SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (2025)

The thing about 1980s slasher films is that most of them are bad. And I don’t mean bad in a good way—if you follow me—where something is always happening, and you can’t help but laugh. I mean bad as in, “90% of this movie has no plot and is just actors awkwardly exchanging the most banal dialogue you have ever heard.” That’s why I think of them as “kill count” movies, because you’d get the same experience watching a five-minute fan video on YouTube of the gore scenes edited together.

You’ll find people who try to say they’re actually mostly great, that Prom Night (1980) is a ‘banger’, and that they loved The Mutilator (1984). I was probably one of them way back when, before I saw Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) on a cruddy DVD transfer bought from the Entertainment Exchange.

But let us be honest with ourselves and come out of the video closet: they are trash for a reason. Beyond the relatively mainstream franchise shores of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween, the waters very quickly become choppy. Heck, only two of those franchises had first entries that I’d consider classic films in terms of the aesthetic.

Slashers were a genre dictated by market forces more than storytelling. You bring in the kids with the promise of sex and violence, and then you cut the good stuff with as much padding as you can. They are like hot dogs: there’s just enough actual food to justify the old boots and rat genitals. I love slasher films, but I love trash. I am also fascinated by fiction so forcefully dictated by profit and cost-effectiveness. It was not until Scream (1996) satirised the genre that it hauled itself out of the doldrums and became artistically fertile ground again, for the first time since early slashers like Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

The original Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), though fondly remembered by genre mavens, was very much stuck in the doldrums. Like many of its peers, it features a prologue that describes the origins of the killer’s madness, and the rest of the film is just passage work between its little bits of meat: the gore scenes. The innovation that Silent Night, Deadly Night 2025 brings to this is an actual plot with real horror themes, mystery, and so forth.

A New Colour of Christmas Horror

When Billy Chapman was a little boy, he visited his grandfather in a retirement home that his parents had recently placed him in—not for his care, but with an eye on the inheritance. The old man takes a turn for the worse, but Billy’s problems are far from over. That night, a man in a Santa Claus suit rear-ends his parents’ car, triggering events that will haunt him forever.

Now an adult (played by Rohan Campbell), Billy drifts across America with a creepy Advent calendar, in which the day behind each door is marked with a fresh sinner’s blood. He comes to the town of Hackett (geddit?) and gets a job in an odds-and-ends store, which I think might just be a Christmas store exclusively. Lord knows how the owner, Mr Sims (David Lawrence Brown), makes rent the rest of the year. Yet, he clearly thinks of it as his legacy to his daughter, Pamela (Ruby Modine), as if it is a chain of car dealerships and not, you know, a shack that sells fibreglass Santas.

Pamela is a girl with a temper, and a violent ex in the local PD, Max (David Tomlinson). As much as Billy wants to establish a life for himself at last, there’s a voice in his head (Mark Acheson) that guides his path and tells him what to do. It’s calling for the days of Christmas to be observed with sinners’ blood…

This is the best Silent Night, Deadly Night film in the franchise, which is not saying much since the original was a bottom-rung slasher movie that only managed to gain some cultural relevance due to an absurd moral panic around depicting Santa Claus as a murderer. (“Culture war” nonsense of the 1980s, kids.)

Its sequel is notable for consisting mostly of footage from the first film, as well as a moment from one of the new scenes that has become a camp classic, featuring the dialogue: “Garbage day!” (Anyone familiar will have heard that line in their heads as it is delivered in the film.)

Other sequels followed, of which the only one I recall is Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991). That one had Mickey Rooney as a toy-store owner with the deeply unfortunate name of “Petto”. (I get it, it is a pun on Geppetto, who made Pinocchio, but come on… US adults will hardly be thrilled when they hear that local kids have been having fun with a Petto’s toys.)

Plot Holes & Pacing

This new film for Christmas 2025 has a properly involved storyline, with twists and turns and a few little Easter eggs for people who have seen its predecessors. Written and directed by Mike P. Nelson (V/H/S/85), I’ll say it lacks the pacing and style required to make it massively memorable.

Although it’s worth observing that I’d not even heard of the previous attempt to remake Silent Night, Deadly Night, just called Silent Night (2012) and starring Malcolm McDowell, who in the 2000s also helped to revive the corpse of the Halloween franchise under Rob Zombie. I probably didn’t know that Silent Night existed because it only made $130,000, which in industry terms means your parents showed up.

Nelson’s film is probably a massive improvement on that one, although he does not seem too concerned with plot believability. You are expected to buy that one small town contains a murderous neo-Nazi cell, several unsolved vanishings, and a human trafficking ring with members killing people in full view of CCTV.

And I thought that the Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996) lady lived in a dangerous town. At one point in Hackett, a massacre occurs with none of the townsfolk seemingly even aware. The police do ask if Billy is familiar with one of its victims, but in a way where it could mean that, from their perspective, that person is merely missing, and they have not located the slaughterhouse just beyond town limits. To quote an internet phrase: lolwut?

Still, my attention was held throughout, and it picks up in the second half with some unconventional plotting. The gore, however, is underwhelming. Blood sprays look painfully digital at times. I remember finally watching Scream 4 (2011) in the last few years and being surprised by how nastily visceral it felt here and there, as a slasher film should, although they often are not these days. Oh well. Silent Night, Deadly Night is at least an 18, so I was spared the 15-certificate overdone steak of the I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) reboot.

The story’s premise with the Advent calendar and Billy’s inner voice is remarkably similar to that of the great Bill Paxton horror film Frailty (2001), wherein a single father is haunted by visions of people’s sins and so feels destined to become God’s avenging angel. This film is not on Frailty’s level, of course, but you have to admire its ambition in using a thematically strong premise.

The acting is serviceable throughout. Campbell played basically the same role in Halloween Ends (2022)—the vulnerable outsider tortured by his inner voice. He’s a handsome young man, as Hollywood leading men tend to be, but there’s a cute doughiness to his face and body that helps the character. Someone more chiselled and conventionally “cover model” might not have sold poor Billy Chapman quite as well.

The film is a sweet winter treat. Well, maybe not sweet. But it’s a nice amuse-bouche with blood-tinted marzipan holly on top.

USA | 2025 | 96 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Mike P. Nelson.
writer: Mike P. Nelson (based on the 1984 film written by Michael Hickey & Paul Caimi).
starring: Rohan Campbell, Ruby Modine, David Lawrence Brown, David Tomlinson & Mark Acheson.