There are some truly truly truly bizarre franchises out there in the horror sphere. I’ve recently watched 11 Puppet Master films pretty closely together. I’ve seen the entirety of the Wrong Turn franchise. I also sat through every Hellraiser film (don’t) but they all fall into oblivion when you get into the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise.
What was clearly a throwaway seasonal slasher capitalising on the early 80s boom, spawned 4 sequels alongside a 2012 and 2025 remake. Did original 1984 writer Michael Hickey plan this as an elaborate franchise that would span into thriller, occult, body horror and procedural genres across the decades? I highly doubt it.
Over the past few days, I’ve watched the franchise back-to-back and watched with a combination of awe, morbid fascination and complete resentment from film to film. I honestly don’t think there’re many series like it. It’s kaleidoscopic. It lurches from unintentional brilliance to unintentional travesty. I’ve tried to keep it brief and put a smattering of thoughts down on one of the weirdest series you’ll witness.
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
The Night that started it all. I would honestly consider this a genre classic. It’s exactly the kind of over-the-top slasher horror madness you’d want. When you think of Christmas Horror, this is surely right up there with Black Christmas, Gremlins, Jack Frost and The Nightmare Before Christmas. That iconic poster of the Santa arm reaching out the chimney with a shiny axe. It’s classic.
Billy is our hero, villain and everything rolled into one played by Robert Brian Wilson. No relation to any of the Beach Boys as far as I or Google know. Billy sees the brutal murder of his parents following what seems to be an incredibly long distance Christmas Eve journey to visit his mentally unstable grandfather for all of 5 minutes. Held up by a deranged robber on the road, Billy sees his father shot at the wheel of the car and his mother’s throat slit…once the killer has had the opportunity to rip her shirt and expose her breasts. Different times in the 80s.
Following an authoritarian upbringing within a catholic orphanage, Billy is left teetering on the edge of insanity with a fundamental psychosis around sex, punishment and Santa Claus. I understand that in early drafts of the bible, these were the prospective names of the Three Kings only to be edited for its official release. Obviously, this leads to the nuns at his orphanage setting him up with a job in a toy shop around the holiday period. What could possibly go wrong?!
Well, a chain of events leads to Billy’s fragile psyche snapping and him undertaking a festive killing spree, punishing all who have been naughty whilst donning a Santa suit. It’s iconic. The kills are iconic. The acting is iconic(ly bad). Some of the line deliveries are unparalleled. On this watch, I really felt like it was striving to be taken seriously, but it was just never going to land. It’s so outlandish in every way that it can only be enjoyed as a comedy. There is not a single element of this that’s scary. However, it really is a perfect film to put on with friends and enjoy over a few drinks during December. If you’ve not watched it, why are you still reading this and not watching it?!
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)
It had been a while since I’d watched this one and time had made it grow fonder in my memory. My memory played a disgusting ruse with me though; this is essentially a 90-minute film consisting of 45 minutes of rehashed story from the first and 10 minutes of credits. This travesty hit so much fucking harder as I watched it less than 24 hours after rewatching the original. If I was sat in the audience back in 1987, I’m sure I’d have still been pissed off with this.
I then read that this had a $250,000 budget and was filmed in 10 days. I can only assume the director, crew and production were on coke and pills for the duration.
A genuinely awful framing narrative to recap the first film plays out. The idea that Ricky (Billy’s younger brother and an actual baby at the time of the first film) would have a photographic memory of the night he became an orphan is insane. The acting is laughably bad, but the script they’re working off isn’t exactly thespian.
If you’ve not seen this before, you will still be familiar with the immortal line “GARBAGE DAY” which is probably the best summary you could ask for from this film. It really is pretty awful BUT in hindsight whilst writing this, at least it was quite fun when it got to the original story. That brings us on nicely to…
Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989)
Following on from the final 40 minutes of Part 2 (or the duration of original content in Part 2…) Ricky has been acquired by a not particularly mad scientist who is conducting some sort of experiment on him to revive his brain function. To be honest, I didn’t understand because within 20 minutes I’d lost the will to keep watching this one.
