Santa’s Slay: Ranking the Silent Night Deadly Night Series
Spreading Holiday Fear
The Silent Night Deadly Night series has never been one of the top horror franchises (hell, I didn’t even bother to rank it in my franchise tier list), but I’m sure plenty of genre fans watch these movies during the Christmas season.
The series immediately became embroiled in controversy after the chilling first trailer for Silent Night Deadly Night was released. It appeared to portray Santa as a cold-blooded murderer. The movie is actually about a traumatized young man who commits homicides while wearing a Santa outfit on Christmas Eve.
Let’s be honest – none of these movies are great. This franchise is a mess. They range from boring to hilariously terrible to relatively decent. But it’s a fun series to watch around the holidays. It may surprise you that not all of them are about a maniac in a Santa suit.
Below are my rankings of all six movies. A seventh, a reboot, is planned for a 2025 release.
Other Franchise Rankings:
Silent Night Series Rankings
6. Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out (1989)
Silent Night, Deadly Night 3, subtitled Better Watch Out, is the first installment of the series that does not feature a crazed maniac in a Santa costume. In fact, “Santa” is one of the victims this time. It ranks last because it has the one truly irredeemable flaw of horror movies: it’s boring!
This one is set a few years after the previous installment. Ricky (now played by Bill Moseley) has been lying in a comatose state ever since he was shot by the police at the conclusion of Silent Night, Deadly Night 2. Sadly, Moseley is wasted here. The script doesn’t allow him to show any personality. In fact, all the actors in this movie seem comatose.
The main character is Laura (Samantha Scully), a blind psychic who experiences terrifying visions of Ricky’s memories. A doctor is working with Laura and hopes to exploit her connection to the crazed killer.
Almost all of the kills in this movie are offscreen. I know this movie had a tiny budget, but this is just lazy. Silent Night Deadly Night 3’s idea of building tension is to slowly zoom into a victim’s face while they scream.
5. Silent Night Deadly Night 2 (1987)
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 should be titled Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 1.5. This movie contains roughly half an hour of flashbacks composed of footage from the first movie. After Billy’s death at the end of the first movie, Ricky (Eric Freeman) picks up where his brother left off. His goal is to finish the job and finally get revenge on Mother Superior, who is now retired and living in seclusion.
Eric Freeman’s performance is by far the most memorable aspect of this movie. His acting isn’t good, but it’s sure as hell entertaining. The outlandish ways he delivers his lines, the wild eyebrow raises, and the cartoonish facial expressions have helped make SNDN 2 a “so bad it’s good” cult classic. This is a terrible but hilarious movie that never takes itself seriously.
Of course, it was probably hard for Freeman to take his role seriously when he has to say ridiculous dialogue like, “It sounded like a squirrel getting its nuts squeezed!” and “You tend to get paranoid when everyone around you gets dead!”
4. Silent Night Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker (`1991)
The weirdness continues in part 5! This one is loosely connected to part 4 but has no plot connection to the other installments in the Silent Night Deadly Night series. This time, it’s about killer toys and an evil toymaker. Mickey Rooney, of all people, stars as Joe Petto, the owner of an old-fashioned toy store. He and his creepy and enigmatic son, Pino (Brian Bremer), creates toys that are capable of murder.
Sarah (Jane Higginson) and her son Derek (William Thorne) run afoul of the toys. One contraption kills Derek’s dad early in the movie, leaving him traumatized and mute. Desperate to save him, Sarah eventually discovers a dark secret about Joe and his son. This one has a batshit insane ending involving a murderous and horny android.
Silent Night 5 is passable entertainment, which is more than can be said about some of the movies in this series. It’s surreal seeing a longtime veteran like Rooney in one of these things. This movie is ridiculous and not scary at all, but at least it’s not boring.
3. Silent Night Deadly Night 4: The Initiation (1990)
Okay, so this is when the Silent Night Deadly Night series really gets crazy. I know, I know, we’ve seen a metric ton of insanity already. But this movie really takes the cake (and the Christmas tree)! The filmmakers must have been drinking a massive jug of spiked eggnog when they came up with this one. It’s a low bar to clear, but Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 is better acted and written than part 2 and 3.
This one abandons the storyline of the previous three films in favor of a brand new plot. Kim (Neith Hunter) is an investigative reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper. She is researching the disturbing and mysterious death of a young woman who appears to have died from spontaneous combustion.
This movie also features lots and lots of bugs. Why? Beats the hell out of me. If you like insect horror movies like Arachnophobia, this is worth checking out.
2. Silent Night (2012)
After a two decade drought, the series was rebooted with this installment, which is, more or less, a loose remake of the original. A crazed Santa killer is stalking a small, snowy Wisconsin town. He commits a series of extremely gruesome murders that target people he considers naughty, like adulterers and pornographers.
It’s up to a plucky young cop, Aubrey (Jaime King) to stop him. She pursues the fiend relentlessly, eventually battling him in a fiery climax at the police station. Aubrey clashes with her boss, a police chief played by Malcolm McDowell. He doesn’t believe she has what it takes to defeat the maniac.
Unlike the previous movies, Silent Night hides the identity of the killer until the final moments. He rarely speaks. You certainly don’t hear him spewing cartoonish wisecracks like Eric Freeman in the second movie. That helps make this Santa the creepiest villain of the Silent Night Deadly Night series.
1.Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
Silent Night, Deadly Night is about Billy, a traumatized young man who becomes a monster. Billy absolutely HATES the Christmas season, and for good reason. While traveling home on Christmas Eve, little Billy (accompanied by his baby brother Ricky) watches helplessly as his parents are murdered by a crazed criminal in a Santa outfit. The psycho tricks them into stopping to help him with car trouble.
The boys are placed in a Catholic orphanage ruled by the tyrannical Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin). She has zero sympathy for Billy and beats him when he misbehaves. Many years later, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) is all grown up. A friendly nun helps him get his first job at — get this — a toy store during the bustling Christmas season. Oops!
Silent Night, Deadly Night is an unapologetically nasty and cold-blooded horror flick with decent performances and an interesting, albeit problematic, examination of the killer’s severe PTSD. It’s not nearly good enough to be a horror classic, but it also doesn’t deserve the vitriol that was heaped upon it when it was released.
