The most successful horror film to hit theaters on November 9, 1984, was not Wes Craven’s masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street, but a low-budget slasher about Santa Claus. This auspicious day in cinema history is the birthday of two iconic killers, Freddy Kruger (Robert Englund) and Billy Claus, a traumatized teen who wanders through a snowy Christmas Eve punishing the naughty. One has transcended the horror genre and remains recognizable to mainstream audiences, while the other sparked one of the most bizarre uproars in horror history.
Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night was directly inspired by genre classics like Halloween and Friday the 13th, seeking to wring similar slasher fun out of a prominent date on the calendar. But something about its December setting outraged parents and critics alike.
Sellier Jr.’s film begins with a horrific Christmas Eve when 5-year-old Billy (Jonathan Best) watches his parents being murdered in a carjacking gone wrong. As his infant brother screams in his car seat, Billy watches from nearby bushes as a man dressed in a Santa suit shoots his father in the head, then sexually assaults his mother before slitting her throat. Unsurprisingly, the traumatized boy will go on to have a dark relationship with the December holiday, egged on by Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin), the cruel headmistress of the orphanage that becomes his home. At eighteen, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) finds himself talked into posing as Santa while working as a stock boy for a neighborhood toy store. This triggering task — combined with witnessing another sexual assault — sends Billy on a bloody rampage through the otherwise peaceful town, punishing anyone he perceives to be on the naughty list.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 1984
This admittedly campy film has gone on to become a cult holiday staple for nihilistic genre fans looking to add cinematic carnage to their festive watch lists. It’s a classic example of Christmas horror, with creative kills decked out in seasonal style. A nearly naked woman (genre darling Linnea Quigley) is impaled on a set of antlers mounted in a wood-paneled den while carolers troll the snowy streets.
The film is also filled with delightfully jarring moments like a child punching Saint Nick in the face and a frightened police chief ordering his deputies to “shoot all Santas on sight.” It spawned four sequels, each more perplexing than the next, and a bizarrely entertaining 2012 reboot. Genre author Armando Muñoz adds salaciousness to this already outlandish story in a 2023 novelization, while Mike P. Nelson’s remake is set to hit theaters later this week, starring the Halloween franchise’s newest masked killer, Rohan Campbell. Love it or hate it, Silent Night, Deadly Night is foundational to the holiday horror subgenre, increasing its popularity with each passing year. But Sellier Jr.’s film was reviled upon its initial release, placing Billy Claus firmly on the naughty list.
By 1984, the concept of a killer Kriss Kringle was hardly new. The 1972 anthology film Tales from the Crypt sees Joan Collins chased by a maniacal Saint Nick, followed in 1980 by two Santa slashers: Christmas Evil and To All a Goodnight. And let’s not forget the perfection of Bob Clark‘s progressive 1974 slasher Black Christmas and the whimsical gore of Joe Dante‘s Gremlins, released just six months before Sellier Jr.’s notorious film. All traffic in blending horror with seasonal tradition, yet none sparked outrage like Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 1984
Though the film made a modest $1.4 million on its opening weekend, outperforming A Nightmare on Elm Street and recouping its $750,000 budget, protesters swarmed theaters with angry signs reading, “Deck the halls with holly, not bodies” and “Santa brings JOY, not pain!” One Milwaukee mother, Kathleen Eberhardt, was so outraged that she created Citizens Against Movie Madness, or CAMM, specifically to boycott the film. This outsized reaction did not stop with concerned parents. The Asbury Park Press ran a scare piece called “Some Say Movie May Cause Irreparable Harm,” warning that Silent Night, Deadly Night could spark phobic reactions in children while causing them to regress in their toilet training. A mall Santa quoted in the article likened the film’s concept to a murderous Easter Bunny and went on to say, “I think it’s totally unconscionable, and theater managers who show it are irresponsible and have no feelings for the holidays.”
Critics were similarly cold, with Variety deeming it “bargain basement” and “(unintentionally) hilarious,” while others simply declined to review. Perhaps most damning was a scathing segment by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on their syndicated show At the Movies. Siskel mirrored his contempt for Friday the 13th by deeming Silent Night, Deadly Night, “sick and sleazy and mean-spirited.” He would go on to name those involved with the film’s creation, including Sellier, Jr., writer Michael Hickey, and producer Ira Barmak, declaring all profits “blood money.” He concluded by naming it one of the two most “contemptible” films he’d ever seen alongside Meir Zarchi‘s I Spit on Your Grave — which, in hindsight, reads as a compliment.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 1984
But this furor begs an obvious question: considering the film’s aforementioned predecessors, how did Billy end up on cinema’s naughty list, and why was this fairly standard slasher singled out? After all, the film is rated R, meaning the children protesters who were so desperate to shield would not be allowed to see it in the first place. While maddening to explore the makings of any moral panic, much of this particular outrage can be traced to the film’s marketing campaign. Silent Night, Deadly Night was distributed by Tri-Star Pictures. At the time best known for Frank Oz’s The Muppets Take Manhattan, the company would go on to release mega-hits like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Basic Instinct, and Rambo: First Blood Part II.
