30th Anniversary Silent Night, Deadly Night Retrospective: Part 2
At the end of Silent Night, Deadly Night, young Ricky inherits a Chapman family heirloom: the blood-soaked axe that his big brother picked up from Ira’s Toys, and used to cut off the heads of humans and snowmen alike. Given the cliffhanger of a finale, not to mention the fact that the controversy surrounding Silent Night, Deadly Night provided the film with press on all the major news networks, it was only natural that a sequel wasn’t going to be far behind. This is the horror genre, after all.
Silent Night, Deadly Night’s director Charles Sellier was approached by LIVE Entertainment to helm Part 2 of the holiday horror story, a job that he couldn’t in good conscience sign up for. Sellier never expected that the 1984 slasher flick about a killer dressed as Santa would cause so much controversy or upset so many people, and he simply didn’t want to attach himself to another film that had the potential to yield the same results.
Related Story: 30th Anniversary Silent Night, Deadly Night Retrospective: Part 1
Related Story: 30th Anniversary Silent Night, Deadly Night Retrospective: Part 3
With Sellier off the project, producers patrolled the waters for fresh blood, giving the job to young editors Lee Harry and Joseph H. Earle. The two men were staff editors at a post-production facility in Burbank, California at the time, and they got the gig the way lots of people get jobs in Hollywood: by knowing the right people.
“Our boss was a friend of the new distributor who bought the recently denounced Silent Night, Deadly Night,” Harry recalls, “so we probably got the job by default.”
Why would producers hire two editors to direct the sequel to a well-known horror film? Here’s where things get really interesting in regards to Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2, making it one of the more bizarre horror sequels ever made.
Believe it or not, the producers’ original plan was to simply recut Silent Night, Deadly Night, adding absolutely no new footage to the mix. Harry and Earle were instructed to use their editing skills to make Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 look like a different film than the original, which would be repackaged as a sequel. Though no doubt an easy job for the editors, the two men saw little purpose in the task, and set out to convince the producers to rethink their strategy.
Eager to get their feet wet and gain some experience as filmmakers, Harry and Earle pitched the producers on the idea of interweaving new footage in with clips from the original film, as a way of continuing the story while at the same time fulfilling their requests to pad out the bulk of the film with flashbacks. Though Harry admits that the idea of having Ricky relay the events of Silent Night, Deadly Night to a psychiatrist doesn’t make all that much sense, given how young he was at the time, the producers were sold on the pitch and production rolled on.
The novice filmmakers banged out the Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 screenplay in a matter of days, and filming for the new scenes began in December of 1986 – two years after the controversial release of Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Shot over the course of 10 days in California, on a budget of a mere $250,000, the new footage ended up comprising around 45 minutes of the film’s 88 minute run-time, mostly focusing on Ricky following in his brother’s footsteps and going on a similarly violent Christmas Eve killing spree.
Traumatized by events from his childhood (understandably so!) and set off by the color red, Ricky impales one man with an umbrella and cleverly uses jumper cables to blow another man’s eyeballs clean out of his skull, before ending up at his final destination: Mother Superior’s house, wherein he decapitates the cruel old woman who all those years ago tormented his brother Billy.
Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2 was a production that was no doubt doomed from the start, a combination of a lazy concept, inexperienced filmmakers and a lack of time and money seemingly working together to prevent the sequel from ever being a noteworthy installment in the annals of 80s slasher cinema. Oddly enough, however, it was all of these things that ended up coming together to solidify Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2’s status as a bonafide cult classic, a film that still to this day is viewed as one of the ‘best worst movies’ the horror genre has ever birthed.
THE RETROSPECTIVE CONTINUES ON THE NEXT PAGE!
Categorized:News Retrospectives
