Silent Night Deadly Night (984) Review

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

Like it or not, the holidays isn’t for everyone and those who aren’t into it have their reasons. The one reason I choose not to ask why comes from watching Silent Night Deadly Night.


PLOT


The 1984 film begins ‘71 and follows 5 year old Billy Chapman go through a traumatic experience, being told by his catatonic grandfather that Santa Claus punishes the naughty. Fiction would blend with reality when a criminal dressed as Kris Kringle would kill his parents, shooting his father dead and assaulting his mother before slitting her throat. Three years later, Billy and his younger brother Ricky would grow up for the remainder of their childhood in an orphanage ran by a strict disciplinarian, Mother Superior, who would always punish those for any bit of misbehaving, believing her actions to be good. The only one who was sentimental was Sister Margaret and she tried to be nurturing, but it wasn’t enough for Billy to get over what happened especially when Mother Superior tried forcing him to sit on the lap of another Saint Nick. He’d be so scared that he’d punch him and flee to his room in horror. 10 years later, he’d get a job stocking at a toy store with the help of Margaret. When he develops a crush on his coworker Pamela, he starts having sexual thoughts that get constantly interrupted by having visions of his parents’ deaths. On Christmas Eve, Billy is then forced to be the store Santa when the intended person got injured and although he does try having a good time at a Christmas party, the constant memories of his past make him depressed. When seeing another coworker Andy force himself onto Pamela, his insanity is triggered and he kills them both, strangling the former with lights and stabs the latter with a box cutter, believing his punishment was a good thing to do. He then goes on to kill his boss Mr. Sims with a hammer and his manager Mrs. Randall with an arrow. Just as he leaves to continue his murder spree, Margaret appears and is in shock of discovering all the carnage. As she goes to the police for help, Billy goes on to kill a teenage couple, Tommy & Denise, throwing the former through a window after impaling the latter with a set of deer antlers. He spares a little girl named Cindy, believing she is good as she says. He even kills a teenage boy named Mac via decapitation after seeing him bully others over a sled. Margaret suspects with Captain Richards that he’ll go to the orphanage to kill Mother Superior, where Ricky still lives. When Officer Barnes checks out the area to secure, he sees someone dressed as Kringle and chooses to shoot first, only to find out it was a pastor, Father O’Brien, who was also deaf. He continues to patrol the area, only to get axed by Billy in a nearby shelter. He then confronts Mother Superior, who is now wheelchair bound, in front of of other children for how she was towards him. Luckily, Margaret arrives with Richards who shoots him down. As he gives his last breath, he tells the kids they’re safe now that Santa’s gone and the film ends with Ricky declaring Mother Superior to be naughty just like she would say towards others who have acted such in her eyes.


THOUGHTS


There have been many horror films to take place in the holidays, the earliest I can recall being Black Christmas ‘74, but it goes without saying that this one really takes the cake for going into the slasher formula. In a lot of ways, you can say Director Charles E Sellier Jr. and writers Michael Hickey & Paul Caine get the point across on what happens when you choose to not deal with trauma properly. Following religion can be healthy, but mixing it up to excuse abuse only worsens good intentions and that is the big dynamic that is witnessed between Mother Superior and Billy Chapman. Actress Lilyan Chauvin goes all in portraying the former as so fanatical that she refuses to see other people’s approaches in life to the point where her good intentions only make her unknowingly sadistic. And if a good person doesn’t even know they’re fucking up, it can be easy to mistake him or her with an actual villain. Since her actions are far from helpful, it was easy to expect Billy vulnerably evolve to his own worst enemy, which we see from the younger actors Jonathan Best & Danny Wagner to adult Robert Brian Wilson. Had Mother Superior even bothered to any kind of lenient & nurturing in the same vein Gilmer McCormick expressed as Sister Margaret, Billy could’ve done far better than what he grew to be. Heck, he likely would’ve not been so confused of fiction & reality had he not left alone with his grandpa. The guy was vulnerable 24/7 because he just wasn’t around the right environment to mentally recover from the trauma and because of that, repeating the cycle of violence basically felt inevitable for those who didn’t take him seriously. It’s not unfamiliar to see all his kills be done in slasher style, such as using lights or an axe, but you know the factor of a Santa costume being worn is where it feels all the more shocking. That is the whole point of this movie too where there are people that can use an image that means kindness be used as a weapon against the innocent. You at first validate him killing a rapist, but killing a victim of assault and other people who consented or a bully that doesn’t know better, because of what he grew up being taught, it sadly destroys his chance of being an antihero. Even though Ricky got the job done in the sequel, killing Mother Superior was never gonna solve anything because it wouldn’t make either brother different from the man that killed their parents. Ricky didn’t even seem to be tormented since he was only a baby when his parents died, but after seeing what happened to his brother, he was bound to crack too as shown in the disastrous sequel. While we want to wish Billy to be free from all the pain, you still wish it was done differently. In short, Silent Night Deadly Night is definitely one of the bolder slasher flicks for actually raising eyebrows on what was being witnessed. If you dare to have that kind of experience for the holidays, have at it with this one.