12 Movies of Christmas: Santa Slashers - One Very Nice, One Very Naughty

The modern concept of Santa Claus (that is to say, from the past century or so) is pretty weird when you think about it. Firstly, children are emotionally blackmailed all year by the prospect of an omniscient supernatural toy-maker watching their every move and keeping tabs on their behaviour. Then, come Christmas Eve, the whole family goes to bed with full knowledge that a rotund stranger will gain access to their home while they slumber and leave a bunch of gifts under the tree. He’s well-known for being jolly, of course, but what if that guy turns out to be a homicidal maniac?

That’s the fear we tap into with the peculiar horror sub-genre of Santa slasher movies, but we should first point out that there has always been a somewhat sinister element of punishment and reward to the legend of St. Nick and his cohorts. It’s something that still continues today with the anti-Santa Krampus, celebrated at Krampusnacht around Central Europe, and the Czech equivalent Mikuláš. Here where I live in Brno, our kids await the latter with a mix of anticipation and trepidation, because that is the day that St. Nicholas visits their school accompanied by an angel and a devil. In more intense renditions, unruly children are grabbed by the devil character, stuffed into a sack, and forcibly dragged from the room. It can be quite alarming, to say the least!

While there were festive-themed horror movies previously, most notably Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, and Tales from the Crypt (1972) featured a segment involving a killer dressed as Santa, we’d have to wait until 1980 for the first true Santa-based slasher film. That was the little-seen To All a Goodnight, but that's a tough one to recommend to anyone other than slasher completists. Luckily, the same year also brought us John Waters’ favourite Christmas movie, which was enough of a selling point for me…

Christmas Evil, a.k.a. You Better Watch Out (1980)

Arriving after the summer of Friday the 13th, the fortunes of Lewis Jackson’s Christmas Evil weren’t helped by marketing comparisons to that first encounter with the Vorhees family and John Carpenter’s Halloween. Receiving only a limited release, Jackson’s one-and-done indie feature is barely a slasher at all and regularly gets compared to Taxi Driver, which isn’t a bad shout.

Although it features a killer dressed in a Santa outfit, it’s more of a psychological portrait of an alienated and deeply disturbed individual who unravels before our eyes. Unlike Martin Scorsese’s classic, however, Jackson’s movie finds an unconventional balance between the bleak and the heart-warming.

We start out in familiar slasher territory with a prologue outlining the trauma of our deranged protagonist: As a child, Harry Stadling (Brandon Maggart) found out that Santa doesn’t exist when he came downstairs to find his mum making sexy time with his dad dressed as the jolly gift-giver by the Christmas tree. Rather than shrugging off the disappointment the way kids tend to, Harry doubles down on his love for all things festive and grows up into a Christmas-obsessed loner working at a toy factory. 

You know how Will Ferrell’s Buddy in Elf absolutely adores Christmas? Well, Harry is a bit like that too, albeit in a far more downcast and troubling way. There is also something of a Pee-Wee Herman-esque manchild quality to him as he awakes in his Crimbo pyjamas and goes about his morning routine, but we see how demented he really is as he spies on local children and meticulously monitors their behaviour in good and bad ledgers. That’s pretty creepy, but he seems reasonably harmless until his co-workers take advantage of him and his money-grubbing bosses can’t even be bothered to make sure there are enough gifts to go round in their annual donation to a children’s hospital. That night, he steals a bunch of toys from the factory, dresses himself as Santa, and goes on a delivering spree while also murdering the wicked.

With a limited budget to work on, Lewis Jackson took his cast and crew out around New Jersey and New York City to film without a permit, and the guerrilla-style approach gives Christmas Evil a real gritty authenticity. Despite the limitations, the photography is really atmospheric and you can almost feel the wintry bite in the air as Harry goes about his rounds in a van crudely painted with a sleigh on the side.

Harry’s rampage is pretty modest by slasher standards. For the most part, the film is a slow-burning character study about a man desperate for Christmas to be all the things we wish for when we’re kids, but finds cynical adulthood standing in his way at every turn. Like Black Christmas, Jackson’s film taps into the sense of loneliness and sadness that many people feel over the festive period when there is so much societal pressure to be having a great time. It’s not all a bummer, however, as Jackson also delivers moments of dark comedy and some unexpectedly feel-good moments.

