SPOILER ALERT: This post contains minor spoilers from “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” now in theaters.
The 1984 slasher “Silent Night, Deadly Night” was an above-average movie, which grew in infamy due to advertising that depicted a bloodied, axe-wielding Santa. Nationwide protests to shield children from the images coincided with the opening, which, of course, had the unintentional effect of drumming up more business. This ultimately led to four more chapters in the series and a loose 2012 reboot, yet most of the movies haven’t stood the test of time in the horror community compared to franchises like “Halloween” or “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
In fact, horror filmmaker Mike P. Nelson says his first experience with “Deadly Night” wasn’t the film itself, but rather the advertising campaign.
“I was born in ’82 and the movie came out in ’84,” Nelson says. “I do feel like a lot of people my age who weren’t able to watch the movie remember that poster: Santa Claus, but then he’s got an axe, and he’s coming down the chimney. That left a pretty big impression on me. From there, that movie was always forbidden. Not that my parents were like on the whole bandwagon of “Ban this movie,” but like horror movies in general, it was off limits. So I didn’t see it until much later in life.”
Perhaps that’s why, when he was asked if he wanted to pitch an idea for a remake, Nelson went with a bold vision that wasn’t nostalgically beholden to the plot of the original.
“It was super important to me to not over-think it,” he says. “I think it’s so easy to go into these and be like, ‘Oh my God, what does everybody want to see?’ And then you get mush. You get a gray pile of mush because you’re either trying to satisfy everybody or it’s too close to the original.”
The result is a wholly different “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” written and directed by Nelson, in theaters Friday via Cineverse. Outside of some key elements and nods to the original film series, it is nowhere near a beat-by-beat remake of the original. In Nelson’s vision, a young Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell) witnesses a family tragedy perpetrated by a psychotic Santa. This causes him to snap and grow up to become a red-suited killer himself, guided by a mysterious imaginary voice in his head. But once he falls in love with a young woman (Ruby Modine) in a small town with her own issues, things go in very unexpected — and bloody — directions.
Surprisingly, Nelson says the romantic thread of “Deadly Night” took inspiration from Will Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel’s quirky, mismatched flirtation in another holiday favorite, 2003’s “Elf.”
“I’d be lying if I said that had no influence,” he says. “We have two very different people in our movie, obviously, but they have their thing. Billy literally has a demon in his head, and Pam is dealing with her own demons and explosive personality disorder. What does that look like when those two people come together? Is it explosive? Is it perfect? Or is it explosive perfection? It’s this perfect merging of these people that are going through crazy shit.”
While Nelson has had success in taking big swings with genre reboots in the past — including the well-received 2021 “Wrong Turn” and this year’s “Friday the 13th” short film “Sweet Revenge” — he says that even the marketing team behind “Deadly Night” was surprised at how much the central relationship resonated with audiences.
“We got to see what people responded to in that first screening, and we were all surprised at how well people responded to the love story and the warm, fuzzy, almost Hallmark-y vibe of it,” he says. “It was really cool. We knew it was there, but it’s ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night.’ It’s a horror film. But when we found that really good response to that, the marketing team said, ‘Well, let’s put more of that in [to the promotion]. Let’s show that there is a relationship story. There’s this romance, a kind of whimsy to it.’ Strangely enough, that has been a really good thing for the movie. I think it’s opened a wider audience. ‘Yeah, this movie is going to be probably violent and bloody, but there’s also this other aspect to it that I’m very intrigued about. It’s this love story.’”
Like any good slasher, Nelson admits that he’s already considering more gory installments.
“Ruby and I have already started talking about weird things, like where things could go,” he says. “We’ve been having a lot of fun. We’ve already created a handful of moments and scenes we’d love to see in it, and it’s absolutely off the wall. It’s a lot of fun, though, and it keeps in the same spirit of the movie. You learn more about the lore. But it remains a relationship movie. It remains a love story. There are so many fun things that we play with and expand on.”
Watch the “Silent Night, Deadly Night” trailer below.
