SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT
On November 9th, 1984, TriStar Pictures released Silent Night, Deadly Night on around 400 screens in the United States. Within two weeks of this initial release, the film was pulled from theaters entirely, the victim of a nationwide controversy based on marketing materials depicting a "killer Santa Claus" that were believed by many concerned parents to be exploitative and potentially damaging to their impressionable young children, should they be exposed to an advertisement of the film depicting the image of their beloved Saint Nicholas (or at least a psychopath dressed up as the holiday icon) brandishing a bloody axe while watching television. The film eventually found its audience on home video over the ensuing years, becoming a cult classic in its own right, although never held to the same high regard as 1974's Black Christmas, the grande dame of Yuletide slashers.
The reason for this is simple enough: Black Christmas is a better film than Silent Night, Deadly Night in just about every way. From the principle cast, to Bob Clark's assured direction, to the moody cinematography, to the haunting musical score by Carl Zittrer, to the slow-burn giallo-inspired plot, Black Christmas is a masterpiece of the genre. In comparison, Silent Night, Deadly Night is an often cheap-looking affair that seems to trade atmosphere for gore, a lesser example of the slasher genre.
Black Christmas is simply a better movie. But I like Silent Night, Deadly Night more.
It's 1971, and young Billy Chapman's spending Christmas Eve with his loving parents and infant brother Ricky visiting his catatonic grandfather at a long-term care specialty hospital. Left alone with the seemingly-unresponsive old man for a moment while his parents speak to a doctor, Billy is surprised when his grandfather begins to speak. He warns his wide-eyed grandson that Santa Claus isn't just coming to deliver presents to all the good boys and girls tonight, but also to punish all the naughty children for misbehaving all year. Grandpa tells Billy that if he sees Santa Claus tonight, then he'd better run for his life, then the cruel features of his face settle once more into a passive, blank mask as Billy's parents return.
You have to wonder why, exactly, Grandpa was waiting until this exact moment to snap out of his catatonic state. The old man just couldn't miss out on the chance to terrify and traumatize his young grandson, I guess. Then of course he conveniently clams up once again as soon as the parents re-enter the room, leaving Billy glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, wondering what the hell just happened. Is Grandpa just faking his illness because he doesn't want to talk to anybody? Are his son and daughter-in-law so boring that he would fake a persistent vegetative state just to avoid a conversation? Or maybe Grandpa just snapped out of his waking coma long enough to fuck with Billy because he hates kids that much.
Driving home, Billy's parents stop to assist a stranded motorist dressed up like Santa Claus, believing the stranger to be harmless. Unbeknownst to them, this particular Santa Claus just held up a convenience store, gunning down the clerk when he tried to play Dirty Harry with a pistol he had stashed under the counter.
Unheeding of Billy's frantic backseat protests to just keep driving, his parents pull over and ask "Santa Claus" if he needs a ride somewhere. The jolly criminal immediately pulls out a gun and shoots Billy's father dead as he attempts to drive away, pulling Billy's mother out of the car and pinning her down on the street, clearly intending to rape the frightened woman in front of her terrified children. But she fights back, prompting Santa to just slit her throat to shut her up.
Billy runs from the car in a panic and watches all of this from the darkness of the roadside, hiding his face in fear when the costumed killer begins stalking toward him, brandishing a bloody switchblade, rage burning in his eyes. After a tense moment, Billy raises his head to see he's all alone out on the road, the only sound carrying on the cold night air the keen wailing of his baby brother, still inside the abandoned car. Santa Claus has taken his leave of Billy this Christmas Eve, leaving nothing but carnage and fear in his wake.
Billy and Ricky are taken in by Saint Mary's Home For Orphaned Children, an institution run by a cruel Mother Superior who believes in punishment as a cardinal rule. Punishment is necessary. Punishment is good. Over the years, Mother Superior views the damaged young Billy not as a damaged child in dire need of counseling and compassion, but as a sinner who only needs to have his supposed wickedness beaten out of him to become a well-adjusted adult. His drawing of a bloody Santa Claus and a beheaded reindeer is clearly a cry for help, but Mother Superior sees it as insubordination, an obstinate boy acting out, in need of harsh discipline.
