Publication Date: 12-17-2025

Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025) review

Dir. Mike P. Nelson

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

When a movie has now inspired two reboots, there’s grounds for concern on multiple fronts. The law of diminishing returns has never been more evident than the precipitous drop-off in quality from Black Christmas (2006) to Black Christmas (2019). That said, Mike P. Nelson’s Silent Night, Deadly Night — the franchise’s first film since the 2012 remake Silent Night — surprises with its slick subversion of Santasploitation and further announces Rohan Campbell as a young actor fit to be a rare “scream king.”

Upon its release in 1984, the original Silent Night, Deadly Night was hugely controversial due to its depiction of a murderous Santa Claus. Parents were outraged if their children saw a TV spot for the film. Christian activists were disgusted by the bastardization of the meaning of Christmas. Cult horror movie fans were quick to flock to theaters, or later their local video store to snatch one of the VHS copies. Several sequels followed, all the way up to a fifth movie that revolved around possessed stuffed animals. Nowadays, the world itself is more frightening than the idea of Santa Claus wielding an axe or a flame-thrower, but Silent Night, Deadly Night grinds its own axe by adopting a Dexter-like narrative that has it playing like a demented Hallmark holiday movie.

Like the original film, Nelson’s remake opens with eight-year-old Billy Chapman watching Santa Claus gun down his parents in cold blood. 20 years later, Billy (Campbell) is aloof and alone in the world, and every December, burdened with a baritone voice in his head (Mark Acheson) imploring to “kill the naughty” or he will be killed. He dons his gay apparel, which makes him look like a budget mall Santa, and heads to the tiny town of Hackett, Wisconsin following his most recent murdering spree.

In Hackett, he gets a job at a Christmas shop run by a young woman named Pam (Ruby Modine) and her father (David Lawrence Brown). The voice in his head tells him not to get too close, but he can’t help but spill his guts (figuratively, in this case) to Pam, regarding trauma and the pain he feels during the holiday season. It starts to make him pause about what he’s going, but when a grimy group of unapologetic neo-Nazis are gathered for a holiday party to celebrate their pure Aryan blood, it’s hard not to seize the opportunity to wreck the halls.

Writer/director Mike P. Nelson has quickly become one of the most under-the-radar horror directors. Most recently, he directed Sweet Revenge, the first appearance of Jason Voorhees in film since the 2009 reboot. Moreover, Nelson’s reboot of Wrong Turn had every potential to set up a slew of bad puns related to its title, but it ended up being an improvement on the original, grounded in the concept of a secret society instead of hungry cannibals. The aforementioned Nazi slaughter scene shows Nelson tried to infuse Silent Night, Deadly Night with a similar brand of commentary on our modern political hellscape that he explored in Wrong Turn, but the end result feels comparatively slight.

What Nelson does accomplish is making the slight concept of a “killer Santa movie” succeed on the merits of its characters. His iteration of Silent Night, Deadly Night reminded me a lot of Black Christmas (2006). It’s bloody and brutal, and establishes itself on the merits of its horrific story that has lasting impact on its characters, obviously Rohan Campbell’s Billy. Speaking of Campbell, he announced his presence in the horror genre as Corey, Michael Myers’ protégé, in Halloween Ends. As he was in that film, Campbell is very strong here, frightened, vulnerable, and at times, intense. In an era of “scream queens” and “final girls” causing great debate and discourse in various facets of horror fandom, here’s a scream king making a name for himself. As is the case with Halloween Ends, I hold out hope that Nelson’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, like Black Christmas (2006) and even Halloween III: Season of the Witch, will undergo a significant reevaluation in the future. Perhaps that will occur in another 10-15 years when we almost certainly will see another Silent Night, Deadly Night remake/reboot/requel.

My review of Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker
My review of Silent Night (2012)

Starring: Rohan Campbell, Ruby Modine, David Lawrence Brown, David Tomlinson, and Mark Acheson. Directed by: Mike P. Nelson.