Silent Night, Deadly Night Parent Guide

It’s hard to say whether or not his childhood shaped Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell). I mean, who’s to know whether watching his parents get murdered by a man in a Santa suit has anything to do with his current hobby of murdering people while wearing a Santa suit? It’s a mystery. According to Billy, he does it because he hears the voice of Charlie (Mark Acheson), his parents’ killer, in his head. Charlie has all kinds of advice for Billy, the most important of which is that he must murder somebody every day for all 24 days of Christmas. If he doesn’t, Charlie strongly implies that the people he loves will die instead.

Voice in his head and axe in hand, Billy drifts into a new town and takes a job at a Christmas décor shop. There he meets (and falls for) the explosively unstable Pamela (Ruby Modine). Charlie isn’t wild about Billy having a love life, but he doesn’t mind so long as Billy keeps killing. Believe it or not, Billy isn’t the town’s biggest problem: It’s also being stalked by a serial child abductor. That ought to be enough holiday cheer for one town – right?

Silent Night, Deadly Night is, admittedly, quite silly, but it handles the plot better than you might expect. Charlie and Billy have almost a Venom-type symbiosis, and the serial murderer in the protagonist’s personal peanut gallery is kind of funny, in a very, very dark way. Just about everybody in the movie is seriously deranged, and Billy doesn’t seem too far off from some of these “normal” characters.

This production isn’t a horror flick in a scary way; it’s horror in the “how much fake blood can we afford in the budget” way. The answer is quite a lot – I gave up the body count after six because the corpses started dropping too fast. It turns out that murder is extra messy when you use a big double-bitted axe. You can expect plenty of split skulls, gaping wounds, and one dramatic disembowelment.

Given that it’s a slasher film, Silent Night, Deadly Night isn’t remotely suitable for families. It’s also a tad predictable, albeit quite fun – despite all the entrails. The film doesn’t redefine the genre, but it is a perfectly palatable holiday offering for the slasher crowd. Given the dismal quality of most slashers generally, I feel like we’ve landed comfortable on the better side of average. While we’re not treading new blood-soaked ground, this flick is a solid choice for the connoisseurs of carnage this Christmas season.

About author

Keith Hawkes

Keith Hawkes graduated from Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada with a degree in English and History. His interests are movies, American literature, science fiction, almost every kind of music, and museums. He enjoys criticizing films for fun - although he's okay with being paid for it.