Census Bloodbath: Faces bright with Christmas fever

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT

Thirteen years.  That's sinister, don't you think?  And that's how long we've been crossing over with Brennan Klein of Popcorn Culture in the Old Switcheroo, where for the duration of October he supplements his ever-burgeoning encyclopedia of the slasher, Census Bloodbath, with a takeover of our own wholesome 50s sci-fi feature, Cardboard Science, while I get the sharper end of that bargain here.

1984

Directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr

Written by Paul Caimi, Dennis Whitehead, Scott J. Schneid, and Michael Hickey

Spoilers: moderate

Silent Night, Deadly Night has a reputation preceding it, if mainly by accident: thanks to a thoughtlessly demographically-minded process, its marketing firm advertised it in the middle of a Sunday during a football game, where normal people could see it, and Kathleen Eberhardt of Milwaukee did see it.  She was shocked and disgusted and formed a nationwide movement against the film under the banner of "Citizens Against Movie Madness," which even managed to get its screenings protested here and there.  It probably didn't have to be as bad as it was—getting pulled from theaters, having its initial home video release canceled, Gene Siskel and Robert Ebert declaring it evil (for those men could be some pretty censorious dickheads)—though it was always bound to instigate some controversy, thanks to the basic gist, "it's a slasher movie and the villain is Santa Claus."

For one thing, obviously it's a guy dressed as Santa Claus, but, anyway, that it made people really upset seems almost incomprehensibly quaint.  There are undoubtedly dozens of "murderous Santa" horror movies by now, not even including the long-running albeit-disjointed-and-oft-rebooted Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise itself—I doubt Terrifier 3 could even be the most recent, though I have every faith it's the best—and this also wouldn't be counting the many other movies about violence being done to or by Santa, from The Nightmare Before Christmas to the "what if Santa Claus were John Wick?" novelty cinema of the Violent Night series.  (Scrooged's Christmas special about terrorists at the North Pole was satire then.)  O tempora, right?  "Slasher Santa" is an idea that seems retrospectively obvious, but six years after Halloween, you'll agree it was obvious even at the time—so obvious, in fact, it'd been done six years before Halloween, in Amicus's 1972 anthology, Tales From the Crypt, and even as a slasher, twice already, in To All a Goodnight and Christmas Evil, both in 1980.

Nevertheless did wannabe producer Scott Schneid seize the holiday, and in 1982 Schneid came into possession of a Paul Caimi script originally called He Sees You When You're Sleeping, and later Slayride (which aren't great, but I don't know what was wrong with calling the film plain "Silent Night," except it was deemed insufficiently blunt).  Schneid developed Caimi's script alongside Dennis Whitehead; eventually they hired Michael Hickey to tie it up in a bow.  Getting it made proved a challenge, until Tristar affiliate Ira Barmak shook them down for an ownership stake, though Schneid had seen the franchise potential himself, which is why, I presume, he foisted such clumsy sequelbait upon the filmmakers.  We'll come back to that plural, but for now, know that Barmak unaccountably hired Charles E. Sellier Jr to helm it, though he was not a horror director—nor a feature film director, really—and also a devout Christian, whose career had until now had involved mostly harmless stuff.

