No list of ridiculous holiday horror films would be complete without Silent Night, Deadly Night; certainly not the first slasher flick about a murderous Santa going on a rampage, but certainly the most iconic, and the one with the best title. And certainly the only one where a woman gets killed by being impaled on the antlers of a stuffed trophy deer. It's more than a little bit of a rip on Christmas Evil but man, what a rip off Silent Night, Deadly Night is. It even begins in much the same way as Christmas Evil, with a young boy who, after witnessing his parents' brutal murder at the hands of a man clad in a Santa suit on Christmas, grows up in a Catholic orphanage and who'd've guess it? - winds up becoming a serial killer himself. A totally OTT Halloween knock-off dressed in tinsel, Silent Night, Deadly Night nonetheless managed a fair more amount of controversy than Michael Myers ever got, with PTA groups campaigning for the film to be banned. They didn't want Christmas spoiling for the children! Won't somebody please think of the children? Apparently not, since despite that and a particularly scathing review by Siskel and Ebert that involved them reading the full credits on air saying "shame, shame" after each one, it spawned five sequels. Five. The absolute nadir of which had to be the second, which doesn't take place at Christmas and involves garbage day. Just watch the clip. It's a gift. A festive gift.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