Sister Margaret tries to convince Mother Superior that Billy's psyche is a minefield, and the boy needs professional psychiatric care, but Mother Superior will hear none of this foolishness. She knows what's best for Billy, and she won't entertain anyone else's ideas of how to help the boy. Mother Superior isn't particularly interested in Billy's mental health; her concern is for the boy's soul, and the only method she knows to save his soul is cruel penance for sins both real and imagined.
When Mother Superior catches Billy spying on two older kids having sex in one of the bunk rooms while everyone else is outside playing in the snow, she first beats both sinning teenagers with disturbing zeal, screaming for the fornicators to accept their punishment with an almost orgasmic tone in her strained voice. When she turns her attention to Billy, Mother Superior does not spare the rod, striking the child with a cold fury glinting in her hard eyes.
When Billy has a nightmare reliving the deaths of his mother and father at the hands of a madman dressed as Santa Claus, Mother Superior ties the screaming boy to his bed instead of attempting to comfort him in any way. Billy begs to be untied, squirming over his sheets as he cries, and Mother Superior just goes back to her room, motioning for Sister Margaret to come away and ignore the boy as he screams for help. After a long moment of indecision, Sister Margaret finally relents and leaves Billy to suffer alone in the dark.
1974 rolls around, and Mother Superior's latest theory to cure Billy's foolish fear of all things Christmas involves forcing the traumatized boy to sit on the lap of a volunteer playing Santa Claus when he comes around for his annual visit to the children on Christmas Eve. This goes about as well as anybody aside from Mother Superior would be expecting it to go, with Billy freaking out on this strange man's lap and slugging him right in the nose before running off to hide in his room. Mother Superior bursts into Billy's room as the camera closes in on his terrified face, the cruel nun's voice growling his name as the image of Billy cowering in a corner freezes, a shaft of light from the open door illuminating the primal fear in his eyes.
Ten years later, and Billy's just celebrated his 18th birthday. Sister Margaret helps Billy find an apartment around town, as well as employment at Ira's Toys, a local store owned by a genial fellow named Ira Sims. All grown up, Billy's become quite the strapping young man, well-muscled and handsome. He also seems to have emerged from his time at Saint Mary's relatively unscathed, at least at first glance. Everything appears to be going quite well for Billy, for a while, anyway. He performs well at his job, earning the respect of Mr. Sims and his co-workers, aside from Andy, who's just an asshole to everybody.
But when Christmastime rolls around, everything changes. All of the festive decorations around the store, not to mention the man dressed up as Santa Claus in one corner, greeting all the boys and girls who step inside, begin to slowly weigh Billy down over the ensuing days. His performance at work suffers, he becomes less cheerful around the other employees, and he begins to take longer lunch breaks, staying away from the toy store as much as possible. Billy's unspoken crush on his co-worker Pamela culminates in an erotic dream interrupted by a knife-wielding Santa Claus carving up the entwined lovers, reminding both Billy and the audience that between the trauma that claimed the lives of his parents and Mother Superior's years of physical and emotional abuse, Billy's mind is still very far from the picture of health.
And things only get worse when the employee who played Santa at Ira's Toys injures himself ice skating, prompting Mr. Sims to volunteer Billy to take the man's place in the baggy red suit on Christmas Eve. Over the course of one very long day, Billy's sanity slowly erodes as he plays Santa Claus for a succession of bratty children at the toy shop, the memories of his long-buried past rising to the surface. After Mr. Sims closes up shop and breaks out the booze for an impromptu staff party, Andy drags Pamela off to the stockroom for a little heavy petting. Mr. Sims, already embarrassingly drunk, corners Billy and jokingly tells him that, since he's still dressed as Santa Claus, he's got a big night ahead of him, so he'd better get to work.
In a daze, Billy wanders back into the stockroom to find Andy forcing himself on Pamela, who has rejected his amorous advances. Witnessing Pamela scream and fight back finally breaks the dam in Billy's mind, and all of the buried trauma and terror and rage come flooding out, drowning Billy's final spark of sanity, leaving nothing behind but a twisted avatar of punishment in the friendly guise of Santa Claus. He wastes no time strangling Andy with some Christmas lights, then quickly gutting Pamela with a box cutter as he croaks Mother Superior's mantra through gritted teeth: Punishment is good. Punishment is necessary.
