Silent Night, Bloody Night / Night of the Dark Full Moon / Death House (1972) ***
In the prehistory of the slasher movie, Silent Night, Bloody Night occupies a position analogous to that of the Natufian settlement at Jericho circa 10,000 BC. Although it predates the emergence of the slasher in its mature North American form, just about all of the familiar subgenre elements are present in it. It’s merely that director/co-writer Theodore Gershuny hasn’t assembled them into quite the familiar pattern. There’s an escaped mental patient with a grudge rooted in long-ago misdeeds. There’s a group of people who share a dark secret, getting their comeuppance one by one at the maniac’s hands. The last character standing is a young woman, although she’s more of an innocent bystander who got sucked into some bad business than a proper Final Girl, because the killer isn’t even aware of her until the final minutes of the film. But with its emphasis on twisted family relationships, long-hidden histories of cruelty and madness that keep getting worse the deeper you dig, and the ease with which evil can hide in a small, insular community simply by donning a mask of respectability, Silent Night, Bloody Night plays less like a slasher flick of the “occasion” school than like an extra-scummy Southern Gothic that wandered up to New England by mistake.
On Christmas Eve, 1950, in the small town of East Willard, Massachusetts (nevermind that the actual shooting locations were all on Long Island), pillar of the community Wilfred Butler (Philip Bruns, from Return of the Living Dead, Part II and Between Time and Timbuktu) burned to death in the front yard of his mansion, having apparently been ignited by the living room fireplace. The death was ruled an accident, for everyone knew that Butler, bitter old recluse that he was, lived alone in the house, and that however few people there were in town who had ever called him friend, he didn’t seem to have any enemies, either. Butler left everything he owned to his California-dwelling grandson, Jeffrey (Goin’ Down Slow’s James Patterson), with the stipulation that the house itself was to remain exactly as Wilfred left it, in order to serve as a monument and memorial to the inhumanity that it had witnessed. If anyone in town knew what the fuck that was supposed to mean, they certainly didn’t talk about it. Jeffrey, for his part, was untroubled by Granddad’s edict regarding the house, since he had absolutely no intention of coming back east to live in it, and the remainder of the estate left him rich enough to satisfy any ambition, desire, or whim that money could further. There the matter stood for twenty years, too, until urgent financial difficulties of an undisclosed nature changed the younger Butler’s mind, pushing him to try selling his grandfather’s house as rapidly as possible. Among the people who get word of the intended sale is East Willard’s mayor (Walter Abel), who quickly assembles a group of local luminaries to put in a bid on behalf of the town itself. But the news also makes its way to Margaretville State Hospital, where an inmate of the mental ward takes it as provocation to break out, making for East Willard on the double.
Jeffrey Butler has delegated the sale of the house to an attorney by the name of John Carter (Patrick O’Neal, from Fantasies and The Stepford Wives). Since Carter’s remit is to close the deal fast, he doesn’t drive nearly as hard a bargain as he’d like to with Mayor Adams’s consortium— which consists of Sheriff Bill Mason (Walter Klavun, of The Boston Strangler and Fright), telephone switchboard operator Tess Howard (Fran Stevens), and Charlie Towman (John Carradine, from House of the Long Shadows and Doctor Dracula), editor of the East Willard Patriot. One point on which the lawyer absolutely will not budge, however, is his client’s demand that the $50,000 sale price be paid in full, in cash, and up front. Otherwise, Butler might as well hold out for the quarter-million that Carter reckons the mansion to be worth on the open market, right? Still, coming up with 50 grand in cash is a pretty tall order in a little town like East Willard. Abel and his cronies assure Carter that they can do it, but it’s going to take a little time to pull the necessary strings. Carter tells them they have 24 hours, then withdraws to the Butler house to await his client’s arrival— and to spend the intervening hours very thoroughly banging his submissive Euro-nymphet mistress, Ingrid (Astrid Heeren), after calling home to check in with his wife. Alas, neither Carter nor Ingrid has heard about the bust-out at Margaretville, leaving them totally unprepared when the escaped loony and his axe reach the mansion before Jeffrey.
Butler’s tardiness is the result of a flat tire, which left him stranded on the roadside outside of town. By the time he reaches his grandfather’s house, the killer has cleared out to dispose of his victims’ bodies in an unused plot in the local cemetery. The scene that confronts Jeffrey upon his belated arrival is thus merely perplexing instead of potentially lethal. Although Carter’s Jaguar is parked in the driveway with the keys still in the ignition, the house is both visibly empty and locked up tight. Butler therefore “borrows” the lawyer’s car, and proceeds to the sheriff’s office, which he finds just as weirdly unoccupied as Granddad’s place. Mayor Adams isn’t at home, either, when Jeffrey makes his third try to make contact with somebody in East Willard (the old man is out rounding up Butler’s $50,000), but the mayor’s daughter, Diane (Mary Woronov, from Seizure and Get Crazy) is. Even so, Jeffrey’s increasingly strange evening is only beginning, for Diane greets him at the door by pointing a pistol in his face! That might seem like an extreme reaction to meeting a stranger, even in a dinky town like this one, but Diane was listening to the radio earlier in the day, when the newsreader announced the escape at Margaretville State Hospital. Butler has to show the girl his California driver’s license before she’ll stand down. Since her father doesn’t have a key to the mansion, however, the most Diane can do to help Jeffrey out of his fix is to give him directions to the deputy sheriff’s house. Would you believe he isn’t home, either?