What elevates Christmas Evil above the standard slasher fare is Brandon Maggart as Harry. The father of singer-songwriter Fiona Apple doesn’t have an extensive filmography, but he is in virtually every scene and his complex performance is riveting. Somehow, he manages to tread a fine line between making Harry both unnerving and totally sympathetic, saying so much with his sad sack eyes. It’s right up there with Michael Rooker’s breakout turn in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and, with Maggart in the role, the Christmas aspect genuinely feels integral to Harry’s psychosis rather than just an exploitation gimmick.

Christmas Evil takes a while to get going but it enters another realm when Harry’s mind finally snaps, with some wonderful moments including a suspenseful attempt to slide down a chimney and a fantastical ending that feels unique in horror cinema. The film wasn’t a success on first release and found itself on the naughty list in the UK where it was seized and banned during the video nasty panic of the ‘80s. Thankfully, it has built a cult following with the help of John Waters, and it now stands alongside Black Christmas as one of the best holiday horror movies around.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Not to be confused with the alternative title for Black Christmas (Silent Night, Evil Night), this trashy horror is the polar opposite of Christmas Evil in terms of delivery and intent. Although it also features a mentally disturbed individual dressed as Santa Claus, it is a far more traditional slasher with a few seasonal twists to the killings.

This time around, we get a double-header prologue laying the groundwork for the carnage to come. First, the Chapman family are traveling home for the holidays after visiting their scary grandpa in a psychiatric ward when they are flagged down by a man dressed as Santa. Unfortunately, he’s a violent nutcase who shoots dad and sexually assaults mum before slitting her throat, leaving young Billy and his baby brother Ricky orphaned.

Skip forward a few years and the boys are living in a Catholic orphanage run with an iron fist by the Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin), who hammers home the point that naughtiness must be punished after she catches Billy peeping on a young couple having sex. He appears to get the message until it’s time to sit on Santa’s lap on Christmas Day, which causes him to flip and punch out the poor guy dressed as Kris Kringle.

Another 10 years pass until the present day. Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) is now a handsome young man who, with the help of kindly Sister Margaret (Gilmer McCormick), gets a job working in a toy store. 

He has a crush on his fellow employee Pamela (Toni Nero), but thoughts about doing anything intimate with her provoke alarming flashbacks to his parents’ murder. Things really kick off when his curmudgeonly boss (Britt Leach) needs a substitute to dress as Santa and drafts in Billy. This pushes him over the edge and he sets about punishing everybody, not just the naughty.

Michael Hickey’s lurid screenplay deserves credit for taking the time to outline the factors that turn Billy into a serial killer, but for the most part it’s standard sex-equals-death stuff peppered with plenty of gratuitous nudity. Unlike Halloween or Friday the 13th, however, showing events from Billy’s perspective means almost zero suspense, and there are long stretches of tedious dialogue between bland characters before we get to the kills.

Wilson makes for one of the best-looking psychos you ever saw, but his performance is pretty flat and the rest of the 2-D cast go through the motions just waiting to get slaughtered. At least there are a few memorably gnarly murders with a holiday slant, one showing what happens when a killer’s axe interfaces with the neck of a sledder, and another involving scream queen Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead) in a typically revealing role.

Overall, Silent Night, Deadly Night is sleazy, boring, and mean-spirited, perhaps made more interesting thanks to its status as one of the most controversial horror movies of the 1980s. The film was picked up by the fledgeling Tri-Star Pictures, which had already released far more respectable fare like The Natural and The Muppets Take Manhattan earlier in 1984. The company questionably ran adverts for their Christmas-based slasher during family-oriented TV shows, and parents didn’t take very kindly to their sprogs being exposed to an axe-wielding Santa coming down the chimney.

Outraged parents and religious groups clubbed together to organise protests against Silent Night, Deadly Night. Screenings were picketed with upstanding citizens waving placards and singing Christmas carols, and Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert lambasted the film on their show. The furore eventually forced Tri-Star to pull the plug citing poor box office performance, but in reality the controversy had helped it out-perform A Nightmare on Elm Street on its opening weekend.

The modest commercial success and subsequent notoriety meant that Silent Night, Deadly Night spawned four sequels (all featuring Billy’s younger brother Ricky), a remake (Silent Night) and also inspired Christmas Bloody Christmas, which follows a killer cyborg santa. Now this year the folks behind the Terrifier series have brought us another remake, and to be fair it looks pretty decent – although it is unlikely to cause the same kind of stir that the original did back in the ‘80s.

So there you have it, two Santa-based slashers for your alternative festive viewing if all the good cheer gets too much!  I’d recommend putting Christmas Evil on your prezzie list if you haven’t seen it already, but Silent Night, Deadly Night is very ho-ho-hum.