Quickly dispatching of Mr. Sims and his assistant manager, Mrs. Randall, Billy exits the toy shop with a bloody axe, stepping out into the cold Christmas Eve night to punish the naughty, wherever they may be.
It's immediately clear that Mother Superior has failed Billy completely as a caregiver and a teacher. Perhaps her particular methods for tutoring and disciplining orphaned children don't permanently scar 99% of the kids who pass through Saint Mary's, turning them into ticking time bombs who will one day snap and destroy everything and everyone around them in a blood-soaked fit of madness, but that doesn't excuse her behavior regarding Billy as he grew up under her care. This boy was clearly a special case who needed a little grace and empathy, but these were not qualities Mother Superior possessed in any abundance.
Every one of Billy's pleas for help and understanding throughout his youth were answered with a calculating and dehumanizing cruelty from Mother Superior, who sought to break the boy down until he simply stopped reaching out at all, smothering the open wounds of his trauma with enough scar tissue to outwardly mask his very real pain, projecting an outward façade of serenity and stability that was never anything but an illusion. Everything Mother Superior disliked was deemed sinful and worthy of swift and severe punishment, and this twisted philosophy intermingled with Billy's knowledge of Santa Claus as a bloody figure of castigation, festering like an infection in his mind for years until a series of events coincided to finally overwhelm Billy entirely, allowing this perversion of the benevolent myth of Santa Claus to come rushing in to fill the void where Billy used to exist.
Billy became a monster, make no mistake, but he wasn't fated to become a monster. Mother Superior's actions are at least partially to blame for Billy's descent into madness and murder in the final act of the film, and if she'd just attempted to engage with Billy on a more humane level at any point in his youth, this tragedy could have been avoided entirely.
But Sister Margaret is not without sin in this drama. She presents herself as a compassionate and kind woman, arguing with Mother Superior that they need to be better with Billy, to see him as more than a problem to be solved with cold discipline, and it's clear that Sister Margaret and Mother Superior don't exactly see eye to eye on a great many issues. Sister Margaret knows what Mother Superior is doing to Billy is purely wrong, that her cruelty is only inflicting more wounds on a fragile young mind that can't bear such a burden, but she never summons the courage to truly challenge Mother Superior, backing down time and time again, standing by as the ruthless old woman systematically destroys whatever was left of a boy named Billy after a lunatic dressed up as Santa Claus burned his entire world to the ground.
She cries impotent tears as her heart breaks for the boy, but Sister Margaret never actually does anything to help Billy, finally turning her back on him as he lies twisting in bed, tied up and screaming for help, for kindness, for humanity. Her cowardice in that moment all but seals Billy's fate, as he finally realizes that no matter how friendly Sister Margaret may seem, she will never defend him, and he will have to endure this nightmare alone.
But Silent Night, Deadly Night didn't become a cult classic due to its unflinchingly realistic depiction of an orphaned child's sanity being dissolved by a callous nun's unceasing cruelty. It became a cult classic due to this:
Linnea Quigley, topless and impaled on the antlers of a taxidermied deer head mounted on a tastefully wood-paneled wall. It's safe to say that if this particular kill did not occur in the movie, that Silent Night, Deadly Night would be regarded, if at all, as an afterthought, an also-ran in the slasher genre by most aficionados. It's one of the most memorable kills ever presented in a slasher movie of any era, and it has rightfully become legendary among fans, with many who have perhaps never seen the film in its entirety describing Silent Night, Deadly Night to their friends as the "movie with the naked girl who gets impaled on a stuffed deer head by a crazy guy dressed as Santa Claus".
That's the one-sentence description that has traveled with this movie for years as it built up a cult following on VHS in the late 1980s, spawning a series of four misbegotten direct-to-video sequels that have essentially nothing to do with the original film, aside from 1987's lazy Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2 that ostensibly follows Billy's brother Ricky as he goes on his own Yuletide killing spree, but around half of that movie's length is just footage from the first movie awkwardly shoved into the narrative to pad out the run time to a respectable eighty-eight minutes.