That brings us to the reason why Sheriff Mason wasn’t in the office when Butler dropped in there. Right after hacking up Carter and Ingrid, the killer phoned the sheriff claiming to be Jeffrey Butler, and telling him very much the same story that the real Jeffrey would have related if he had the chance. But on his way to the mansion to investigate, Mason passes by the graveyard, and catches the killer at work hiding the evidence. That goes very badly for Mason, because the killer was at least halfway expecting such an eventuality, and planned accordingly. There’s a strange sideline on the sheriff’s ambush, too, because after signing off with Mason, the killer told Tess to call Mayor Adams and “the others,” and to pass along word that he wanted to see them. And despite the patent masculinity of his voice, the killer identified himself to Tess not as Jeffrey Butler, but as someone named “Marianne.”
“Marianne” has also been calling the mayor’s house, asking to speak to Jeffrey. What’s really strange about that is how Diane takes it for granted that the mysterious caller really is a woman, even though “she” sounds like Leonard Nimoy with a head cold. By the time Butler returns from his fruitless errand to the deputy’s house, hoping once again to catch Adams at home, Diane’s curiosity over what the hell is going on here has risen as high as Jeffrey’s. The two of them decide to put their heads together going forward, so as to combine her knowledge of East Willard with his knowledge of the participants in the buying and selling of the Butler mansion. Their first stop is intended to be the bank in neighboring Wilton where Mayor Adams keeps his money, but the route there leads them past the cemetery, and thus deeper into the mystery instead. Although the killer evidently buried Mason’s body in the same grave as Carter’s and Ingrid’s, he made no effort to hide the sheriff’s car, nor did he notice that Mason’s glasses fell off at some point during their struggle. Diane notices both things, and reasonably takes them as further evidence that something has gone badly awry. She and Jeffrey go next to the offices of the Patriot, hoping to enlist Charlie Towman in their impromptu investigation. After all, who has more experience getting to the bottom of things than an elderly reporter?
In fact, though, it’s Diane herself who finds the right thread to tug on in order to unravel the mystery. While Butler and Towman are off looking for Tess (who is no longer where she’s supposed to be, either, by this point in the evening), “Marianne” calls the Patriot, leaving a cryptic message about a newspaper from December of 1935. Diane figures she might as well look up the same date in the Patriot backfiles, and ends up uncovering nothing less than the hidden history of Jeffrey Butler’s birth. Even that startling story of adolescent rape and descent into madness must be only the beginning of something much bigger and darker, however, because somebody has carefully clipped out every story pertaining to the Butler family from every backfile volume for the ensuing fifteen years. Diane thinks she knows what the missing articles would tell her if she were able to read them, but she really hasn’t guessed the half of it. And the part that she hasn’t guessed is what’s getting the leading citizens of East Willard bumped off one at a time this Christmas Eve.
I suspect that Silent Night, Bloody Night is considerably more appealing today that it was in 1972, precisely because the kind of movie that it so interestingly isn’t didn’t really exist yet when it was made. Then again, there were enough gialli floating around by ’72 that I can maybe see people back then being similarly intrigued that it’s almost, but not quite, the same kind of film as Twitch of the Death Nerve or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Come to think of it, one of Silent Night, Bloody Night’s best qualities is that it uses Dario Argento’s recurring trick of sending the investigating heroes into the endgame with a completely erroneous “solution” to the mystery, but does it more credibly and effectively than Argento himself ever managed. And as that ought to imply, the mystery itself is both more complex and sophisticated than one typically encounters in mature slasher movies that play the whodunit card, and more logically and fairly developed than in pretty much any giallo that I can ever remember seeing. Even the movie’s reliance on the discovery of flashback-triggering documents— which I would normally consider a bit of a cheat in a mystery story— works here, for the simple reason that none of the people attempting to figure out who “Marianne” is before he finishes depopulating East Willard of its geezers with guilty consciences have any training or experience in criminal investigation. The key clues are not only things that they could plausibly be expected to find, but also things that they could understand without any specialized background. That said, taking so many extended timeouts to reveal things that happened 20 and 40 years ago isn’t great for Silent Night, Bloody Night’s momentum, especially when one of them has to interpose itself between a buildup of suspense and its release in bloody mayhem.
But although I might quibble with the placement of those flashbacks, I certainly can’t fault their content. This is one of those rare horror films that pack their scariest, most disturbing material into their glimpses of the long-ago back-story— in this case, the tragic story of Jeffrey’s mother and the uprising of mental patients that brings it to its gore-soaked conclusion. A surprising number of Mary Woronov’s Warhol Factory compatriots figure in the asylum flashbacks, whether as abused patients or as decadent hangers-on to the corrupt staff, and what’s even more surprising is how the “Bedlam, Depression-style” setting channels those performers’ camp instincts into something much grimmer and more troublingly perverse.
My favorite thing about Silent Night, Bloody Night, though, might be all the little bits of unexplained and largely irrelevant weirdness poking in from all the edges. Take Charlie Towman, for instance. Nearly deaf and all but mute, he communicates mainly by striking a desktop bell of the sort that a short-order kitchen staff might use to alert the waitresses that some diner’s order was up. Towman’s muteness is a plot point, insofar as it limits his ability to explain what he suspects to be going on to Jeffrey and Diane, but the business with the bell is just pure eccentricity of the most delightful sort. Then there are all the inconclusive shadows cast by John Carter’s unconventional personal life: the easy affection he displays during the phone call to his wife despite being on the road with his mistress, the hints of ongoing dominance-and-submission games in his interactions with Ingrid, etc. None of that stuff needed to be there at all, given how quickly the lawyer exits the film, but it deepens the sense of reality when even such minor figures have conspicuous, memorable foibles.
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