Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)/Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987) first published as the 114th instalment of my Cinema Psychrotonicum column “Everything he’s been doing has a kind of logic to it – once you understand what he’s gone through.” So says Sister Margaret (Gilmer McCormick) of her former ward Billy Chapman (Robert Brian…
Paul Tanter’s The Night Before Christmas comes with a slightly confusing timeline. It begins in Woodridge, Upstate New York, with a scene ‘four years ago’, as Michelle Weaver (Sayla de Goede) and her bruised and bloodied partner Nick Conway (Simon Phillips) viciously murder 30 orderlies and doctors in the asylum where they are patients. It…
Christmas Evil first published by VODzilla.co The way for the slasher was paved in the Seventies by Italy’s stylised whodunnits (known as gialli) and by Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), and the commercial success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) guaranteed imitators – but the tropes of this nascent subgenre would still take a few years to…