Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of the most controversial horror films ever made. Released in 1984, the film wasn’t the first to feature a killer Santa. It was preceded by both 1980’s To All a Goodnight (the very first 80s slasher) and Christmas Evil (one of John Waters’ favorite films AND starring Fiona Apple’s dad!). Neither of those caused much of a backlash.
Silent Night, Deadly Night, however, turned into a giant conservative talking point, mostly because of an ad campaign that allegedly traumatized children. Critic Gene Siskel got on TV to list off the names of the filmmakers and publicly shame them. Several celebrities wrote angry letters condemning the film, including Mickey Rooney (who, ironically, would go on to star in one of its sequels). The movie was eventually pulled from theaters after one week, yet another victim to Reagan-era hysteria.
And yet . . . if all these pearl-clutching protesters had actually seen the movie, they would probably agree with its underlining message. Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of the most conservative, sex-negative movies ever made, despite all the nudity and murder. It goes out of its way to depict a world where physical intimacy of any kind will always lead to punishment.
The film follows Billy, a boy who watched someone in a Santa costume assault and murder his mother. Right away, his worldview is completely warped. He’s then sent to a strict Catholic orphanage where his trauma is amplified. When he grows up and sees another couple in bed together (consensually), he flashes back to his childhood memory and eventually starts a killing spree.
Throughout the movie, he mutters his one-word catchphrase (“Naughty!”) while dispatching multiple couples mid-coitus. He eventually starts murdering in the name of more minor “sins,” like stealing bobsleds and drinking at office parties. On a surface level, the film delivers the kind of bloodshed that 80s slasher fans expect, but it never loses sight of the message that sex is dirty and anyone who goes against social norms deserves to die.
Admittedly, the whole film could be interpreted as a warning against repression: how childhood trauma and religious abuse can turn a normal person into a murderer. That would be a valid reading of the film if the world it presented weren’t so sleazy. Throughout the movie, virtually all the adult characters (minus one nun) are painted as bullies, sex addicts, and sinners. The general vibe seems to continually justify Billy’s rampage.
The whole “sex equals death” accusation has been levied at all slasher films of the 80s, but that’s usually an overstatement. The final girl in Friday the 13th, for example, isn’t a virgin at all. (She’s even implied to have slept with her boss, an act that is barely addressed.) A Nightmare on Elm Street, released the same year as Silent Night, has very little to say about sexuality, instead focusing on the more progressive message of overcoming the mistakes of your parents. Even the Halloween franchise, the ground-zero of this “sex equals death” trope, rarely features the theme in an overt way, spending a lot more time (for better or worse) on family.
In contrast, Silent Night’s raison d’etre is to punish young people for promiscuity and rule-breaking, and its sequels continue that theme in interesting ways. Part two is mostly a clip-show of part one. (Because the first film was ripped from theaters so quickly, they basically re-released it with less than an hour of new material.) Therefore, all the themes of the original are present here, but the new footage doubles down on puritan values, showing how Billy’s little brother Ricky is so traumatized by his brother’s actions that he picks up the mantle and takes it even further. He punishes minor sins (talking in a movie theater, for example), but he’s mostly focused on sex. He even gets a girlfriend and seems genuinely happy until he finds out that she had a previous relationship she never told him about. He kills both her and her ex, unable to process that they had slept together. Like so many conservatives, he’s okay with having sex but refuses to accept when other people do it.
This leads into the second sequel Better Watch Out, the nadir of the franchise. Ricky’s back, though now he’s mostly mute, has an exposed brain, and he’s psychically linked to a blind girl. (Don’t ask.) The body count in this movie is frustratingly low, but Ricky still manages to murder a few people who supposedly deserve it (a pervy doctor, a bitchy nurse, a drunk hospital Santa). The only sexual scene is a short moment between a couple in a bathtub. They get murdered too, but their deaths seem much less linked to their moment of intimacy than in the previous films.
Overall, this entry is less interested in the conservative themes that the original established, but it does include a detective character verbalizing what could be the series’ mission statement: “Ricky isn’t a killer. He’s a way to stop people from killing.” While the film itself doesn’t fully commit to the punishment ethos, that single line shows that it still views its killer Santa as an inevitable response to a flawed world.
The third sequel, Initiation, is probably the most interesting. Rather than focusing on a killer Santa, this one is about a coven of lesbian witches who want to use bug-related magic to gain power and kill men. (Seriously.) We follow Kim, a career woman who’s constantly dismissed by all the men in her life. She becomes the target of the coven’s leader, who drugs her with potions, kisses her a few times, and uses magical larvae to force her into sacrificing a teen boy so that the coven can complete an ill-defined ritual. Honestly, it doesn’t make much sense.
Overall, Initiation’s themes are deeply muddled. While the male characters are mostly misogynistic, the real danger comes in the form of women who hate men so much that they resort to murder and black magic. I guess this could be a satire of gender politics, but its mostly serious tone (and the fact that it comes in the middle of a franchise like this) makes the whole thing feel like an angry takedown of feminism itself. (This was written and directed by men, in case you couldn’t tell.)
The original franchise ends with The Toymaker, starring the aforementioned Mickey Rooney. This one’s all about killer toys. As is typical of these films, multiple sex scenes get interrupted by murder, though killer Santa has been replaced by booby-trapped centipedes and roller skates. It basically follows the same kill structure as the first film, though its climax adds an interesting wrinkle. We find out (spoiler alert) that the toys were all made by an android named Pino (who himself was made by toymaker Joe Petto. Get it?). Pino has gone insane—partly due to his Ken-doll lack of genitals, though that doesn’t stop him from trying to force himself onto the female lead before getting dismantled. Somehow, everything comes back to how a sex drive can lead to violence and death.
Eleven years later, the series was rebooted with 2012’s Silent Night, where a new killer Santa goes on a wildly violent rampage after experiencing childhood trauma. While that trauma isn’t linked to sex like Billy’s, the result is still the same. He goes after adulterers, pornographers, and various other couples in the midst of lovemaking. Some of the kills are directly lifted from the original, though the gore and violence is amplified.
By 2012, the backlash to the original had long been forgotten, and this film barely made a dent in pop culture. It grossed about $100,000 in total, and despite copious nudity and a franchise-high kill count, the film went almost completely overlooked. The world has gotten much less puritanical since 1984, apparently.
Silent Night, Deadly Night has an ironic place in film history, as a series that was condemned by a vocal minority who probably agreed with the very message that they were trying to suppress. And to make things doubly ironic, those protests helped spur more interest in the series, turning a deeply flawed slasher into a franchise-spawning cult classic that has spread its anti-sex message to millions of people. So maybe they succeeded after all.