Silent Night, Deadly Night
It’s a classic set-up. Boy moves to new town. Boy meets girl. Boy catches wind of girl’s creepy ex. Boy struggles with whether or not to share his nocturnal habit of donning a Santa suit for the purposes of axing his way through the scummiest victims in his immediate vicinity. While it may not quite invite the proudly sappy Hallmark Christmas shenanigans of the barrage of warmed-over festive fare on Netflix, it certainly isn’t a premise that excludes the possibility for comedy, along with a welcome dash of the macabre to temper all the holiday sweetness. It’s a pity, then, that Mike P Nelson’s latest crack at Charles E Sellier Jr’s 1984 B-movie seems unable (unwilling?) to let its hair down fully and have the gooey fun it ought to be having.
A number of factors may contribute to this. It could be that Rohan Campbell’s performance as our central lunatic is simply too grounded, too suffused with an emotional reality that can’t help but unbalance the gory good vibes. Downcast, softly spoken, lightly dishevelled from living a one-motel-to-another life over decades, Nelson grants his protagonist patience and restraint (two descriptors one would expect to have stayed far away from Silent Night, Deadly Night, and perhaps ought to have done), letting us luxuriate in something like the reality of this woebegone serial killer’s day-to-day, and it’s bleak indeed! Having never recovered from the Christmas night that claimed the lives of his parents and grandfather, our antihero Billy Chapman is a disaffected loner who has more shades of Travis Bickle than Christmas camp, with some additional Dexter Morgan (you best believe he has a Silent Passenger) and, God forbid, Peter Parker thrown in for good measure. The latter emerges the most in his tentative courtship of Christmas shop “heiress” Pamela (Ruby Modine), who may share some of his capacity for righteous fury, especially when it comes to the creepy stalker ex who’s been giving her trouble (David Tomlinson). Should the realities of his double life come to light, will Billy’s one chance at love slip away?
That’s a solid enough framework to hang what ought to be a series of escalatingly gnarly set-pieces on, but – for reasons that feel palpably like a matter of budget rather than nerve – Silent Night, Deadly Night’s kills feel more reserved than one would prefer, like a test run before the amount of corn syrup required for some real splatter art is procured. Every time the movie feels ready to fully untether itself from those pesky gravitational restraints like good taste, logic, and laboured A to B storytelling coherence, something – usually a prudishly evasive, budget-friendly edit – keeps it stubbornly, drably earthbound. Never is this felt more keenly than in the sequence that ought to have locked down cult status forever (and still may), one that sees Billy surrounded by an enclave of fellow Santas who’ve taken “dreaming of a white Christmas” to new heights. On paper, the scene is everything a contemporary B-movie could dream of: audacious, tongue-in-cheek, steeped equally in bad taste and genuine, righteous catharsis. In execution, it feels only halfway there, like a promising proof of concept.
Thank goodness, then, for Mark Acheson, whose sardonic voiceover as the devil on Billy’s shoulder feels keyed into the drolly comic tone the rest of the film struggles to reach. One itches to hear what growled deadpan asides he’d have to offer on the subject of Catholicism, something Sellier’s grimier, sillier original was not unconcerned with (the version of Billy in that film is as much the victim of the nunnery that took him in as he is his parents’ killer). Alas, satire is not on Nelson’s agenda, and neither is sexual repression. If anything, this Billy is within spitting distance of a brooding dreamboat whose damage only grants him more appeal, and he doesn’t much seem capable of a joke either.
The cultural legacy of both the original and its 1987 sequel feels largely boiled down to a small handful of meme-able moments. Nonetheless, Eric Freeman – the bug-eyed wackadoodle of the second round – flexing his eyebrows, declaring “GARBAGE DAY!” at the top of his lungs as if celebrating a national holiday, and promptly gunning down a man in the act of…taking out the garbage? This version of Silent Night, Deadly Night strains throughout to reach even a semblance of that zany good value, and thankfully, towards the end, it finally gets there. Still, after 96 minutes of ironing out the kinks, should sequels follow, one can only hope they fully make good on the grindhouse promise of this premise.
Ultimately, the new Silent Night, Deadly Night has moments of inspiration, but feels stranded, both by an uncertain tone and budgetary constraints. Avoiding a simple copy-paste job on a remake will always be commendable, but the brooding superhero-ification of Killer Santa threatens to spoil some of the fun.
Thomas Messner
Silent Night, Deadly Night is released nationwide on 12th December 2025.
Watch the trailer for Silent Night, Deadly Night here:
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