There’s a chill in the air. Frost is accumulating in the sky and on car windshields; people’s faces are leaking fluids while they try politely hiding their illnesses; dealerships are dusting off their house brand market-devised strategically named year-end sales events. In other words, the holidays are here. But the only holiday we know will get the spotlight is Christmas. I’m not here to tell you why, you probably already have a good idea.
There’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to anything Christmas-themed alone in this country. The embarrassment may in fact come because of the sheer volume of it all. This extends to film but more specifically because of this article, horror films. Maybe once upon a time there wasn’t much horror centered around the holiday but I have never been part of that world. Are these curses cast on human society or balms to soothe us in our times of need? Am I lucky to be part of this — or is this what it’s like having been born into a reality where voluminous mounds of glittering gifts are handed down to future generations in the form of rough, blistering coal by those who sapped the fruits of past labors of their intrinsic value?
These may be more interesting questions that the films (films, movies, cinema, you decide) I’m about to get to don’t altogether deserve to be explored alongside. But it does start with the concept of regifting, albeit far less dramatic and poignant. This is a piece about the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, one of the most critically derided (and socially from the beginning) franchises of the waning slasher era. People got mad about a guy who dresses up as Santa killing people left and right.* In hindsight why wouldn’t you market it that way from the start? It’s anything if not untruthful. Silent Night, Deadly Night is perhaps more honest about the season it mirrors than anyone who made it would admit.
As of its first installment and arguably beyond (we’ll get there), the Silent Night movies are so unapologetically for and about the season of giving. The first film’s focus on Billy’s mental spiral may be somewhat haphazard (and there really is something there if you trim away the cheese) but it remains respectful and rewards with kills that only get better and better as the film approaches its finale. The sequels that follow hand off in a series of tongue-in-cheek “regifting” of something that came before.
The entire first half of Part 2 is simply a recap of the first film before moving on to Ricky Caldwell to give you the fresh kills you crave. Monte Hellman directs the 3rd film, “regifting” us with a recast Ricky (Bill Moseley, but don’t get excited) in our very own original full-length feature that continues his story to make up for being duped on two and a half reels last time (but this still borrows significant chunks of clips from the original). Brian Yuzna’s 4th part (again, don’t excite yourself) places a completely unrelated character named Ricky (Clint Howard) in front of a TV watching the 3rd movie with him commenting on it. The final sequel throws in a toy that anyone hot off the heels of Initiation would spot right away but gifts us with another moment: a child watches a Silent Night, Deadly Night movie where Part 4’s Ricky is watching a Silent Night, Deadly Night movie. The lengths this series goes to for the creative risks it takes is commendable.
There’s another horror franchise that wanted to do what the Silent Night movies got to do pretty often: Halloween. No more introductions really need to be made for them. John Carpenter’s desire for the films that followed his 1978 feature to focus on disconnected horrific ventures into the human soul never took hold. Halloween II, which saw the immediate continuation of the events in Haddonfield unfolding later that night into the early November morning, didn’t have Michael Myers anywhere near resurrection. Carpenter and Debra Hill fully intended to wrap up Michael and Laurie’s story, moving on in episodic fashion similar to The Twilight Zone with Halloween III. The pattern could have continued but once Carpenter left the rights sold over to Moustapha Akkad, who immediately spun the series back into the Michael Myers show — for better or worse. Akkad steered the series back towards what the fans wanted but at the expense of setting the Halloween series up for new stories told by fresh voices in horror.
Despite Halloween’s unfortunate commercial boomerang back to Haddonfield, both it and the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchises are awfully spirited about the seasons they depict. The films reap gleeful rewards through the deathly demise of their victims’ kills — as inventive as they can be, whether limited by studio executives or the human minds prompted to write such things. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Halloween struggled (and ultimately failed) through creative rejection on a commercial level so that Silent Night, Deadly Night could pick up where Carpenter intended to take his series.
The latter Silent Night films got to explore more original and weirder spaces. Though they’re not as creatively diverse, Silent Night, Deadly Night parts 2 through 5 certainly cover a lot of different ground for horror concepts. 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night is almost entirely indebted to 1978’s Halloween and makes no efforts to convince anyone that it’s a fully original venture into seasonal territory. Killer Santa Clauses were fairly new in 1984 but the Charles E. Sellier, Jr. film was hardly the first to do it. Tales From the Crypt, To All a Goodnight, and Christmas Evil (which the UK classified a video nasty but the US didn’t cry outrage until ad campaigns for the first Silent Night aired on TV) all came before Billy ever became traumatized by a bloodthirsty Santa Claus.
Halloween III’s gambit deserves some respect, perhaps more or less so based on how bizarre the story Tommy Lee Wallace decided to go with to “kick off” the anthology model for Halloween. Say what you will of its main character Dan Chalice but the story beats provide almost the ultimate example of subverting expectations in a horror sequel. It doesn’t stick the landing at all in Carpenter and Wallace’s desire to make a Nigel Kneale story, although it has some of the hallmarks of one. It does fall short of what Kneale would focus on as well as how he would frame the story. The final result of what Wallace and Carpenter brought to Season of the Witch ended up resembling more of a cut-and-paste of Kneale’s elements (the Quatermass films contain the themes of panic Wallace attempts to emulate). But even as audiences came to see the vision in action of Carpenter’s true Halloween series, Michael Myers killed more than just innocent teens.
Throughout the entire first film Halloween refuses to flesh out anything about Michael’s past. His motivations, psychology, and relationships in the film are undefined and instead replaced with a void. This doesn’t stop Loomis from putting definitions and meanings within that void to at least attempt to fill it with some kind of meaning. Many of us already know about this and how it was done to make Myers as frightening and unpredictable as possible (and if you didn’t, you do now!), making Michael Myers much more believable as an agent of evil and chaos. Silent Night, Deadly Night on the other hand makes a different bold decision to push the issue of explaining a killer’s motive.
The first Silent Night centers on the development of a certain Billy Chapman and early on features a scene with he and his family visiting his catatonic grandfather. In what could be described as a single moment, he breaks into an episode of lucidity, frightening Billy. He then provides the film with the tiniest kernel of fear-driven motivation that drive future killings in one of the most ridiculous and best-acted moments in horror. It’s the performance of it that makes it work so well, which also leads the film a helping hand over the hurdle of having to treat this whole affair so seriously. It’s the over the top treatment that ends up giving Billy’s kills a sharp comedic edge — but it also makes the question of motivation for the killer as moot as Carpenter does.
Each film does so for its own maximum effect but with Silent Night’s grandfatherly push, it creates space between the obligation to obsess over a killer like Billy Chapman, who could’ve been written into numerous sequels and had each film simply revolve around different kids dying in different ways on Christmas. To me Grandpa Chapman is the first, true Christmas gift of these films. If he spins a story to freak out little Billy that Santa punishes those on the naughty list he may also have some other good ones up his sleeve like his brother who would become the same as him; how he could end up studied by doctors experimenting with his method of communicating with brain waves; a coven of witches who convene with insects, setting their enemies on fire and hurling them off the top of buildings; and killer toys that turn up on children’s doorsteps disguised as Christmas presents.
When everything about the Silent Night, Deadly Night films are laid out it’s hard to argue that this didn’t eventually become an anthology film series. And even though it brought installments directed by Monte Hellman and Brian Yuzna, the films ultimately didn’t get past a certain sleepiness to feel uniquely theirs in spite of having a franchise name behind it. The franchise name here not really being nearly as big as Halloween, granted, however something in me suggests that a similar thing could very well have happened if Carpenter got his way and Halloween IV (or 4 or Four or whatever) and beyond could’ve been about something different than retconning Michael and Sam “somehow returning.”
Maybe these potential Halloweens wouldn’t be all that good. One can only hope that they might have been miracles. Who knows what ideas that could’ve been thrown around for them and if there could be lost treasure sitting somewhere in barely legible scrawls on the back of a gas station receipt. We could spend eternities speculating and wondering about this. But this perpetuates unhealthy tendencies about conjecture that would normalize this kind of thinking. Like those of us who celebrate aspects of the Halloween franchise no matter the overall quality of later installments (I myself am a staunch Halloween 6 enthusiast) it would make similar sense to celebrate what we have in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series just as equally — no matter how much better you think they should be.
What we got out of the Silent Night movies is what Carpenter wanted in spirit for his 1978 slasher film to beget. It has the same core attitudes, only centered around a different holiday. But once Halloween comes around after each long year, other seasonal holidays creep closer each day. And a couple full moons later once the air gets colder and frost starts to accumulate, Christmas is always here before you know it.
*Christmas Evil, a film with very similar themes was released four years prior without anyone taking note or umbrage. Marketing really is everything.
Fritz is an avid film watcher, blogger and podcaster. You can read her words on film at letterboxd and medium, and hear their voice on movies, monsters, and other weird things on Humanoids From the Deep Dive every other Monday. In their “off” time they volunteer as a film projectionist, reads fiction & nonfiction, comics, and plays video games until it’s way too late.
