Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) From what I can gather from Silent Night, Deadly Night’s production history and context, the notion of an evil Santa Claus was somewhat new at the time. Nowadays, of course, we barely blink at the idea of Santa being repurposed as something other than a beloved icon—nearly every long-running sitcom has Santa showing up and not being jolly, while Christmas Horror has become a sub-genre in its own right. But 1984 wasn’t as far on the postmodern scale as 2020 is, and so many pearls were clutched at this slasher repurposing Christmas iconology for its own purposes. Of course, being used to evil Santas means that Silent Night, Deadly Night feels surprisingly dull by a modern perspective. It’s a very standard slasher in Christmas disguise, and even the explanations behind why a killer would dress up as Santa feel overused in a genre that has twisted human psychology past its breaking point. Not being a fan of slashers, I don’t find anything of value left once the originality of the Christmas theme has faded: Silent Night, Deadly Night remains an ugly cheap film with little to say.