All is not calm Locally shot Silent Night, Deadly Night remake shatters serenity of beloved Christmas carol By: Randall King Posted: 5:23 PM CST Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025

Back in December 1984, a little movie called Silent Night, Deadly Night caused a firestorm of controversy by juxtaposing the benign figure of Santa Claus with an axe-wielding maniac.

If the maniac was triggered to kill by proximity to the jolly old elf’s red suit and snow-white whiskers, the Reagan-era audiences of the day were double triggered. The unseasonable heat caused by protesters in front of cinemas ultimately drove the studio, TriStar, to pull the movie from theatres.

Of course, there’s nothing like a movie ban to spark interest in moviegoers, and Silent Night, Deadly Night would spawn three sequels and two remakes. (Both remakes, coincidentally, were shot in Manitoba.)

Lest anyone picture Mike P. Nelson, the writer-director of the newest iteration, as some kind of grinchy humbug, he appears on his Zoom call in front of an angel-topped Christmas tree, with winter light streaming through the windows of his home in Minneapolis, where he was born and raised.

Nelson has pulled off something of a Christmas miracle: beginning in April of this year, he shot 100 pages of script in just 22 days, and managed to assemble a solid, coherent, cohesive movie in time for a Christmas release on Friday.

“Yeah, we’ve got to keep that a secret, because I’m hoping I don’t have to do that again,” he says. “I’m hoping for the next project, whatever it may be, that we get a few more days added to that schedule.”

The film was produced by the same duo behind the original, Scott Schneid and Dennis Whitehead, four decades later after the property and the assets of its three sequels were taken away from them.

Even so, Schneid and Whitehead proved amenable to letting Nelson use the building blocks of the original film, but construct an entirely different toy, the same approach he took reinventing the established horror property Wrong Turn in 2021.

“That was huge,” Nelson says. “You’re always taking a risk when you dive into an IP (intellectual property) like this that has a following, especially with the original producers and you don’t know how close they are to the subject matter.”

The new version still has a troubled killer named Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell) stalking the residents of a small Midwestern town at Christmas time. But this Billy is miles removed from the villain of the original.

When Nelson submitted his reinvention to the producers, “it wasn’t a ‘yes, absolutely.’

“They took some time to think about it, but I think ultimately, they saw this reimagining could really give some new life to Silent Night, Deadly Night. And I think that’s what we did. So I give them a lot of credit for just taking that chance.”

Schneid had a low opinion of the 2012 remake, titled simply Silent Night, directed by Steven C. Miller, which starred Malcolm McDowell and Jamie King as small-town cops trying to catch a killer Santa during a Santa festival. Schneid called it “crapola,” which is harsh, Nelson says, given that Miller took a chance deviating from the original film.

“You do have to give credit if a director’s going to give its own vibe so it will stand out. And I think that one definitely does.”

Also, Nelson’s film casts the psycho Santa from that movie, Winnipeg actor/stuntman Rick Skene, in a role as one of Billy’s targets.

“I give (the producers) a lot of credit for just taking that chance.”

“Rick Skene, baby, that guy, he’s legit,” says Nelson, laughing. “He was so much fun to work with.”

Alas, that was as close as the production could get to hiring any actors from past iterations; Nelson says he and the producers pushed for it, but budgetary contraints prevented it.

That said, the city delivered talent both behind the camera (producers Jeremy Torrie and Tanya Brunel, casting director Jim Heber, production designer Oscar Fenoglio, costume designer Laura DeLuca and makeup whiz Doug Morrow) and in front of it.

“I’ve got to give props to Sharon Bajer, who does just an incredible job, and David Lawrence Brown, David Tomlinson, I mean, those guys, even just the smallest of roles, they just, they came in and they killed. And even the kids were fantastic,” he says, giving a shout-out to Logan Sawyer, who plays “Young Billy.”

“And that crew worked so hard,” he says. “Once we got into it and they started to see what we were doing, trying to do something fun and unique, I think everybody just locked in.”

Silent Night, Deadly Night opens this weekend at Polo Park and St. Vital cinemas.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com