The original Silent Night, Deadly Night has a two-fold cultural legacy: A killer poster that looked great on a video store shelf and the “garbage day” meme, which originated in the first of four sequels. In 1984, the film elicited outrage from the likes of Mickey Rooney, who would ironically star in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker, but was more of an exploitation also-ran to that summer’s big Christmastime horror-comedy: Gremlins. With this second remake (following 2012’s Silent Night), Silent Night, Deadly Night writer-director Mike P. Nelson has a low bar for his sleigh to clear, and he came up with a fun-in-theory premise to deliver: A Hallmark movie about a serial killer Santa, adding grisly killings to the rote clichés of laid-back, low-budget holiday rom-coms. But in practice, the film is even less than the sum of its genre trappings.
Like the original, Silent Night, Deadly Night opens with eight-year-old Billy Chapman watching Santa Claus gun down his parents in cold blood. Cut to 20 years later and Billy (now played by Halloween Ends‘ Rohan Campbell) is an aimless drifter, murdering in motel rooms at the behest of the malevolent baritone voice in his head (Mark Acheson, best known as Elf‘s Mailroom Guy) telling him to “Kill the naughty or else the nice will die.” Still haunted by that fateful Christmas, Billy carries out the voice’s murderous whims while dressed as a Temu Santa. Fleeing his most recent crime scene, Billy hops a bus to the underpopulated small town of Hackett, Wisconsin, where he meets Pam (Ruby Modine), the clerk at her father’s (David Lawrence Brown) quaint Christmas shop. Immediately smitten, and despite his inner voice’s protests, Billy rips a “Help Wanted” sign out of the shop’s window with the confidence of a Depression-era train-hopper and scores a job as a stock boy.
Silent Night, Deadly Night fares best when in Hallmark mode, punctuating stock beats with a quick kill. The small-town meet-cute and Billy’s stay at the local inn evoke the cozy comforts of those low-effort seasonal delights. But the movie can’t decide which kind of Hallmark movie it is. Is this one where he finds the spirit of Christmas in a small town’s warmth and a high school sweetheart, or one where he’s dating Santa Claus’ daughter? The movie isn’t sure, so it does what any self-respecting slasher would do: It adds unnecessary side plots and superfluous business from different versions of the script to gum up the works. An ancient advent calendar where Billy counts down the days in the blood of his victims, a body-swap plot pulled from Child’s Play, and another local killer known as “The Snatcher” all provide frequent diversions that lead to an overcooked turkey. As the film progresses, it works itself into knots to frame Billy as an antihero. When the movie can’t find sufficient evidence of his victims’ wrongdoing, Nelson retcons what he can. A handsy older neighbor turns out to be a wife killer! The town Scrooge is actually a white nationalist! It’s all enough to pad out the original’s overlong 82 minutes to an unforgivable 95.
As Billy, Rohan once again takes on the role of proxy killer, trading Halloween Ends‘ absentee Michael Myers for a low-rent Eddie Brock. Rohan makes for a good drifter and, if you squint hard enough, some semblance of humanity can be spotted in his brief, quasi-charming flirtations with Modine. However, he’s restrained by the film’s structure, which retains the killer’s POV. That keeps this underlit remake in the lurid exploitation mold of the original, but it does nothing for the suspense. With plenty of splatter but minimal gore, Nelson often cuts away just as Billy’s axe makes contact, as if he were conspicuously aiming his unrated film at the confines of an R. So why bother, beyond boasting “unrated” as a marketing stunt? Nelson’s attempts to convince us that these Billy’s victims are “naughty” enough to have their heads hacked off are a struggle throughout, leading to a third-act info dump that serves to make a neo-Nazi even worse (she also kills people!). In that third act, Nelson’s merciful editor, Geoff Klein, reveals how much of the film he has excised, condensing what was likely a prologue down into a last-minute, cut-to-ribbons flashback.
There is an original take on Silent Night, Deadly Night somewhere in this film. Actually, there are several. But the movie is noncommittal toward all of them, as if Nelson were playing whack-a-mole with studio notes. At times, the movie is aiming for the nihilistic satire of this year’s Toxic Avenger, but lacks that film’s strong point of view and consistent sense of humor. Unfortunately for all involved, the best version of Silent Night, Deadly Night remains the Tales From The Crypt segment “And All Through The House,” in which a femme fatale’s Christmas Eve murder plot is interrupted by an escaped mental patient sporting a Santa costume. There’s tension, tinsel, and simplicity to that story that Silent Night, Deadly Night‘s overworked script would wrap in lights and baubles, as if over-decorating a dead tree. Silent Night, Deadly Night misses its holiday mark and lands in the no-man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s: There’s not much going on as unrealistic anticipation leads to disappointment around how you spent your night.
Director: Mike P. Nelson
Writer: Mike P. Nelson
Starring: Rohan Campbell, Ruby Modine, David Lawrence Brown, David Tomlinson, Mark Acheson
Release Date: December 12, 2025