Strangely enough, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2 has broken through into the greater public consciousness in a way the original film never could have, at least in part, through the ubiquitous "Garbage Day!" meme, but that's not really what I'm talking about here, because millions upon millions of people have watched that twenty-second-long clip on YouTube without having any idea what film it's from, nor any desire to seek that film out. But the infamous "antler kill" scene in Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't so easy to dismiss.
The scene begins with Linnea Quigley playing Denise, clad only in a tiny pair of cut-off jean shorts, abandoning her horny boyfriend Tommy in the rumpus room to cool off for a minute while she lets her cat in from the cold. She opens her front door, in the middle of the night, brazenly displaying her naked breasts for all the world to see while the cat comes inside, and a passing Billy gets an eyeful of this carnal display and decides he can't let this mortal sin go unpunished. So he bursts through the front door like the fucking Kool-Aid Man...
...tossing his axe at a terrified Denise, and the blade embeds itself in the wood paneling mere inches from her screaming face. Billy quickly picks the squirming victim up and, taking advantage of his surroundings, very slowly and cruelly presses Denise's back into the antlers of a deer head mounted nearby on the wall. In the full cut of the film, the sequence begins with shadows projected on a far wall presenting a suspenseful tableau as Billy pushes Denise's body closer and closer to the mounted antlers, then cross-cutting between close-up shots of the antlers slowly emerging from the skin of Denise's belly via some very convincing prosthetic effects work, the agonizing expression on Denise's face as the antlers pierce her flesh, and Billy's sweaty, grimacing features as he does his bloody work. It's a very effective scene, one which I still find difficult to watch after over a dozen viewings.
The sequence would be nothing without Linnea Quigley's fearless performance, featured here on the cusp of her breakthrough role in 1985's Return Of The Living Dead that would secure her place among the "scream queen" pantheon, although Quigley by this point had been a ten-year veteran of the film industry, getting by on small roles in cheap slashers like 1981's Graduation Day and bawdy comedies like 1979's Summer Camp. The one-two punch of 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night and the Linda Blair-starring Savage Streets helped gain Quigley a larger level of notoreity that she would use to her advantage throughout the late 1980s, 1990s and beyond, gathering a staggering 133 acting credits to date after these two releases.
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| I want that badass tiger painting on the wall. |
After Billy dispatches Denise in this gruesome manner, he just tosses her boyfriend Tommy out a window, because he knows nothing's going to be good enough to follow up that death. As Billy prepares to exit the house, Denise's little sister Cindy, who's having trouble sleeping since it's Christmas Eve and all, comes out of her room to find "Santa Claus" standing in her hallway. She's very excited to finally meet the big guy, and she promises him that she's been good all year. Billy, still clutching the blood-streaked axe in one hand, fixes her with a heavy stare as he asks her whether she's sure she hasn't been naughty all year, and she insists with a smile on her face that she's been a little angel.
Billy reaches into his coat pocket and produces the box cutter he used to dispatch Pamela earlier in the film, still covered in the poor girl's blood, dropping it in Cindy's hands for a Christmas gift. As he walks out into the night, nonchalantly kicking the remains of the ruined front door out of its frame as he makes his exit, Cindy is confused and a little frightened as she examines her macabre new gift, calling out for her dead sister as the scene ends.
This entire scene, from its beginning, introducing Denise and Tommy making out on the pool table in the rumpus room, to Denise's death via deer antlers, to Cindy catching Billy-as-Santa as he tries to leave the house, could be completely removed from the context of the film and shown to an audience as a Christmas-themed slasher short, and it would work almost as well as it already does in the film itself. It tells a complete, self-contained story all within its five short minutes, and it tells this story pretty damned well. The sequence definitely lives up to its reputation, and single-handedly earns Silent Night, Deadly Night's place in the slasher hall of fame.
Having eluded the police all night, Christmas Day begins with Sister Margaret at the police station, talking with Captain Richards. She claims that his horrifying actions are all following a sort of logic, and Richards suggests that if that's the case, then perhaps they could put their heads together and figure out where Billy might appear next. Sister Margaret surmises that Billy would probably be heading back to Saint Mary's for a final confrontation with Mother Superior, perhaps the greatest sinner of them all in his eyes, the most deserving of Santa's righteous fury and the godly Dr. Frankenstein to Billy's fur-trimmed Yuletide Monster.
