Silent Night, Deadly Night
Christmas is not a time which Billy Chapman associates with goodwill and festivity, though his memories are of family, the last time he and his parents visiting his grandfather in the nursing home, eight year old Billy alone with him when he had a seizure and died, the silence of the long darkened drive home when another car bumped them at a stop light, the driver dressed as Santa Claus but armed with a gun, Billy watching as his parents were murdered.
Twenty years passed, Billy drifts from town to town, anonymous and always on the move, now arriving in Hackett, Minnesota, and finding work as a stock boy in Ida’s Trinket Trees, a gift store run by Pamela Sims and her father, she at first cold towards him but warming as she comes to know him and realises he likes her for who she is, a self-confessed outsider with a fascination with true crime documentaries, unaware of his traumatic childhood or the peculiarities of his advent calendar rituals, seeking out and punishing those who have been naughty.
Written and directed by Mike P Nelson, Silent Night, Deadly Night is a seasonal remake of Charles E Sellier Jr’s 1984 horror of the same name, more faithful to the original premise than the previous remake of 2012 even as it creates something new, opening in a nursing home as shadowed as grandpa’s fading mind, glittering ornaments in the gloom, a shrouded place where familiar people become strangers who act oddly, an unsafe environment of confusion and displacement.
Starring Rowan Campbell as Billy, Ruby Modine as Pam, David Lawrence Brown as Mister Sims, David Tomlinson as police officer Max Benedict, Pam’s possessive ex, and Mark Acheson as Charlie, the cleaner who witnessed Billy’s visit to his grandfather and followed his family that fateful night and who now still haunts him, seeing the dark truths in people others don’t notice as the spirit of Christmas brings bloody murder on a tight schedule to Hackett.
Transplanted from the orphanage and lacking sadistic nuns and Catholic guilt, the new version pays other dividends, Billy a driven but sympathetic killer whose actions are guided by Charlie, persistent and knowing, something between conscience and tormentor but also protecting him, while supposed “nice girl” Pam has less justification for her violent temper, questioning whether she controls it or it controls her, yet protecting her nephew from bullies while the ice hockey referee looks the other way her righteous outburst is understandable.
The tone shifted from overly comedic that is superceded by the sinister aspects of the season in a cynical world, America a changed place since the original and with the slaughter of the Santas at the White Power Christmas party a true Hallmark moment, but despite standing by the message that there is a difference between doing a bad thing and being a bad person Silent Night, Deadly Night is an adequate stocking filler rather than the perfect gift, satisfying but never quite as subversive or spicy as it might have been, particularly in the final scenes.
Silent Night, Deadly Night is currently on general release
