User:DaveJB/Silent Night, Deadly Night (film series)

The Silent Night, Deadly Night is a series of American horror films produced between 1984 and 1992. The films have, with the exception of the fourth, focused around murders and horror set pieces themed around the Christmas season. The first two films received limited cinematic releases, whereas the remaining three were direct-to-video releases.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
The first film in the series revolves around Billy Chapman, who as a young boy is left orphaned when a robber disguised as Santa Claus murders his parents, orphaning Billy and his younger brother Ricky. The two are admitted to an orphanage, where Billy's sanity is gradually worn down by the abusive Mother Superior. Eventually, when the now-teenaged Billy is made to work as Santa at a local toy store, his sanity cracks and he begins a killing spree, targeting those who he deems naughty.

While the film was released without much publicity, a vocal campaign against the concept of a Christmas-based killer soon sprang up, and the film gained notoriety when Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel publicly "named and shamed" the film's writer, producer and director on national television. The film was quickly pulled from cinemas, but soon found success in the then-emerging VHS market, although protests would inevitably follow whenever it was re-released, and so print runs of the video (and DVD, more recently) have remained sporadic to this day.

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)
Billy's younger brother, now going by the name of Ricky Caldwell, is on death row, and is interviewed by a psychologist who hopes to understand what drove him to a killing spree in which he murdered his girlfriend, her boyfriend and several innocents. Ricky tells the story of his life, through extensive flashbacks to the first film.

The sequel notoriously used footage from the first film to make up half its running time, and in recent years has become something of a cult classic, in no small part due to the perceived overacting by its lead actor, Eric Freeman.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989)
After the events of the previous film Ricky Caldwell is left in a coma, suffering from brain damage and the replacement of part of his skull with a plastic casing. The surgeon in charge of his case attempts to use a blind teenage girl with psychic powers in order to communicate with him, but when Christmas comes around, Ricky awakens and seeks out the girl, killing anyone that stands in his way.

The film keeps some slasher elements as well as the character of Ricky, but is more of a psychological thriller than its two predecessors. While it was helmed by cult director Monte Hellman and produced in the hopes of finding a cinematic release, the producers were unable to find a distributor and so it became the first film in the franchise to be released direct to video. Although produced to an arguably higher technical standard than the second film, it is usually thought of as the worst in the series in pure entertainment value.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)
Upon hearing about a woman who died of apparent spontaneous combustion combined with falling from a building, a female reporter investigates her death, and a cult that the woman was formerly involved in. She is soon "initiated" into the cult against her will, and discovers that unless she completes the full initiation rites, she will suffer the same fate as the victim she is investigating.

Departing almost completely from the series' core themes, this film is more of an occult body horror story, and only tangentially related to Christmas. It has often been suspected that the film was conceived of as a standalone entry (indeed, director Brian Yuzna and writer Woody Keith were also responsible for the similarly themed cult classic Society) and produced as an entry in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series to secure funding.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1992)
The final film in the series returns to the idea of Christmas-themed killings, if not the scenario of the earlier films. After witnessing his father's death at the hands of a malicious toy, a young boy discovers that a local toymaker, Joe Petto, is planning to use similar toys to cause mass carnage on Christmas Day.

The fifth film kept largely the same creative team as the previous, although Brian Yuzna was only present as producer and co-writer this time round. Notably the film stars Mickey Rooney as Joe Petto, even though Rooney had been an ardent protester against the original film.