Silent Night, Bloody Night

No one who made 1972’s Silent Night, Bloody Night had much of a clue what the story was supposed to be, which sounds like a massive impediment, but it’s all good here in what is tantamount to a progression of darkening images and moods spun around the bare bones of an early Christmas slasher with haunted-house elements.

Coming out two years prior to Black Christmas, Theodore Geshuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night is at the least a pioneering subgenre offering, given that we didn’t really have Christmas-based murder and mayhem at the movie theater previously. This is a dark film that looks dark. You will see the likes of Christmas wreaths, but only if you peer hard into the gloom. There are no twinkling lights—unlike with Black Christmas—but instead an ooze of terminal night.

You deserve props if you understand the film’s backstory—or even care about it—but the interesting plot points concern Jeffrey Butler (James Patterson, who became ill during shooting and died before production was complete) trying to sell his late grandfather’s mansion in a small Massachusetts town, with said grandfather having died in a fire some 20 years earlier. There’s a catch, because of course there’d have to be: the mansion used to be an insane asylum. Jeffrey wanders into the home of Diane Adams (Mary Woronov)—people do a lot of stealthy turning up in this movie—who holds a gun on him, but they become friends and go off on a couple grisly missions together.

There are stretches where you have no idea what you’re looking at, and as much as Silent Night, Bloody Night helped usher in the body-count festive carnage of Black Christmas, it bears a more apparent stylistic stamp on the likes of Skinamarink (2022). How low can the lo-fi go? The answer is pretty low. There’s hiss and hair all over this thing. You put the movie on in the background and it’s there with you, accompanying whatever you’re doing, and every now and again, it provides a jolt.

John Carradine adds some gravitas. Not that his character says anything—he’s a mute who rings a bell. The most pronounced seasonal element—besides the references to the Christmas time of the year—are the various iterations of “Silent Night.” They’re threaded throughout the movie as a sort of auditory character—a constant, carol-based Grecian chorus, to mix mediums and regions.

The movie stalls when an attempt is made—and it’s no shorty—to account for what’s been going on, and the truth is, it hardly matters. You don’t need to understand. The film works best as a series of moments with some connection between them, but this is a mood-dominant work. It’s no Christmas version of Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, but it does have a film-school touch, and that’s not bad. (Though it is ironic how important fire is to such an oppressively blackened film.) Silent Night, Bloody Night most resounds as a historical curio, but an important one, because it suggested that a Christmas needn’t be a bloodless affair. We don’t get rivers of the stuff, but neither are we just talking Santa suits and reindeer-pulled sleighs either. 🩸