This brings us to the movie itself, partway-rehabilitated over these last forty-two years.  I get it—there's a noble impulse to defend the honor of an underdog that got kicked this hard—and Silent Night, Deadly Night, the slasher that scandalized the nation, actually will give you all the material you could need to mount a solid-seeming intellectual defense of it; in fact, it's going to give it to you long and hard, and there's no small irony to its own apparent serious-mindedness, since it's the biggest reason why it's so idiotic and also why it sucks.  So we begin in 1971 with the Chapmans, dad Jim (Jeff Hansen), mom Ellie (Tara Buckman), infant Ricky (prop infant Melissa Best), and five year-old Billy (Jonathan Best).  It's Christmas Eve in Utah, and they're visiting Billy's grandfather (Will Hare) in a mental health facility.  Grandpa Chapman's been catatonic for years, for no explicitly-stated reason, but when they leave Billy alone with Grandpa for a few minutes, he springs back to life, frightfully interrogating Billy about his understanding of Santa Claus.  Billy, of course, believes Santa to be a kindly old elf.  Grandpa sets him straight: Santa is a punisher of the naughty; everyone is naughty; and if you see Santa, run.  Grandpa returns to his statuelike state the instant the adults come back into the room, but his words have impressed themselves upon Billy, and they are reinforced beyond contradiction when on the way back the family is ambushed by a psychopath in a Santa suit (Charles Dierkop) who remains in costume while he shoots Jim and only doesn't finish raping Ellie because her resistance makes him so angry he slits her throat before he can.  Don't worry about Ricky: he's only around to set up a sequel and, charitably, provide this horror film its nihilistic button.  But Billy, though he did run, still witnessed all this.  His next stop's an orphanage—ah, the famous Catholic orphanages of Utah; and rather historically late for Billy to have spent his entire childhood in any orphanage, but don't let that stop you, movie—and here Billy learns more about punishment as justified by supernatural beings, and, after seeing some teens having sex, that this is the naughtiest act of all.

And my God this is terrible.  That's a long paragraph, but I've belabored it far less than the film does.  Some will say Silent Night, Deadly Night is treating its themes of religion and sexuality and childhood trauma well—that it is indeed taking them on is just its black-letter text, so I don't dispute that—but how you possibly get there from the finely-tuned gobbledygook of that, I truly cannot say, when as soon as we have "catatonic relative revives long enough to prime a phobia that would be exactly as thoroughly explained by the subsequent scene," we've already planted both feet in stupid bullshitland.  Now, I concede it's got an idea in its head: Santa as the shape that a punitive God has taken in Billy's broken mind, thereby perverting our junior Christmas deity as a stand-in for the worst aspects of the reason for this season; and that's not a bad idea.  (I wonder how angry its protesters would've gotten if they'd watched it.)  But this movie spends about thirty minutes slowly putting Billy's overdesigned puzzle together, possibly twenty before Billy's even grown up (in the intervening years he's played, rather poorly, by Danny Wagner), and that's far too many.  Those minutes feel like a solid hour, and all they're after is establishing this psychological element with this psychological trauma, over and over, contrived beyond belief, inefficient beyond reason, lifeless beyond endurance.  This is thanks at least a bit to Sellier, who's plying some "style" in the sense that there are choices being made in matters of editing and camera direction that are intended to have an artistic effect; but you'd need special instruments to detect these choices and there's not one where "style" would have the appropriate connotation, except for maybe the intercut psychothriller flashbacks that are still just reminding us of crap we saw only minutes earlier, which for all I know may be the contribution of his editor (and remember his name) Michael Spence.

But it's obviously not all Sellier: rarely has it been more abundantly clear that the writers only had an idea for an idea, and not enough of the littler ideas that actually make up a film, so the ultimate impression this long, ponderous prologue leaves is that the movie is using its own themes as the fucking padding it needs to heave itself up to a feature's length.  This is infuriatingly wrongheaded: this is a movie about a guy who's gonna dress up like Santa and kill people; that is not obviously a serious subject, and if you're insistent that it is, you're still making a slasher movie—you are making any movie—and it cannot be this dumb and boring while you detail how everyone acts ridiculously inhumanely to this damaged child because, otherwise, how would he ever become the killer Santa Claus our poster promised?  I'd posit "fairly easily!", given I'm watching the movie I already know is about a killer Santa Claus, so it seems like I wouldn't need to be convinced by a preposterously-overdetermined multifactorial argument you also took all damn day to make, where the sole decent thing is Perry Botkin Jr's cheesetastic, doom-ridden broken electric harpsichord score.

