Holiday horror is usually all tinsel and trauma, but the new remake of “Silent Night, Deadly Night” decides it also wants a to add a warm hug, a nervous breakdown, and a full-blown Nazi Christmas party for good measure. Director Mike P. Nelson takes the infamous killer Santa premise and rebuilds it as a supernatural slasher with a bruised, endearing Hallmark heart at the center, following a gentler, wounded version of Billy Chapman and the woman who accidentally falls in love with the monster in the red suit. It is romantic, nasty, and weird in exactly the right Christmas-y ways.
On this episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo is joined by star Rohan Campbell and director Mike P. Nelson to dig into reinventing a cult slasher, balancing sweetness with splatter, staging set pieces like a Nazi Christmas rager and a nightmare ball pit, and where a potential sequel could take Billy and Pam.
For Rohan Campbell, the key to this new Billy is treating him less like an 80s slasher machine and more like a guy doing a very grim job while trying to protect something fragile inside.
“I think the biggest thing for me is trying to get into the headspace of somebody that can do those things. Like the justification and, this sounds so insane, the sort of doing-your-job aspect to the action, like taking out the trash,” Campbell explained. “We spent two weeks shooting what felt like a rom-com or like a romance movie, and me and Mike and Ruby kept looking at each other and we’d be like, ‘What are we doing?!’ And then the next week we’d be chopping somebody to bits or we’d be at a Christmas party with some unsavory folk. And it was quite the ride to try and go back and forth.”
That off-kilter tone is baked in from the script up. Nelson wanted to hold onto the DNA that made the original notorious, but he never set out to repeat it beat for beat. Growing up, he was obsessed with the VHS box art of Santa climbing out of a chimney with an axe, long before he actually saw the film. When Bloody Disgusting and Cineverse reached out through Brad Miska after their work on “V/H/S/85,” that old poster became the North Star.
“I’ve always been inspired by the original poster,” Nelson said. “That Santa coming out of the chimney with the ax, it’s one of the most iconic and almost most perfect movie posters ever created because you can create an entire story in your head within five minutes by looking at it. I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies, so I made them up in my brain when I perused all of these movies. When Brad called and said, we have this property, we’re looking for a take, I hit the ground running. I gave them this kind of strange new take on it with, again, enough of the DNA from the original that left an impression on me.”
Part of that reinvention meant sanding off some of the meaner, more exploitative tendencies of the 1984 film and leaning into a warmer, character-driven story. Nelson wanted the movie to feel cozy even when it is caving in skulls.
“I wanted to do something that was much more jovial and just fun,” he said. “The first one has its place and I think it does something really unique. I think it’s tonally really strange and unique. But I did want to do something that was a bit more fun and raucous and just like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m watching this right now.’ At the core it needed to be about these two characters. I wanted to do something that was warmer and cozier that had more heart, that wasn’t as depressing. It’s not a plot movie. It’s a character movie, and we’re just watching that kind of grow and how these two grow and how they get closer.”
That focus on heart resonated with Campbell, who connected the film’s sentimental streak to the horror community itself.
“For me, it’s just always trying to find the heart in things,” Campbell said. “I don’t know about you, but I fell in love with movies because if something has heart, it always makes you feel warm and it’s always a good time, no matter the content. There’s so much heart in the horror community. As divisive as it can be, I just feel like it’s a heartfelt community. And so, Mike had written that down and it was about trusting that and just being there and everything was working, and just trying to inject a little heart into everything.”
Of course, the tonal high-wire act reaches full tilt with sequences like the Nazi Christmas party, where the quirkiness, the supernatural twist, and the axe-murder mayhem collide in one big, deranged holiday cocktail. Nelson says that set piece was never in danger.
“The Nazi Christmas party, that was like hands down, when I rolled that out, people were like, ‘Absolutely, that 100 percent has to happen, no question,” Nelson recalled. “This is the scene that needs to stay. We’ll make sure that money is there to make this happen. Still wasn’t enough money, but still, this is the world we live in. There was, at times, a question of, ‘Do we need to do more? In a post-‘Terrifier’ world, do we need to make things more gratuitous? Do we need more violence, more gore?’ I love my blood and I love my gore and I love my nasty kill scenes, but for me, I am a huge fan of Coen brothers violence where it just happens and you’re like, ‘Oh dear Lord, that just happened.’ You kind of sit there with it. That was the tone I wanted to go for.”
The film’s ending leaves the door cracked open for an even stranger sequel, one that would push deeper into the idea of never being alone in your own head. Campbell is all in.
“My conversation is let’s go make another movie,” Campbell said. “I would die to see that movie and I don’t know, not giving spoilers, but the dynamic of your partner being in your head and not having any time to yourself or thoughts to yourself, there’s something about where I’m just like, I need to see that movie in this universe.”
Nelson has already been quietly workshopping ideas with Cruz and Campbell, and claims their hypothetical Part Two gets pretty unhinged.
“It’s so funny because Ruby bugs me about it all the time,” he said. “I get a text from her that feels sometimes like once a week, like, ‘Sequel?’ When we’re out at the premiere or at Comic-Con, we start throwing ideas at each other. Then we get Rowan in the mix and it’s absolutely zany. It would be a great continuation while also being able to dive back into a little bit more of Charlie and see some things of Billy’s that we didn’t see in this one and why it pertains to what’s going on in the second movie.”
Campbell has already infamously planted himself firmly in the horror landscape with “Halloween Ends” and now “Silent Night, Deadly Night.” But as much as he’s been welcome with open arms by the horror community in early screenings of “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” he was not so fortunate with his turn in the “Halloween” franchise, as his character Corey Cunningham was quite possibly the most divisive in the entire series. Campbell says he understood the risk of playing one of the franchise’s most polarizing characters from the moment he read that script.
“Out the gate, immediately,” he said of realizing Corey would divide fans. “Reading it just felt like the fucking coolest horror indie. It just felt like this really cool character, like it just felt like a good movie. The first time I read it, I just forgot that people would care. Then being on set and stuff, you’re in a room with Michael Myers and it’s so iconic and it starts to dawn on you how much this means to people, because it means so much to me. However, that being said, I love that movie and I love Corey. Shoot me, I think we needed that movie.”
Looking ahead, Campbell is already at work on a mysterious Netflix sea-creature series with Josh Hartnett, Mackenzie Davis, Charlie Heaton, which he pitches as a very specific flavor of small-town genre story.
“We shot this summer and it was probably one of the best summers of my life,” he said. “It takes place in Newfoundland, Canada, which is such a distinct place. There’s a borderline Irish-Canadian accent and it’s sort of like ‘Fargo’ meets ‘Jaws.’ I’m so proud of it and so excited about it.”
As for dream franchises, now that Nelson has knocked his first reimagining out of the park, would he want to take a swing at another beloved property?
“‘Race With the Devil,’ Peter Fonda and Warren Oates,” he said without hesitation. “I’ve been obsessed with that movie. I think I saw that back in college and I have been a huge fan of it. It’s super underrated, not as well known. To me, it’s just one of the greats. That would be kind of a dream project. Literally horror movie, horror car chase movie, right? Those are three greatest words ever sold.”
“Silent Night, Deadly Night” is a bloody, heartfelt, unhinged holiday surprise that feels tailor-made to slide into annual December watchlists. The film hits theaters on December 12th. Listen to the full conversations with Rohan Campbell and Mike P. Nelson below.
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