The Silent Night, Deadly Night remake is better than the original, but more nice than naughty

Like a lot of similar controversies, this one was likely guided more by perception and advertisements than the movie itself, which, removed from any moral panic involving the corruption of innocent children, is pretty bad on its own terms. It’s not especially scary, not especially funny, and not all that much fun without the transgressive charge of watching something banned. So it makes sense that a 2025 remake would tweak almost everything about the original while still paying homage to its illicit history. But the new Silent Night, Deadly Night winds up going too far toward moral redemption, even as it improves upon the original.

The 1984 film opens with a five-year-old boy witnessing the brutal murder of his parents at the hands of a criminal dressed as Santa Claus. Writer-director Mike P. Nelson keeps a version of that backstory for the remake, but parcels it out over the course of the movie. He fills in additional details via occasional flashbacks in between scenes of an adult Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell from Halloween Ends) drifting into a small town, where he gets a stockroom job at a tchotchke shop. The audience is privy to a deep voice in Billy’s head that helps him select murder victims to feed a primal hunger to kill. Early on, we see Billy don, yes, a Santa suit, and gorily kill an older man as dictated by the voice. We also see the aftermath of an earlier kill when Billy is first introduced.

At first, it seems like the voice is supposed to be an intrusive mental illness, and it does interrupt some of Billy’s day-to-day life, especially when he tries to converse with his co-worker, the shop owner’s daughter Pam (Ruby Modine). But as the movie goes on, it becomes clear the voice in Billy’s head — an invention for this remake — is more akin to the movie version of Marvel antihero Venom. Nagging as it may be, it’s not necessarily irrational or unhinged. The voice alerts Billy to the presence of those who are “naughty,” and must be killed in order to protect those who are “nice.”

This is made most explicit in a mid-movie scene already circulated in the movie’s marketing, where Billy trails a prospective victim to a gathering that turns out to be a “white power Christmas” party, complete with dozens of attendees in full Nazi regalia. Billy dutifully locks the door and goes to town, dispatching dozens of Nazis as the movie makes the full transition from depicting a disturbed young man to a righteous Venom-style superhero. This almost functions as an extreme apology for the earlier version using Santa (or someone wearing his outfit, anyway) as a figure of menace. Here, it’s Billy’s Santa cosplay that allows him to take on a greater evil (though there remains the disturbing possibility that killing Nazis in 2025 is meant to court its own form of controversy).

Billy’s righteousness, however reluctant he becomes when he’d rather share a tender moment with Pam, engages more directly with the idea of Santa Claus than the earlier film, which mostly used the costume and the notion of killing the “naughty” as a snickering joke. The most gimmicky details in the new movie are more fun, like the big nazi-killing scene, or the fact that Billy’s annual sprees only last for the 24 days of an advent calendar, leading him to tote one around with him. It looks more like the Book of the Dead, and he seals each cardboard flap back up with a victim’s blood a la Dexter (another semi-virtuous killer carrying around a “dark passenger” in his brain). For all the flip horror violence, this movie is still a less cynical, more Christmassy, and altogether less grody holiday slasher than its dubious source material. (If you’re in the market for a nasty, quasi-psychological 1980s holiday slasher, 1980’s Christmas Evil is a lot better than the original Silent Night, Deadly Night.)

Eventually, though, Billy’s status as Christmas Venom (or Dexter Claus, take your pick) undermines the actual horror. The specific origin of the voice in Billy’s head isn’t exactly a twist, and is easy enough to guess after a certain point, but is too spoiler-y to discuss in detail. It’s not a spoiler, however, to note that even before the explanation, the movie has erased any sense of creepy ambiguity about this device. There’s little space to wonder whether he’s truly disturbed. Campbell walked this line between sympathy and monstrousness beautifully in Halloween Ends, where he had an eerily undefined, borderline supernatural relationship with Micahel Myers. Here, he’s playing a similar character in a movie designed mainly to vindicate his character, and maybe the whole killer-Santa subgenre, too.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. Silent Night, Deadly Night takes the material seriously without any suffocating fealty to its low-rent aesthetics. It also defines itself mostly on those terms — as a corrective that views its killer with maximum sympathy, rather than the exploitative cruelty that defines the original. Non-fans of that one, like me, will probably have a good time. But anyone heading to the new horror movie from Cineverse, distributors of the Christmas-horror gnarliness of Terrifier 3, hoping for some throwback controversy will find a movie that errs on the side of nice, rather than naughty.