Possibly hoping to repeat the success of Halloween, Tri-Star had planned a full promotional packet, leaning into the holiday connection with the tagline, “You’ve made it through Halloween, now try and survive Christmas.” The original trailer begins with an idyllic holiday toy store, followed by Santa pulling a gun from his pocket, strangling a man with Christmas lights, and jumping out of the snow to decapitate a sledding teen. Ads featuring many of the film’s iconic kills ran during a prominent NFL game between the Green Bay Packers and the New Orleans Saints and in ad breaks for Three’s Company and Little House on the Prairie — the latter beloved by this writer’s mother for its wholesome and steadfastly inoffensive content.
Though ads were later relegated to after 9 p.m., these placements achieved the intended effect, at least from a visibility standpoint. While Christmas Evil and To All a Goodnight were able to fly mostly under the radar, Billy and his snowy axe were front and center on network television. Parents with no intention of ever seeing the film cried foul and tried to censor the release for everyone else. Tri-Star would eventually cave to public pressure and pull the film from some 400 theaters before its planned wide release.
Adding to this draconian decision, the distribution company had just wrapped filming on the family friendly Santa Claus: The Movie while eyeing a 1985 release. Tri-Star was also owned by Columbia, then a subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company known for its Norman Rockwell-esque holiday ads, which heavily feature a pink-cheeked and winking Saint Nicholas.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 1984
Despite this frustrating moral panic, protests may have ultimately bolstered the film to its status as a holiday classic. Public outrage never lasts forever, and none of the franchise’s four sequels sparked equal furor, though they also never matched the original film’s box office haul. And it must be said that each successive Silent Night, Deadly Night film grows more nonsensical and disconnected from Hickey’s original premise, flirting with “so bad it’s good” territory.
The moral panic came full circle when iconic childhood actor Mickey Rooney, who once said of the 1984 original, “How dare they! I’m all for the first amendment, but . . . don’t give me Santa Claus with a gun going to kill someone. The scum who made that movie should be run out of town,” starred as a maniacal toy shop owner in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker.
First to be placed on the naughty list, Billy is far from the last cinematic Saint Nick to pick up a deadly weapon. In addition to his little brother Ricky (Eric Freeman), who would helm the lovably ridiculous Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, a series of killer Kriss Kringles would spin this relative anomaly into a subgenre in and of itself. The 1989 film Deadly Games follows a murderous Father Christmas attempting to enter a family home, and John A. Russo‘s Santa Claws is a low-budget exploitation film which sees a mentally unstable cinema fan kill in a black version of the iconic suit. Santa’s Slay (2005) stars professional wrestler Bill Goldberg as a sinister Santa cursed to deliver gifts, while Saint (2010) retraces European folklore, taking the world-famous figure in a supernatural direction.
Silent Night, Deadly Night 2025
Modern examples include the 2022 gorefest Christmas Bloody Christmas, in which a robotic Father Christmas goes on a neon killing spree, and Violent Night, which positions Claus (David Harbour) as a disillusioned Viking warrior tasked with saving the daughter of a wealthy family. And of course, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) takes a turn in the red suit in Terrifier 3, which eschews the franchise’s typical Halloween setting and follows the sinister showman in late December.
With Nelson’s Silent Night, Deadly Night remake set to take December by storm and Christmas horror going mainstream, the tide seems to have turned on killer Saint Nicks. After all, recent B-movie adaptations of beloved children’s stories like Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey and Bambi: The Reckoning prove that any story can be taken in a scary direction and any figure, no matter how wholesome, can be perceived as dangerous. Billy may have been first on the naughty list and received a lot of unfair criticism, but as the years go by, he’s been joined by more and more of his bearded brethren whose red Santa suits are splattered with blood.
This article is presented by Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Produced by Bloody Disgusting, the grizzly update to the most controversial horror film ever made stars Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends) and Ruby Modine (Happy Death Day), directed by Mike P. Nelson (V/H/S 85). Exclusively in theaters December 12, 2025.
The post First on the Naughty List: How ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night’ Birthed a Reign of Killer Santas appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.