Silent Night, Deadly Night

The review is done, but I have screen caps to add (no, those dropped on this review are not the screen caps I have planned for this review, just random as all hell from my selection) once I can get them in order. Man, I'm anal about these screen caps..
**½

Santa’s going to bring you a big surprise tonight…you just wait and see.

Christmas Eve is the damned scariest night of the year.

You see Santa Claus tonight…you better run boy! You better run for your life!

Oh, yes, Silent Night, Deadly Night. In a manner of maybe a minute or so, a husband and wife are killed while their infant cries and little Billy hides in the bushes, by none other than a sick, twisted fuck in a Santa suit (after shooting a gas station attendant multiple times after stealing $31 bucks), using a gun, seemingly for the hell of it, it seems. Oh, but poor Billy’s young life just gets better. He is stuck, with his now a little-older brother, Rick, in the Catholic Orphanage from Hell, the Mother Superior taking a special liking to giving him harsh discipline. Mother Superior doesn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks when it comes to curing Billy; she thinks with proper discipline and training, he can be taught to cope with “all that violence within him”. She is wrong. If anything, Mother Superior just makes things worse.

And that’s the point of putting Billy through all this shit. He’s really warped for a reason. How could he not be? Sister Margaret (Gilmer McCormick) is that one person who seems to give her all in support of Billy.

Punishment is absolute. Punishment is necessary. Punishment is good.

When you are already under a psychological duress because of horrible baggage from the past, you need support and encouragement, maybe a tiny bit of kindness. Mother Superior is of the “I am right, you are wrong” mold. Her opinion, her decision, is all that matters and what she feels is important is what will be applied to the kids in her orphanage. When Sister Margaret tells Billy he can go outside, he passes by a room, sees a couple of teenagers shagging, is caught by Mother Superior, told he was naughty for leaving his room (despite getting permission to do so), and gets his ass pounded by a belt. When he has nightmares of his parents’ getting murdered, he freaks out, leaves his room, is caught by Mother Superior, has his wrists tied by pillow sheets to the bed posts, squirming at such treatment knowing what comes if he returns to sleep. Mother Superior’s methods only fuck him up more.

As an 18 year old he would have to leave the orphanage and thanks to the sympathetic Sister Margaret finds a job at a toy store as the stock boy. When working at a toy store it is only a matter of time before Christmas arrives as does Santa…this will trigger, along with an attempted rape by a purposely loathsome prick working inventory and manages the stock/supplies for the store on fellow employee, Andy (Randy Stumpf), Billy’s mania, buried but certain to surface at any moment when pushed over by an event or incident significant enough to flick the switch.

The way director Charles E Sellier, Jr. seems to set up Billy snapping into the Santa Claus maniac is by “transferring” the evil of the killer who took the lives of his parents onto himself. Why I say this is because the interference of flashbacks invoking the face and evil actions of the psycho seem to intrude into Billy’s psyche, taking him over as if an invasion he cannot overcome. Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) contributes as well to Billy’s mental damage, certainly instrumental in using punishment as a tool to enforce her will on him as a child, needing nurturing and sympathy, instead receiving abuse and cruelty. For me, Mother Superior is as much a villain as Billy and the killer of his parents. Victims of abuse are often, for whatever reason, chosen as a constant source of punishment because the authoritarian figure over them just doesn’t like them. I imagine quite a few people had wished Billy had taken her head off with that ax. The bitch.

Sellier loves to show us Billy’s handiwork. Crime scenes, the fresh corpses, the surroundings of the places he kills victims. Sellier never fails to show a dead body after Billy leaves for the next kill. Silent Night, Deadly Night is a slasher film, through and through. The maniac in the Santa costume was certain to fuel the rage of many people; how could it not? He also makes sure to establish Santa toys and displays as prevalent images, hoping (I think rather successively) to up the eerie ambiance. You know how mannequins, dolls, and ventriloquist dummies have that level of eeriness to them? Santa seems to evoke that same sort of feeling.

I imaged those involved in the script-to-screen process devised ways to piss people off.

A checklist: 

 ``Set the slasher during the holiday season that is supposed to represent a festive spirit, peace and good will toward men  

``Have the killer dressed as Santa, supposedly a symbol of jolly good cheer and a figure that usually (but not always) delights children

``Have a mean-ass sicko kill a happy husband and wife (shooting the husband, slitting the wife’s throat after ripping open her shirt, exposing her breasts, and hitting her across the face) in front of their children

``Dump the brothers in an orphanage where a tyrannical Mother Superior, opposed to anyone else’s opinion different from her own, calls the shots and seems hellbent on tormenting the older of the two.

``Watch as Billy is forced on the lap of Santa despite the fact that a maniac in that disguise killed his parents because Mother Superior wholly believes she can prove she’s right when it’s obvious this will just further cause irreparable damage.

``Have Billy go off the deep end by sticking him in a Santa outfit because the regular hire had injured himself carelesslydue to an ice skating incident.

``Have Billy snap because he sees a girl he’s sexually interested in being raped by a co-worker who mocks and ridicules him persistently.
 
``Have us watch as Billy, stuck in the Santa outfit, going on a murder spree, just killing folks he considers naughty.

``Have him use a variety of weapons: bow and arrow, hammer, ax, Christmas lights (yes, Christmas lights), box cutter, deer head antlers (the obvious showstopping “highlight”), and the good, old fashioned trip out a window, the broken glass doing the rest.
 

``A priest, dressed as Santa, for the kids at the orphanage, deaf, is mistaken for Billy and gunned down…not just gunned down, but right in front of some kids, a string of his blood hitting the boy directly in his path

``And have the cops, believing Billy is entering the room of another potentially doomed victim, interrupting a father, disguised as Santa, in the middle of his surprising his daughter.

``Oh, and you get a topless Linnea Quigley (when is she not?), while babysitting (a guy upstairs trying to shag her on the home’s pool table), opening the door to let the pet cat in.

``To top it all off, you have the movie poster featuring Santa, ax in hand, in a chimney.

Those involved with this film had to figure there’d be a backlash. This film was built to invoke a response. How could the film not rub parents the wrong way? How could using Santa in such a fashion not provoke soccer moms to outrage? That was bound to happen. The slasher genre was already under hard scrutiny from critics and a certain section of the population who found what lied within to be a detriment of taste and morals—Silent Night, Deadly Night could have been used as a poster child for this sentiment, this critique.

To stick the knife in and twist: have an old grandpa—supposedly suffering some form of dementia—waiting until his son and daughter-in-law walk away to scare the living shit out of his grandson about how Santa will punish naughty boys, veins sticking out of his forehead, eyes so intense they’re sweating tears, fierce spittle from his mouth, even laughing a bit about all of this as if enjoying the kid’s fearful reaction. Also, have Billy as Santa give a little girl the box cutter he used on Pamela (Toni Nero) as a present for being good during the year.

You have plenty of sick shit nowadays that would make SNDN seem like a Disney movie so the initial impact of this film has tapered somewhat. When you have Bill Goldberg as a psycho Santa parodying the holiday and character in a movie as a comical slasher, SNDN doesn’t quite leave that same sort of impression it once did in the 80s. But the checklist seems to indicate that those involved in the making of SNDN went out of their way to offend all sorts of people. Its legacy still endures as there’s plenty of offensive material to piss people off here. It just doesn’t quite compete with the Hostels and Saws and August Undergrounds that are the norm/status quo of today’s horror.