I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a more phoned in film than this. Not a single on-screen death. A slasher who doesn’t slash. I could write a whole piece on how bad the second one is but it’s infinitely more fun than this shit. Potentially the most boring film I’ve ever suffered in my life. A huge pile of nothingness. I can’t even write anything more. Honestly, do anything else with your life, aside from watching this.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)
Christmas is a time of many different smells. The smell of eggnog and hot chocolates. Chestnuts roasting on open fires. In this case, the stench of a script that was sitting and festering somewhere before having ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night 4’ slapped on the front of it.
I thought I’d seen this, but I clearly hadn’t. It shares no connective tissue with SNDN but a few things have clearly been changed, script wise, to make it fit in. Clint Howard’s character being called Ricky and I think a verbatim line about sexually aggressive males pushing themselves on their partners. There’s also a moment where SNDN3 is playing on the TV. I had gotten 50 minutes into this and not a shred of Christmas/Festive/Yuletide cheer to be found. Aside from the Boxing Day scraps listed above and some cheap Santa hats, this has absolutely no connection to Christmas and sits so far outside of this bonkers franchise, it might as well be sitting in June.
The general plot revolves around an inquisitive journalist looking into the mysterious death of a woman who falls from a building, on fire, with her legs blown off. Our protagonist Kim’s motivations for this journalism, stem from her desire to be taken seriously within her chauvinistic workplace, which is pretty admirably ahead of it’s time for 1990. This drive leads to mysterious, hallucinogenic, cockroach-heavy action spattered in amongst picnics, tea parties and gloopy insectoid body horror. Confusing? Thought so.
Expect the usual Brian Yuzna insanity and effects from Screaming Mad George to keep this one interesting. I also have to give a huge shout out to Neith Hunter who pretty much single handedly carries this film. She gives a great performance as Kim, the target of Maud Adams’ witch coven. Yep, you read that right. Witch coven. In a SNDN film…
Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991)
Something of a return to the Christmas origins of the franchise, The Toymaker is a bonkers slice of the early 90s, late 80s hangover. It feels like it’s going to be relatively paint by numbers throughout but it builds towards a truly batshit last 20 minutes.
Yuzna steps back from the camera into a producer role this time but it still has his fingerprints all over it. It’s a campy and over the top slice of Christmas madness centring around Mickey Rooney, who infamously slammed the original, as Joe Petto (seriously), a toy shop owner whose toys come to life and kill their owners. We see toy soldiers, a Robot Wars-style contraption, a weird crocodile thing, roller skates and bauble-style Santas cause carnage in delightfully stupid ways. The return to the original’s knowing winks to the audience are appreciated and make this the most fun entry since the original.
It has its faults, sure. There was much more sex in this than I remember and not a single moment of it is sexy. The mother looks like Janice from Friends and it’s really distracting. The babysitter and her boyfriend wear some truly hideous underwear during a bedroom scene. This bedroom toy scene might be better than anything in Puppet Master to be honest. Killer toys brutalise the babysitter and her nappy-wearing boyfriend with an assortment of explosives, disc saws and chomping crocodiles. Only from a Yuzna/Screaming Mad George brain could this be concocted. If you haven’t seen this one, definitely check it out.
Final note; Pino is weird as fuck.
Silent Night (2012)
A loose remake of the original. I’ll be honest, it feels like it just doesn’t fit with the rest of this blog. It’s very much symptomatic of the early 2010s horror era. It ups the gore but for me, at the expense of knowing what it wants to be. There are some attempts at humour, an attempt at a story arc for the main protagonist, but it all felt quite jarring. There’re some cool kills and some fantastic shots, but overall, it felt very Saw-indebted including its “meh” reveal ending. Again, I won’t be going back to this one regularly I don’t think.
So Silent Night, Deadly Night. Should it be revered as a franchise in the company of Halloween, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, Sleepaway Camp? Absolutely not. Is it worth watching past the original? Hmm. Trickier. I feel like all of them, bar “Better Watch Out!”, are worth at least one watch to horror fans. Some I’ll revisit again (Silent Night, Deadly Night and The Toy Maker), but others are definitely confined to the “one and done” basket. You can probably guess which. There was a bundle of the original 5 films on VHS on eBay for around £120. This writer was extremely tempted. Having now finished, I’m glad I didn’t…
