how Santa is just a way for drunk homosexual hobos to get little kids to sit on their laps.

I'm generally not one to harsh on another's religion. I realize some people take that stuff seriously. Having been raised with no religion, and having leanings toward the wild-eyed Paganism of my ancestors kicking it up in the far northern reaches of Scotland, I'm not big on religious persecution and am willing to live and live. But I have no problem making endless amounts of fun at the twisted, hate-mongering freaks of the world who use religion as a convenient excuse to subject those around them to constant abuse and pain, whether they be Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, or Zoroastrian.

These are the people who make me want to go skyclad to one of their little ice cream socials, hooting like a madman and dancing naked under the moon while twirling about a walking stick and brandishing a copy of The Hobbit or some other foul tome of Satanism. The people who use God or any diety as an excuse to hate another race, burn or ban a book, attack a person for their sexual preference, and generally bend the world to match their incredibly warped and bitter version of morality are the sword enemies of Teleport City, and we issue forth like a great muster of loin-cloth clad heathens bent on annoying these people endlessly by simply not adhering to their repressed, guilt-riddled, hateful views on life and how to live it. Hear the call! We are all around ye, and we're naked!

So right here in a 1980s slasher film we have the continuing struggle of Paganism against repressive Christianity, and after centuries of being hunted, burned, hanged, tortured, and forced to convert, the Pagans finally got themselves an ax-wielding Claus. Let the games begin!

The whole mythology of Santa and his role in corrupting Christians is muddied when one takes into account the plot of the Mexican movie Santa Claus, in which Santa faces off against the minions of Satan. So just who is Santa? A rogue demon all dressed in red, as much at odds with the kingdom of Christ as he is with the minions of the Dark Lord? A lone warrior playing judge, jury, and in the case of this film, executioner? Who is he, and what does he want? It becomes obvious, then, that Santa is in fact some sort of proto-vigilante, an avenging angel, very much like Charles Bronson's character in Death Wish or The Punisher in spirit, if not in attire.

Perhaps, however, this film is far more subversive. A secret fundamentalist recruitment movie aiming to undermine our children's trust in Santa Claus, to teach them that he is evil, and only an out-of-shape old cop with a loaded revolver can offer you eternal salvation.

Silent Night, Deadly Night also succeeds in being clever from time to time. The utility knife scene is simply hilarious in a very dry way, and the frequent allusions to the punishment of naughty people and the Christmas carols about Santa sneaking about are well-done, even if they are a bit obvious. Put in the context of this film, you begin to realize how weird the whole concept of a laughing fat man keeping tabs on you, then breaking into your home to leave you gifts or coal, actually is. Once harmless carols become far more disturbing when set to scenes of Santa knocking people off.

As I said in the beginning, I was surprised to see just how much this film was able to get away with, and how pathetically tame modern slasher films seem by comparison. It'd been some fifteen years since I'd last watched this movie, and I found it pretty effective. It held up well, and pitted against the slashers of the 1990s and the 2000s, Silent Night, Deadly Night would plant an ax in their head, shove a Christmas tree up their bum, then dance gleefully about their useless quivering corpses whilst laughing heartily.

Sure it's a silly film. I mean, it's about a guy dressed as Santa killing people. There's a built-in silliness in that scenario. But beyond the goofiness, there's actually a decently-constructed horror film here that takes on religious issues and manages to create a central character that is evil and all, but also invokes pity and sympathy for all that he's endured. We witness his progression into madness, and it's well done.

I went into Silent Night, Deadly Night expecting to be groaning in pain throughout, much like I so on Christmas Eve when my family gathers around to chain smoke and watch golf on television all night. I was pleasantly surprised to find a fairly enjoyable slasher film that certainly had more thought put into it than most other films of the genre.

Labels: Horror: Slashers, Year: 1984