Silent Night, Deadly Night

Bluesky

41 years after the original Silent Night, Deadly Night outraged the censors by depicting a murderous Santa Claus, writer/director Mike P Nelson takes another stab at the story. With some significant changes to account for the shift in audience sensibilities, it ditches the schlocky vibe in favour of something like a coherent and believable narrative, but fans shouldn’t be alarmed – there are still some wild sequences full of gore-soaked action.

The protagonist in both films is Billy, just a wee boy when he sees his parents killed by a man dressed as Santa Claus, growing up to become a serial killer himself. This time around he’s played by Halloween Ends star Rohan Campbell, who doesn’t quite have the charisma required for a role like this, especially when Will is at his most depressive, but who does the difficult job of grounding the character. Will hears voices. A man he knows as Charlie (Mark Acheson) speaks to him inside his head, telling him to put on his Father Christmas costume and kill once a day during the Advent period, placing a drop of blood from each victim in an old and heavily stained wooden advent calendar – but there’s a twist. As the story develops, connections between Billy’s victims become apparent: most of them seem to be thoroughly unpleasant people. Is this just because he doesn’t want to exercise his compulsion on nice folk, or is there something supernatural guiding him to punish the guilty?

Since he started killing, Billy has been drifting from town to town. His life becomes considerably more complicated when he decides to settle for a while in a small town, getting a job in a store owned by the father of Pamela (Ruby Modine), on whom he has an almost instant crush. She too is a character from the original, but here she comes across very differently, a confident young woman who gets along well with most people in the town but has a mental health problem of her own, experiencing sudden violent urges. Between this and her unwillingness to put up with any bullshit, she takes her time to warm to Billy; and though he’s glad of their slowly developing friendship, he’s nonetheless afraid that his own urges may put her in danger. Meanwhile, bodies begin to pile up – sometimes literally – and it seems inevitable that law enforcement will start getting curious about the stranger in town.

Smoothly blending drama and horror, Nelson lightens the mix with gentle, observational humour and intermittent clips from Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, a film with personal relevance for Billy. The killings are not always spectacular – early ones require a measure of discretion and can’t distract too much from the larger movements of the plot – but at around the halfway mark the film really lets rip with a gleefully choreographed slaughterfest set to the Ronettes’ Sleigh Rider. There’s a similar treat close to the end, when we’re treated to a montage as Billy reflects on some of the highlights of his murderous career. A sequence with a ball pond, meanwhile, blends fun with a scary uncertainty that will have you on the edge of your seat.

There’s a hint of magic at the heart of it all, and more than one mystery to solve as Nelson uses the central device to reflect on what goes on beneath the placid surface of small towns. All in all, it’s a remarkably successful piece of storytelling, and what could easily have been an empty series of kill scenes emerges as an enjoyable watch.

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