Captain Richards calls all available units to converge on Saint Mary's ASAP, and Officer Barnes is first on the scene, catching a suspicious-looking character dressed as Santa Claus approaching the orphanage, and a gathered group of children outside, all waving their arms and cheering the arrival of jolly old Kris Kringle. Barnes exits his vehicle and calls for the man in red to freeze, but he seemingly ignores the officer's warning. Believing he's been left with no choice, Barnes fires... gunning down a deaf Catholic priest who had volunteered to play Santa Claus for the children at the orphanage this year, splattering little Ricky with the kindly old priest's blood for good measure.
Barnes is killed a few minutes later when Billy buries his axe in the hapless cop's chest after he arrives at the orphanage, which is probably for the best, since I don't think the guy could have lived with the weight of that kind of death on his conscience, anyway. Honestly, Billy was probably doing this poor bastard a favor.
Every obstacle finally removed from his path, Billy enters Saint Mary's, staring down Mother Superior as the kids within are all very relieved to see that Santa isn't dead, after all. Mother Superior tells the children to get behind her, but they're not who Billy's after this Christmas Day. He raises his axe, preparing to finally punish Mother Superior for all of her innumerable sins... only to be shot in the back by Captain Richards as he enters with Sister Margaret.
Mother Superior sneers at the dying young man as he collapses on the floor, and Sister Margaret rushes to his side, the weight of the knowledge that she has well and truly failed Billy plain on her face as she cradles his head in her hands. With his dying breath, Billy addresses the children in the room, telling them in a strained rasp that they're all safe now, because Santa's gone.
The acting on the part of Gilmer McCormick as Sister Margaret is heartbreaking in this final sequence. The great depths of sadness in her eyes as she sits with Billy in his final moments, her hands gently caressing his blood-streaked face, say more than any dialogue ever could. As does Lilyan Chauvin's face as she looks down on the dying young man from her wheelchair. No sympathy, no kindness. Her expression is one of cold satisfaction as she gazes at Billy's still form, chilling in her utter inhumanity. As far as Mother Superior's concerned, the cops can just drag Billy's carcass out to the street with the rest of the garbage and let her get on with her day. And the sincerity in actor Robert Brian Wilson's voice as he tells the children there's no reason to fear before dying is heartbreaking.
There's something I've always found interesting regarding the soundtrack to Silent Night, Deadly Night. Where the score by Perry Botkin is decent, consisting primarily of discordant synthesizer compositions that feel like an extension of Billy's fractured psyche as the story stretches on, it's the other songs included that have always fascinated me. When I was younger and first discovered Silent Night, Deadly Night, I assumed the songs I heard in the film, "Merry Christmas Baby", "The Warm Side Of The Door", "Sweet Little Baby" and the tune that plays over both the opening title and the end credits, "Santa's Watching", were all preexisting tunes that the producers licensed for inclusion in the film. The songs all sound so familiar, like all the best (and worst) Christmas songs do, like they've become so deeply enmeshed in the popular culture that it feels as though you've heard them a thousand times.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn several years after I first saw the film that all of the songs used were original compositions written by a talented musician named Morgan Ames. Originally intended to be included in a spin-off Christmas album along with six other compositions by Morgan Ames, the release was canceled after Silent Night, Deadly Night was pulled from release, leaving the remaining songs unheard by anybody outside a handful of producers and music executives for thirty years, when the first official soundtrack for the film was released by Death Waltz Records. There's a beat during the Christmas party at Ira's Toys when Mr. Sims and Mrs. Randall are drunkenly singing a half-remembered version of "Santa's Watching", and it's such a clever moment because it helps sell the authenticity of the song, placing it in the context of the film as a well known seasonal ballad that's become part of the tapestry of Christmas. That scene is why I never questioned the songs in Silent Night, Deadly Night as being anything but genuine, tried-and-true Christmas tunes. They just sounded too real to be made up for the movie.
"The Warm Side Of The Door", which plays over a montage of Billy working at Ira's Toys in the salad days before Christmastime comes and ruins everything, is such a benign, sunny ballad about spending quality time with family and friends that it sounds like a sibling to those tepid little tunes that were composed as theme songs for sheltered 1980s or 1990s sitcoms like Perfect Strangers or Family Matters. It's so big-hearted and goofy that it works like gangbusters over footage of Billy declining a co-worker's offer of scotch for a lunchtime pick-me-up in favor of a small carton of milk and smiling broadly as he picks up a little girl so she can reach an item on a high shelf as the kid's mother looks on beatifically. I love that these songs exist. They add this wonderful little layer of authenticity to the world of Silent Night, Deadly Night, and the film would be poorer in their absence.
There's a lot going on in Silent Night, Deadly Night, if one chooses to look for it. The story is ultimately a tragedy, as Billy could have been diverted from this path, if Mother Superior had bothered to try and forge a connection with the boy that didn't involve the business end of a leather belt, or if Sister Margaret had dared to truly stand up to Mother Superior, putting the well-being of a suffering young boy ahead of her own craven nature. The viewer can see the mistakes being made by these authority figures, they can see Billy slipping further away from sanity with every act of violence inflicted upon him, every moment of cold indifference when all he needs is a modicum of compassion to show him that there's more to this world that an endless cycle of sin and punishment, that there's room for love and grace and understanding.
Watching this tragedy unfold is painful at times, as Billy follows his path to its inevitable conclusion, armed with the knowledge that if only somebody cared enough to step in and make one small change that nine lives could have been saved that Christmas. Silent Night, Deadly Night may not be the most well-written or well-directed or well-acted movie out there, but I've cherished the film in all its lo-fi charm for twenty years.
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were so appalled by Silent Night, Deadly Night that they called the producers out by name on their review show, telling them that every dollar they earned from this production was blood money. Leonard Maltin bemoaned the depraved minds that would dream up such a lurid story, wondering if perhaps they would attempt to outdo themselves in a sequel that featured the Easter Bunny as a child molester. Legendary actor Mickey Rooney wrote "the scum who made (Silent Night, Deadly Night) should be run out of town". But Silent Night, Deadly Night endures. It's a solid slasher with great characterization, memorable kills, and a wicked sense of humor. Now attracting its third generation of fans via a new restored home video release by Scream Factory, Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't going anywhere. Billy Chapman's bloody night of retribution will never end.
If you see Santa Claus tonight, you'd better run for your life.
Mommy's Dead - Neither Billy's mommy nor his Daddy survive the prologue.
Scrooged - Billy hates and fears Christmas all throughout the movie, but after he suffers a psychotic break and assumes the mantle of a murderous Santa Claus, he is embracing the spirit of the season as he understands it, so this most definitely counts.
Assistant Chef Jen - I should just change the name of this trope to Mother Superior.
And if any of you were keeping score at home, here is the Twelve Tropes Of Christmas final tally:
Mommy's Dead: 9
Scrooged - 9
Christmas In July! - 7
Small Town Salvation - 6
Secret Santa - 6
Assistant Chef Jen - 6
Christmas Magic - 4
Slumming It - 4
Little White Lies - 4
Slumming It - 4
Calling All Angels - 2
I Hate You! Kiss Me! - 2
VERDICT: IT'S OVER! TIME TO GET SHIT-FACED!
Thus concludes my final step in my tortuous journey to find the heart of Christmas. I came here today to bury Christmas, but I've found that I just can't do it. Because Christmas isn't dead. I've found the spirit of the season, and it is alive and well. I've found it in Silent Night, Deadly Night, of all places. Watching this movie after a long and exhausting day of cooking and cleaning, not feeling much of anything remotely resembling "Christmas", I don't know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn't expecting this.
There's a moment in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge tells his nephew Fred, "You keep Christmas in your way, allow me to keep it in mine". As it turns out, this is how I keep Christmas. Not through opening presents under a brightly lit tree in the living room. Not through gathering with family and drowning in awkward silence while sitting around a table, eating turkey and mashed potatoes. Not through an abundance of chintzy decorations and irritating Christmas-themed pop songs. I sit in the dark and watch Silent Night, Deadly Night, and I feel something stirring within me. I can feel Titus's presence beside me in that darkness. I can hear his laughter echoing through the room. And in that darkness, maybe it feels a bit more like Christmas, for a little while.
You can keep Christmas in your way, allow me to keep it in mine. Thank you for following along with me on this long and winding road.
Merry Christmas, Titus.
"It's Always Christmas on the warm side of the door."
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