This doesn't even fully stop once Billy becomes an adult (Robert Brian Wilson); it's never a well-structured script, and I almost wonder if I want to use the phrase "radically-structured" instead, but I'd die in shame.  It's taken on a villain protagonist, which is something slashers do from time to time, but it's a challenge for the formula, and this slasher is simply not meeting that with Billy's story, and has no one else to turn to.  The closest it comes to even a second character is Sister Margaret (Gilmer McCormick), the kindly nun who attempted to shield Billy from their stern mother superior (Lilyan Chauvin) but utterly failed, and who probably blames herself, but whether she does or not, it seems like her intimate knowledge would put her on a collision course with Billy once he's launched into his inevitable rampage, and it turns out she'll keep missing him and continue to accomplish nothing forever.

You'd imagine that Billy's coworkers at his first job would reach the status of characters—garrulous boss Sims (Britt Leach), attractive coworker Pamela (Toni Nero), abusive coworker Andy (Randy Stumpf), or other coworker Helen (Nancy Borgenicht).  For, as it happens, Margaret got him a job in a toy store, because even this movie's nice people are morons, and you can see where this is going, because halfway through we're still not done watching obvious dominoes get set up.  They do finally fall: despite his go at a normal life, when Billy is pressganged into playing Santa for Christmas, he begins to fracture, and he definitely shouldn't have stuck around for the store's after-hours party, because when he witnesses Andy attempting to rape Pamela, he murders the former in a manner so premeditated that the latter is only horrified rather than relieved, though it's not clear that gratitude would have saved the woman he once desired and now adjudges a fornicator anyway.  And then, after finishing off the other two, Billy stumbles out into the wider world to have further adventures.

But what does happen right about here is that the movie changes quite a bit for the better—a plotless collection of kill scenes is sort of already "better" than the twaddle of its psychological pretensions, yes, but that's only part of what I mean.  It's never "its best self": the toy store is the best location they ever got, thanks especially to the genuine effort put into its decoration, notably a lovely semi-transparent glass mural on its exterior windows, and it's the closest Silent Night, Deadly Night ever gets to feeling like a real movie, which it still isn't (that "toy store" is today a small gym in a slightly-rural town, after all), but if we imagine a bigger budget, and an FAO Schwarz or even Toys-R-Us sort of location, and probably some more interesting photography to go along (leaving aside the movie's altogether un-Christmasy lighting, I spent a considerable portion of it wondering if I'd ever seen a true camera movement, or if they'd even rented a dolly for this thriller; they seem to have done so eventually), then it could surely have supported any amount of dizzy slasher action.

But it does this instead, removing all the movie's only character-like figures in a single six or seven-minute massacre.  It's still better.  It's maybe... good.  (Botkin's score is worse when it requires "action" cues rather than "suspense" ones, however.)  Whatever else, though, it comes very suddenly into an awareness of its own legacy as "the movie where Santa wackily murders people," replacing its foregoing dull solemnity with subtle and not-so-subtle black humor, perhaps best encapsulated by Billy beheading an evidently "naughty" snowman.  And I have a theory about this, for I have stumbled across a fact, that is more like an unattributed rumor made on some damned fan wiki, that sent me onto a brief investigation, but I'm convinced there must be some truth in it: that Sellier, owing to his discomfort with the material, didn't actually direct his movie's kill scenes, leaving them instead to his editor Spence, and the thing is, after about the three-fifths mark, Silent Night, Deadly Night is basically all kill scenes.  Extremely arbitrary ones, for that matter.  (The non-kill scenes are mostly the town's panic, and the logically-extrapolated mistreatment of the wrong Santas; the addling thing is that this, too, is comedic.)

If you peruse the credits, you'll see Spence was also its second unit director.  He's never claimed anything like co-directorial credit, and he's further repeatedly insisted (albeit in Manchurian Candidate-like repetitive language) that he faithfully translated Hickey's script, which itself seems borderline-impossible given how tonally disjoint the movie is.  But if you look into his interviews, he'll speak of directing this scene or that scene, and if you do enough scenes, at some point you're not exactly the second unit's director anymore.

