The post is better than any stills, really. Another mark of the 1970s,
Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972) is a bizarre slasher movie in which its biggest star, John Carradine, is reduced to just a couple of minutes of screen time, restricted to writing on notepads and ringing a little bell one might find at a desk. He manages to gasp out all of a single line of dialog – I think.
But the movie does have the oddest charm about it, as proven by the fact that we not only finished it, but we kept looking at each other, mystified concerning where it was going. After an opening in which we learn the previous owner, Wilford Butler, self-immolated twenty years earlier, leaving the property to his grandson, Jeffery, lawyer John Carter shows up at a magnificent ruined East Coast mansion, much younger mistress in tow, to inspect it. From there, he travels onward to the City Council and states that he’s authorized to sell it to them for $50,000 cash – perhaps 20% of its value, he states.
The Council is its own collection of characters with hidden pasts, from mayor to sheriff to the mute newspaperman. None appear to be happy people, but they tell the lawyer that they are interested and will attempt to raise the money. The lawyer returns to the mansion and the arms of his mistress, and, well, as this is a slasher flick, we can guess what happens to them.
But it’s just the start, and it’s not clear who’s providing the horror. The caretaker, who remains a figure in the dark? The daughter who birthed the grandson? Random mad slasher? The daughter of the sheriff, who, surprised by a random stranger who appears from nowhere, meets him with a gun? And, hey, how does that early scene showing someone escaping from the local insane asylum play into this mess?
But at the denouement, we learn the horror is much worse than a simple mad man with a big knife. Incorporating a scene which was filmed either with deep incompetence or admirable innovation – take your pick of adjective, but at the end of the sequence I was unsettled – this sickly moral horror piled on other moral horror on yet another moral horror, all filmed in a decayed manner which emphasizes the fragmentation of the moral depravities on which the film is based, makes the initial murders almost trivial in comparison to what has happened in the past.
I cannot possibly recommend this, but it was actually fascinating as we kept juggling elements and trying to make rational sense out of it. The era sensibilities vis-à-vis the art of movie-making, much like that of Britain’s, is that slightly brittle style of bad audio, unclear visuals, and apparently unsympathetic characters, but these technical facets gradually recede into the background as the bodies pile up and the mysteries of the characters become paramount.
Enjoy? Be horrified? Are those the same things? After this, you tell me. Merry Christmas!
P.S. As it was never copyrighted, here it is:
