Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Over the years there have been a number of Christmas-themed horror films.  From Bob Clark’s proto-slasher film Black Christmas in 1974 to the surprisingly funny Santa’s Slay in 2005, Christmas horror is a subgenre with a long – but not particularly illustrious – history.  Still, if you bring up Christmas slasher flicks in casual conversation most people’s minds immediately jump to 1985’s controversial cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those movies that a lot of people have heard about but a relatively small number have actually seen.  Yeah, it’s one of those movies.  It’s famous (to use that term in the loosest possible sense) due the controversy surrounding it, while the actual film is really fairly obscure.  As one might imagine, a film in 1984 depicting a guy in a Santa suit killing people really riled up a number of parent’s groups.  Even then, sometimes the outrage about this movie tends to be overstated – many parents, understanding that any children young enough to be disturbed by the film would also never actually see it, were instead angry about the placement of commercials for the movie on television.  Of course, you also had the good ol’ “War on Christmas” brigade waiting to leap out and be angry, but if they hadn’t had this movie to be angry about they’d have found something else to complain about.  Ultimately the film only lasted about two weeks in theaters, supposedly as a result of the public outcry.

            Before we begin, I’d like to point out that the version of the film I’m reviewing today is the 2003 Anchor Bay unrated DVD release.  It’s unfortunately a two-sided disc (the second side holds one of the film’s four sequels), but it does have some deleted scenes that didn’t make it into the theatrical cut of the film.  The extra scenes are from a badly degraded source, but it’s nice to have them included.

            The film opens on Christmas Eve 1971 as young Billy, his baby brother Ricky, and their parents have set off to visit their ailing grandpa in a mental institution.  Anyone who went against my advice and watched Enter the Ninja will recognize Will Hare, the actor playing catatonic grandpa, from his appearance in that film as Dollars the street merchant.  I like to think that it’s the same character in both movies – That Dollars from Enter the Ninja was so traumatized by the nonsensical insanity of that film that he ended up institutionalized back in the States.

            In any event, the instant Billy’s parents leave him alone with crazy ol’ gramps, the old man suddenly snaps out of his trance just long enough to spout off some crazy gobbledygook about Santa Claus killing people.  Needless to say, Billy's little mind is blown and he spends the drive home fretting to his parents about Santa coming to kill him.  It just so happens that his parents encounter a stranded motorist in a Santa suit on a remote back road, so they pull over to help him – and to defuse Billy’s fears by letting him “meet” Santa.  Unfortunately, this Santa Claus is actually a psychopath who only moments ago blew away a gas station attendant over $31 during a robbery.  Santa shoots Billy’s dad, then inexplicably tries to rape his mom before cutting her throat.

            Billy and Ricky end up in a church orphanage in a sequence that lasts far too long.  Billy’s unable to put his trauma behind him and has violent outbursts every single Christmas.  His mental problems are exacerbated by the harsh Mother Superior, who delivers brutal beatings to anyone who’s “naughty” under her care.  (The tottering old woman even somehow manages to deliver a beating to a pair of nearly-grown teens she catches humping.)  A sympathetic nun named Sister Margaret tries to provide him with a gentle upbringing, but is constantly at odds with the authoritarian Mother Superior.  The entire orphanage sequence takes up way too much of the film, though it’s highlighted by an uproarious sequence where Billy lays out a costumed Santa with a Hail Mary haymaker.

Billy ends up outwardly fairly normal, but he’s internalized bizarre ideas about what’s naughty and what’s nice.  “Punishment is absolute, punishment is necessary, and punishment is good,” has been the Mother Superior’s creed, and this idea is always lurking on the periphery of Billy’s psyche, even after he’s grown up into a hulking teen played by Robert Brian Wilson in his lone theatrical role.  Although he still apparently lives at the orphanage, Billy finds a community job working at a local toy store.  Everything’s going pretty well for him (as the audience sees during a happy montage set to the incongruously cheerful song “The Warm Side of the Door” by Morgan Ames), but then Christmas time rolls around again.  The upcoming holiday, combined with his guilt surrounding his burgeoning attraction to his coworker Pamela, starts bringing Billy’s neuroses to the fore once again.

When Billy is forced to play the role of Santa Claus at the toy store on Christmas Eve, his mental state is pushed to the absolute limit.  Playing Santa is bad enough, but the ensuing naughtiness of the office Christmas party manages to shove him over the edge of insanity. (Hasn’t that happened to everyone?)  When he walks in on his supervisor Randy trying to force himself on Pamela in the stockroom, Billy totally loses his shit and strangles Randy to death with a string of Christmas lights.  He then decides that she too was naughty and eviscerates her with a box cutter.

So begins about 40 minutes of Billy wandering the streets in his Santa suit bellowing “naughty” and dispatching people in the usual slasher movie ways.  The most creative sequence in the film, and one which was apparently heavily edited in the theatrical cut, involves Billy impaling a woman on the antlers of a deer’s head hanging on a wall.  Horror fans will recognize the antler victim as Linnea Quigley from such films as Return of the Living Dead, Pumkinhead II, and The Guyver.  Otherwise it’s a lot of hammer-to-the-face, arrow-in-the-back, axe-to-the-neck 1980s horror staples.  It’s not bad, but they didn’t run with the Christmas theme as much as they could’ve.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those odd early-ish slasher movies that tries to take itself super seriously.  I’m not opposed to that per se, but this movie spends a lot of time early on trying to establish Billy’s character only to immediately have him devolve into more or less your standard slasher villain. Also, making a good “serious” horror movie requires a fair amount of finesse that this movie just doesn’t have.  The ultra-dramatic music and camera work at the ending are textbook examples of unintentional humor.  Also, the violence in this movie is pretty lingering and uncomfortable at times.  That’s kind of a staple of early slasher flicks, but it doesn’t work especially well here given the ludicrous subject matter.  I’m not saying that this movie should’ve been a comedy or anything, but I think it might have been more enjoyable to watch if hadn’t tried quite so hard to be a brooding, serious film. 

I’d also be curious to know the details of the filming schedule for this movie.  See, even though it’s set at Christmas, there’s not much snow to be seen.  In fact, in some sequences you can see that snow has been laid out in a fairly small area while yards and trees in the background are completely clear.  It’s kind of an odd thing to note, but the unseasonal weather is something that always sticks out to me about this movie.  The other special effects are pretty simple as well, though the antler murder is done nicely.  For a sense of perspective, this movie came out the same year as Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, which has vastly better visuals (and, to be fair, twice the budget).

            Silent Night, Deadly Night isn’t an easy movie to judge.  It doesn’t approach the quality of genre classics like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, but it’s also head and shoulders above films such as Happy Birthday to Me or Sleepaway Camp.  Like so many horror movies, this is kind of a case of personal taste.  I kind of like it, but if someone were to walk up to me on the street and ask me to recommend a good Christmas horror film (Hey, it could happen.) I’d probably recommend Santa’s Slay over Silent Night, Deadly Night, as the former is just plain more fun to watch.  Silent Night, Deadly Night is kind of interesting for the history behind it and it’s certainly not unwatchably bad…but it’s not necessarily easy to recommend either.  Also, a remake of this flick, with the abbreviated title Silent Night, came out at the end of November…so there’s that.

           As I alluded to in an earlier post, most of the movie reviews I’d planned for December are instead getting the podcast treatment over at Joe’s Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  The first two episodes of the 2012 Christmas special are already up, so go check it out.

Santaclysm!

Last year I got the chance to take part in a really awesome Christmas episode of Joe's Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  That particular Christmas episode is currently unavailable for download, but happily brand spanking new Christmas episode just went up!  It's first part of a fairly long special JATHE presentation we're calling "Santaclysm" and it deals with various offbeat film incarnations of Santa Claus through the decades. The first episode, wherein we discuss the portrayal of Santa in a couple of beloevd Rankin-Bass specials, was a ton of fun to tape.  Plus I got upgraded from regular guest to temporary guest host (kind of) for this one.  Check it out!

On a semi-related note, Tommy can apparently read my mind, because the next three episodes of Santaclysm just happen to be the exact three movies I had planned to review for my holiday festivities for the blog.  That said, I've been forced to change up my plans a bit.  I had intended to kind of avoid the most obvious Christmas horror movies this year, but my hand has been forced...so screw it.  Coming up soon will be my review of the grand-daddy of all Christmas horror flicks, that oft-maligned but rarely viewed cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.  Please come back and join me for it!

Christmastime With Skippy

As the dozen or so of you that come by the blog for reasons other than Google Images sending here you to look for ninja pictures may have noticed, it's been pretty quiet around here since Halloween.  There are a few reasons for these, not the least of which being that the Halloween Horror Countdown was more work than I expected and I wanted a break.  It's also the case that I probably watched about 50 horror flicks in October, so I needed a break from that, too.  Not feeling like writing or watching movies makes it pretty darn hard to run a movie blog.

Wait Skippy, you might say, why worry with horror movies?  You post seasonal stuff too, so why didn't you post any Thanksgiving-related reviews?

Thanksgiving movies, huh?  Name three.  Other than Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  Not easy, huh?  That's also why there weren't any movie reviews this month.

Now December is upon us.  As you're no doubt aware, there's no dearth of Christmas movies out there, and many of them are weird enough to fall under my purview.  There are plenty of weird Christmas-themed horror flicks out there, as well more than a couple of "straight" Christmas flicks that are more than bizarre enough to warrant inclusion here, so we've certainly got enough to work with.  I'm not going to do a countdown or anything, but things are going to start picking up around here between now and the holidays.

'Tis the season for weird movies, and I hope you'll come join in the fun.
 

More Christmas Nonsense From the AFA...

Well, it's that time of year again: The American Family Association has rolled out its bitch list Naughty or Nice List. It happens around this time every single year, and yet somehow I'm freshly amazed every time.

You see, the American Family Association is a conservative a Christian organization that combines hilarious oversensitivity with enormous amounts of free time in order to scour thousands of advertisements to root out companies that don't expressly use the word "Christmas" when trying to get you to buy their products.¹ Apparently they think Jesus gets angry if he isn't mentioned by name in the Victoria's Secret catalog with all the sexy Santa costumes in it.

Check out the AFA's criteria for judging whether or not a company is "against" Christmas:

If a company's ad has references to items associated with Christmas (trees, wreaths, lights, etc.), it was considered as an attempt to reach "Christmas" shoppers. If a company has items associated with Christmas, but did not use the word "Christmas," then the company is considered as censoring "Christmas.

Victoria's Secret really is on their "naughty list", but if the AFA's own site is to be believed, the company is "naughty" only because it doesn't use the term "Christmas" in advertising its "items associated with Christmas"and not because it trades exclusively in sexy under-things. Conversely, JCPenney is considered "nice" because (among other things) you can get to this by visiting their website and running a search on the term "Christmas thong". Makes sense to me...

I write about the Naughty or Nice list every year, and every year I find something else about it that boggles my mind. What sticks out to me at the moment is that it's only the wording of the advertisements that the AFA takes into account rather than the actual items a company sells. Does that mean that a store selling "holiday trees" is giving Christmas a giant middle finger, whereas PetSmart is being utterly reverent towards the Christian aspects of the holiday by using the word "Christmas" to advertise canine Santa costumes? If the AFA's own literature is true, then the answer is yes.

But hey, it seems like their bully tactics are working. Each year their "naughty" list seems to get a little bit shorter, so maybe there's something to this. Perhaps it's possible to steer to the meaning of a holiday by shrilly dictating the language used to discuss it. You know, there's a certain Christmas tradition that I'm attached to, one that's been shunned by most of my fellow Americans. Maybe, just maybe, this would work:

Skippy's "Keep the Krampus in Christmas" Naughty or Nice List!

That's it! I've had enough of my pal the Krampus being left out of America's Christmas zeitgeist. He's a longstanding tradition throughout large parts of Europe, but he's been utterly "censored" out of American culture in favor of Santa Claus just because he's a hairy black monster who catches naughty children on Christmas Eve and flays them silly with a bundle of birch twigs before carrying them off to his forest lair. Oh, the injustice! Henceforth, I unilaterally declare that any company whose ads don't mention the Krampus just as often as Santa is "naughty" and therefore utterly inimical to the holiday. Here's the list so far:

The Nice List:
The Naughty List: Pretty much every store in the entire country.

Hmm, looks like I'd better start an intense pressure campaign to force stores across the country to start plastering the Krampus all over their circulars and commercials. After all, if everyone else doesn't pay lip service to my red-faced demands, the moral fabric of the very country could totally unravel!

...No, wait...it turns out that the important thing about the holidays is being with friends and family and strengthening our interpersonal bonds through shared traditions instead of obsessing over the language in freakin' commercials.

_____
1.) I spent the vast majority of October sprawled out like a dragon atop a huge pile of horror movies and KitKats, so I guess I shouldn't really throw stones about how other folks spend their free time...

What's Christmas Without the Krampus?

This is the time of year when religious blogs around the internet light up with complaints about how culture has "taken Christ out of Christmas". Tons of complaints.¹ I'm not really concerned about that, since I rather suspect that for most folks, even people who self-identify as Christians, Christmas is really about nostalgic tradition and love for one's family moreso than religion. That being said, I can certainly commiserate with folks who lament the crass commercialization of holiday sentiment and the replacement of long-lasting, cherished traditions with hokey corporate contrivances. (I'm looking at you, Olive the Other Reindeer.)

In that vein I'd like to call attention to an awesome holiday tradition that has been utterly abandoned here in the States, one that I would dearly love to see revived. Readers, I ask you...

Who took the Krampus out of Christmas?

You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry...

The Krampus is a traditional companion of Santa Claus in certain parts of Europe, especially Austria and the surrounding region. Just as Santa brings gifts to the good children, the Krampus brings stone-cold whuppin's to the bad ones. Commonly pictured wielding a fistful of switches and carrying a huge basket in which to carry off all the really rotten kids, the Krampus is a fearsome figure who probably does a bit more to discourage naughtiness than the threat of St. Nick filling one's stockings with coal.

I really get a kick out of the Krampus. ² I'm not a fan of threatening children with supernatural evil to encourage good behavior, but, unlike the earnest visions of hell propagated by religious folks, the Krampus is thought of as a rather tongue-in-cheek character.³ It's like telling someone that Frankenstein will get them if they're bad - it gets the message across, but it's not going to scar any little kids for life. Going one step further, folks in rural Austria actually dress up like the Krampus on the night of December 5th and parade around town making mischief and playfully "birching" passers-by. Halloween in December? That's something I can really get behind!

The Krampus is a weird, fascinating twist on the usual, saccharine sweet version of Christmas most people are familiar with...he's like the Grinch with balls. He's also a memorable exemplar of pre-Christian traditions being incorporated into the mythology of Christmas, a delightful byproduct of the social construction of this particular holiday. On a simpler note, the Krampus is just plain fun.

Come on people, isn't it time we put the Krampus back in Christmas?

______________
1.) In some ways the better question might be "who jammed Christ into everyone else's Solstice celebrations", but that's not especially relevant to my point.

2.) I like the Krampus even more because the Nazis took a distinctly anti-Krampus stance in World War II. A 1934 article from the New York Times (Available here...for $3.95) discusses how Nazis in Austria tried to stamp out the local Krampus traditions.

3.) Check out all the Krampus swag, both vintage and modern, on this site. Why in the world can't you get Krampus greeting cards stateside?

The War on What Now...?

As I'm sure most of you have guessed, my favorite place to hang out online is the website for the American Family Association. It's a website run by fundagelical oddballs who spend most of the year obsessing over what the gay folk are doing, but this time of year they really start caterwauling about the good ol' "War on Christmas".* All of this generally takes the form of a whole lot of pissing and moaning about companies that use the term "holiday" rather than "Christmas" in their advertising. (You know, because they couldn't possibly be selling Hanukkah or New Year's stuff at the same time.) The AFA even goes so far as to promote a "Naughty or Nice List", complete with the phone numbers of the offending companies so people can call and complain. If you're so inclined, you can also order buttons and stickers emblazoned with the slogan "It's Okay To Say Merry Christmas". (I was going to take a dig at them about the prices, but they're actually quite reasonable.)

The AFA lives in a fantasy world where "there are companies and individuals who want to ban "Merry Christmas" and replace it with 'Holiday Greetings'". Now I'm not sure AFA chairman Don Wildmon does his shopping, but I certainly don't see any paucity of "Merry Christmas" stuff lying around. Hell, the stores had Christmas stuff out before Halloween. What I do know is that by whining about how "Merry Christmas" is the only acceptable holiday greeting and getting their undies knotted up about freakin' Best Buy not using the word "Christmas" in their newspaper ads, AFA is completely missing the point: There is no war on Christmas because Christmas has already been secularized.

I myself will be putting up a Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving and I'm a freakin' atheist. It will even include my (atheist) girlfriend's saccharine-sweet "Precious Moments" nativity in which all of the characters are macrocephalic, doe-eyed baby-people. And, horror of horrors, I'll even play a fair amount of religious Christmas music because it's not nearly as annoying as the rock-a-billy crap that gets passed off as Christmas music these days.

"What the hell", I can hear you ask, "Why would an atheist do something like that?"

