Santa Knows If You've Been Bad

I was at my buddy Jeff's house, and his daughter was visiting, and she mentioned that she wanted to watch SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT, which Jeff had picked up from the library.* He'd recently given her a copy of Grady Hendrix's "The Final Girl Support Group," which is a fun book about a group of women who each overcame a specific and familiar attack by a serial killer, and the main one survived a massacre by a crazy man dressed as Santa.

His daughter (with a father like Jeff) was familiar with SCREAM, FRIDAY THE 13TH, TEXAS CHAINSAW, HALLOWEEN, and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, but had never seen 1984's SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT.  Well, I'd seen it twice (once as a kid, and once in my twenties for our Horror Film Compendium), and I told her not to bother, that the movie was bad, and explained how it got famous due to the Streisand Effect.  

But Jeff had already rented the movie, and was bummed that he was going to have to watch it alone.  When he said that, I told him I would go ahead and watch the movie with him, even though I remembered it being pretty awful.**

So, we watched it, and I was impressed by the opening scenes, which were both fun and effective.  As the movie went on, I admired the Utah locations, leered lasciviously at the vintage Star Wars toys, and took in the gratuitous nudity with homey sentimentality.

By the time we got to the end, I was surprised not only by how much I enjoyed the movie, but by how well made it was, compared to the schlock of today (my nephew was watching SHARKNADO 4 the other day, and a bunch of cows got sucked up by it, and one of the characters looked at the camera and shouted, "It's a COWnado!!!" proving for one and all that Friedrich Nietzsche was right about God being dead).  

Jeff also thought it was good, and looked up our reviews from twenty-five years ago . . . and we thought it was good then too.

Weird. 

Anyway, one thing I admired, then and now, was the ghastly Christmas song that is repeated multiple times in the movie, that goes "Santa's watching, Santa's creeping..."  It is cheery and fairly trite-sounding, but includes ominious lyrics like
Can you hear him in the night?
Close your door, turn out the light!

and it ends with the delightfully fatalistic

Did you do your best this year? 
Too late now, 'cause Santa's here."

Good times.

*Yes, it's that good of a library. Or bad, you decide.

**Here's the thing: bad horror movies made in the Eighties are better than bad horror movies made today, simply because of my nostalgia for that period, its music, its fashions, and the kinds of movies they were making then.  Heck, a bad horror movie from the Eighties might be better than a so-so movie from the 2010s.