\n\tSPOILER ALERT:\u00a0This post contains minor spoilers from \u201cSilent Night, Deadly Night,\u201d now in theaters.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 1984 slasher \u201cSilent Night, Deadly Night\u201d was an above-average movie, which grew in infamy due to advertising that depicted a bloodied, axe-wielding Santa. Nationwide protests to shield children from the images coincided with the opening, which, of course, had the unintentional effect of drumming up more business. This ultimately led to four more chapters in the series and a loose 2012 reboot, yet most of the movies haven\u2019t stood the test of time in the horror community compared to franchises like \u201cHalloween\u201d or \u201cA Nightmare on Elm Street.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn fact, horror filmmaker Mike P. Nelson says his first experience with \u201cDeadly Night\u201d wasn\u2019t the film itself, but rather the advertising campaign.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI was born in \u201982 and the movie came out in \u201984,\u201d Nelson says. \u201cI do feel like a lot of people my age who weren\u2019t able to watch the movie remember that poster<\/a>: Santa Claus, but then he\u2019s got an axe, and he\u2019s coming down the chimney. That left a pretty big impression on me. From there, that movie was always forbidden. Not that my parents were like on the whole bandwagon of \u201cBan this movie,\u201d but like horror movies in general, it was off limits. So I didn\u2019t see it until much later in life.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tPerhaps that\u2019s why, when he was asked if he wanted to pitch an idea for a remake, Nelson went with a bold vision that wasn\u2019t nostalgically beholden to the plot of the original.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt was super important to me to not over-think it,\u201d he says. \u201cI think it\u2019s so easy to go into these and be like, \u2018Oh my God, what does everybody want to see?\u2019 And then you get mush. You get a gray pile of mush because you\u2019re either trying to satisfy everybody or it\u2019s too close to the original.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe result is a wholly different \u201cSilent Night, Deadly Night,\u201d written and directed by Nelson, in theaters Friday via Cineverse. Outside of some key elements and nods to the original film series, it is nowhere near a beat-by-beat remake of the original. In Nelson\u2019s vision, a young Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell) witnesses a family tragedy perpetrated by a psychotic Santa. This causes him to snap and grow up to become a red-suited killer himself, guided by a mysterious imaginary voice in his head. But once he falls in love with a young woman (Ruby Modine) in a small town with her own issues, things go in very unexpected \u2014\u00a0and bloody \u2014\u00a0directions.<\/p>\n \n\tSurprisingly, Nelson says the romantic thread of \u201cDeadly Night\u201d took inspiration from Will Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel\u2019s quirky, mismatched flirtation in another holiday favorite, 2003\u2019s \u201cElf<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI\u2019d be lying if I said that had no influence,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have two very different people in our movie, obviously, but they have their thing. Billy literally has a demon in his head, and Pam is dealing with her own demons and explosive personality disorder. What does that look like when those two people come together? Is it explosive? Is it perfect? Or is it explosive perfection? It\u2019s this perfect merging of these people that are going through crazy shit.\u201d<\/p>\n