Silent Night, Deadly Night

I was pretty young when I noticed the trend in horror movies of theming slashers around holidays. Even before I’d seen one, I knew Halloween and Friday The 13th had to be the benchmark. After all, they’re the only holidays that, thematically speaking, make sense automatically as a horror movie. Any other holiday needs something of a contrivance to make it horror, and in my childlike mind, that automatically made it lesser than. Anyway, Silent Night Deadly Night. This may be the king of the second tier slashers with holiday concepts. Not the first, or even second, Christmas slasher, but this one got the most attention by far, due to its copious gore and nudity. This movie is deliberately using its content and the fact that it’s a guy in a Santa suit doing it for shock value, and that is all it’s hanging its hat one. SNDN is not a deep or clever movie. It spends a weird amount of time giving its main character, Billy, a backstory to set up his murderous rampage, but he’s still strangely flat as a character. I think it’s because the movie makes no attempt at hiding what it’s setting up, so it doesn’t need to give Billy any depth. Everything is an exercise in getting this guy to crazy town, and once he does, then it’s just watching him kill. To that end, I do have to give it credit for being a rather lean movie. There’s no filler, no minor story arcs that serve to kill time until killing time begins. This is carried to extremes in some cases, such as when Billy is told by a coworker how he’s tired of Billy slacking off at work and being short-tempered. We never see that, though, because this movie is singularly focused on getting to Billy’s killing spree. However, this unflinching focus means SNDN also lacks a protagonist. This is rather odd in a slasher — the lack of a Final Girl gives the movie a fresh feeling, but the shallow script does little with it. Credit where it’s due, though, this movie never once winks at the viewer. This is trying to be a serious character study of a victim turned victimizer. But this is also a movie that never had a high ceiling to begin with. It cost little more than the original Friday The 13th, but there is a serious difference in style, tone, and quality. I think a significant portion of that comes from Friday being at the front of the wave and SNDN being on the back, so the expectations for a movie like this was never above a B-movie tier at best. It’s no classic, and certainly did not need a franchise, but it’s watchable enough in the right mood.