🪓🎅🏻 The Blood on Santa Claus 🪓🎅🏻

This week, a selection of horrors each featuring an axe-wielding Santa Claus (light spoilers for the first) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Silent Night, Deadly Night, dir. Charles E. Sellier Jr., 1984.

1. Creepy Christmas. Silent Night, Deadly Night is standout piece for demonstrating the malleability of seemingly solid cultural images—even stock, iconic ones. The movie is full of familiar Christmas stuff—Santa figurines and animatronics, Christmas trees, toys—rendered creepy by a change of mood, light, music, or framing. Nutcrackers are not scary. Here, in a zoom on a darkly lit row of them, they are.
2. Portraiture. Silent Night, Deadly Night approaches its fairly ludicrous idea—a killer dressed as Santa Claus—with an attempt at a believable pathway for its protagonist from childhood trauma to killer Santa. This was probably always a doomed endeavor, and the pathway never quite makes sense, but the result is an opening third that works as an affecting portrait of a disturbed child. Here we have a pretty convincing story about a misunderstood, mistreated orphan. Then things head in a weirder direction.
3. Pursuers. Horror movies are full of victims totally unaware of any lurking dangers, and they also have the characters who know exactly what’s going on. The iconic character here is Donald Pleasance's Dr. Samuel Loomis in Halloween. He shows up in Haddonfield raving about the evil he’s chasing. Silent Night, Deadly Night offers a different version of this type of pursuer. Sister Margaret, a nun from the orphanage our killer Santa grew up in, also knows exactly what’s going on, and she is also on his trail. But she cares about him. For her, he’s sick, not evil, and she’s trying to help. There’s an added quality of tragedy here—an empathetic pursuer who’s worried about victims but whose heart is breaking for the killer as well.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ Silent Night, Deadly Night, dir. Mike P. Nelson, 2025.

4. Mr. Claus's wild ride. How do you get a killer in a Santa suit? The original Silent Night, Deadly Night's naturalistic, psychological portrait approach could not sustain credibility when its end-goal was so silly. Mike P. Nelson’s 2025 remake takes a different approach. Here, a killer in a Santa costume is the foundation of a bonkers, supernatural, pulp horror crime story. Instead of attempting a believable progression from child to killer Santa, the remake takes the goofy notion of a killer Santa as pretext for a wild ride. It’s unrecognizable as a remake but a successful approach to the killer Santa idea.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ And All Through The House (Tales from the Crypt), dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1989.

5. ". . . be very careful what you axe for for Christmas." For fun, light horror fare—with a killer Santa—the right holiday season watch is the Tales from the Crypt episode And All Through The House. A single extended set-piece in which a woman kills her husband and attempts to hide the body the same night a killer Santa’s rampaging through the neighborhood, this is a great, 22-minute, holiday horror amuse-bouche. With the Crypt Keeper in Santa costume!

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