Whoever did them, these scenes make a concerted effort to return to traditional slasher pleasures (the amount of nudity here is a little gobsmacking, even for this genre, especially when there's only two "nubile" roles left).  They are vivid, and sometimes funny, and almost uniformly lean into the goofiness of not only "killer Santa" but even the goofiness of "sex freak punishing the world," the aforementioned gobsmacking nudity being most thoroughly showcased by the pendulous Denise (Linnea Quigley), who interrupts foreplay to collect her indoor-outdoor cat and does so topless in December, while Billy must have infrared vision to know there was sexuality happening inside this house and there's a cutesy slippage between the cat's bell and his own jingle bells.  These scenes remain marked by some substantial incompetence of their own—the lead-up to Denise's and Tommy's (Leo Geter's) deaths features, despite this likely being directed by an editor, some astoundingly bad geography and eyelines (and a rumpus room that's apparently insulated better for sound than a recording studio); even the movie's highlight kill, goofy and frightful at once, feels like it's been staged in the least physically-persuasive way possible, so poor Denise fares better as a matter of corpse decoration on the wall and subsequent body discovery—but now it's merely the warm, cozy incompetence of cheapjack 80s horror.  But it even manages one brilliantly nauseating joke here—adroitly avoiding Santa murdering any actual small children—when Denise's unwitting little sister (Amy Stuyvesant) convincingly declares she's been good all year, so she does get a present rather than a punishment, and Billy hands her her gift, his favorite boxcutter for gutting women.

The link between these phases, if there is one, is Wilson, a first-time actor yet providing the movie its best and most fit-to-purpose performance, and while he obviously hasn't "been here all along," he makes the second half of the awful first half less awful when he arrives.  So far, that's mostly just physicality, rather than a good performance: it's simply interesting to watch a guy who looks like the star quarterback play Norman Bates, and it's also interesting to see how plainly off-model this clean-cut teen jock is as a "Santa Claus."  But as the second phase begins in earnest, he's using that physicality in a new way—why, you might suspect he was being directed differently—and his sweatily overclocked madness, punctuated with weirdly thoughtful expressions as he internally plans the next stage of his spree or reevaluates a course of action, is one major avenue for comedy to make it way into this movie with the joke premise.  It adds up to not very much—its ending has no interest in being dramatically or emotionally satisfying at all; the final kill is some random Wasatch County sheriff's deputy—but it does eventually lift itself out of some the most drudging, miserablist tedium I've ever seen an 80s slasher try for.

Killer: Billy Chapman

Final Girl: the wheelchair-bound mother superior I guess (not remotely as interesting as it sounds)

Best Kill: Denise's impalement upon the head of a stag in her living room

Sign of the Times: The enormous pop cultural lag between the advent of foster care and the disappearance of orphanages from movies

Scariest Moment: Being worried that Quigley, owing to her undress, might have gotten some serious carpet burns

Weirdest Moment: The orphanage kids nonetheless being directed to play in some nearly-nonexistent snow, thanks to uncooperative Utahn weather

Champion Dialogue: "Do you have any idea what you're doing?  You're being naughty, right on Santa's lap."

Body Count: 13, including the killer

1. Clerk is robbed and shot (the head squib being the best gore effect)

2. Jim is shot in the car during the abortive second robbery

3. Ellie has her throat slit topless on the pavement

4. Andy is garroted with a string of Christmas lights

5. Pamela has her belly opened

6. Sims gets hammered

7. Helen, though the 50-ish year-old makes the most credible "final girl"-style exertions, is downed with an arrow

8. Denise is mounted

9. Tommy is defenestrated

10. Mac (Richard Terry) is be-sledded

11. Father O'Brien (possibly Spencer Ashby), dressed like Santa, is mistaken for Billy and shot in the back

12. Deputy Barnes (Max Robinson), on the bright side, doesn't have to face an investigation, just an axe

13. Billy is shot in the back, fortunately it was Billy this time

TL;DR: Absolutely inert for the long stretch where it's faking being a serious study of a religiously-repressed sex murderer who dresses like Santa Claus, but at least it manages to be a larf once it starts living up to its promises, and, if my story is true, effectively replaces its director with someone who even understood what those promises were.

Score: 5/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1957) The Amaizing Colossal Man (1957) Journey To the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957)

2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963) Earth vs. the Spider (1958)  The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Visiting Hours (1982) Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988)