Because it's what my family did when I was a kid and I enjoy it. There's something to be said for harmless tradition - Just ask the British, up to 44% of whom are atheists (Source), but who still, stunningly enough, have freakin' Christmas. You don't have to believe in something to have fun with it - see Halloween, for example, or note that I still call today "Wednesday" even though I don't believe in Odin. I bet that very suggestion burns some people up, but it's true. I can go through all the traditional Christmas motions: Put up a tree, listen to carols, bake cookies (Okay, so I can't do that, but my girlfriend can.) utilize reciprocal gift-giving to express a fraction of my feelings of affection for my family and friends, even go to church with my folks on Christmas Eve, enjoy every single minute of it...and not believe even a tiny bit of the supernatural hokum attached to it.

Santa knows that Christmas has already been largely
stripped of its religious significance.

The AFA doesn't get that. They don't care if I don't believe it, they just want to see me going through the motions, and that's jacked up. They can't conceive of a smiling atheist at Christmas. They seem to think that we all going around shaking our fists and peeing on people's Christmas lights - as if by bullying other people into acting a certain way we could actually change what they believe. But there's a good reason the AFA should feel that way: Their whole modus operandi is built around bullying people into acting a certain way. That's what the whole "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" ballyhoo is about - trying to strong arm people into expressing good intentions in one particular way and claiming that the other is unacceptable. The AFA wants to grumble, groan, and cry foul until, instead of two innocuous greetings that don't actually offend anyone, we have one greeting that Christians are supposed to be offended by because it's not "Christian enough" and another greeting that's been weaponized into a big middle finger to everyone else. What exactly is the good that comes of that?

The whole idea championed by some of these religious groups that appearance is everything is something I don't get. Are they honestly so insecure in the reality of their religion that the celebration of their biggest holiday is thrown into disarray because the phrase "Merry Christmas" doesn't appear anywhere in the Sunday ad from the Gap? Are they so adamant that every state capital needs a taxpayer-funded set of nativity figures that they forget the fact that they can put 50 nativity scenes in their own front yard if they want to? Are they really so terrified that there might be (gasp) secularists around that they'll get pissed off if someone has the temerity to wish them "happy holidays"?

The problem for the AFA and similar groups is that society (including 92% theistic American society) really has created a modern version of Christmas that has as little to do with the Christian one as the Christian one has to do with the pagan solstice celebrations that most of its rituals are borrowed from. That's the trouble with memes - they evolve and change over time. It's also why I'd be comfortable making a bet that many more people will watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer than go to church this Christmas.

*They also host a weekly all-Christian TV and Podcast program about how Christian folk are "silenced". Don't think about it too much or you'll realize that it's the very definition of irony.

Quick, pander harder!!!

Well, Congress is working as hard as possible to kiss Christian ass yet again. I'm letting tact fall by the wayside here because this is just so freaking asinine. House Resolution 847 went before Congress today, forcing members to agree or disagree with a statement noting that Christmas is awesome. It's full of platitudes for the Christian right, droning on and on about the "sacrifice of Jesus Christ". Also note number 4 down there, which will surely be trotted out by every rightist out there in the coming months and years. If this does not constitute a government endorsement of a specific religion, WHAT DOES? Would that Thomas Jefferson was alive so that he could put an end to this silliness.

Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.

Whereas Christmas , a holiday of great significance to Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world;

Whereas there are approximately 225,000,000 Christians in the United States, making Christianity the religion of over three-fourths of the American population;

Whereas there are approximately 2,000,000,000 Christians throughout the world, making Christianity the largest religion in the world and the religion of about one-third of the world population;

Whereas Christians identify themselves as those who believe in the salvation from sin offered to them through the sacrifice of their savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and who, out of gratitude for the gift of salvation, commit themselves to living their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Bible;

Whereas Christians and Christianity have contributed greatly to the development of western civilization;

Whereas the United States, being founded as a constitutional republic in the traditions of western civilization, finds much in its history that points observers back to its roots in Christianity;

Whereas on December 25 of each calendar year, American Christians observe Christmas , the holiday celebrating the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ;

Whereas for Christians , Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God’s redemption, mercy, and Grace; and

Whereas many Christians and non-Christians throughout the United States and the rest of the world, celebrate Christmas as a time to serve others: Now, therefore be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives–

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;

(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians , both in the United States and worldwide; and

(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world.