He'd approached Tri-Star in early 1983 with a pitch, promising that he could produce several low budget, money-making movies, one of which was a Christmas-themed horror feature. I didn't deliberately ride roughshod over that sensitivity and I didn't anticipate the objection to it.' Indeed, astute horror fans could've told pointed out that Santa's image had already been used in Tales from The Crypt (1974), and Christmas Evil (1980).īarmak was a film industry veteran, having previously run corporate divisions at CBS, Filmways, and Columbia Pictures. 'Santa Claus is not a religious figure, he's a mythic character. 'People have taken offense at Santa being used in a scary context,' he argued.

Barmak was sorry that people were upset, but he didn't back down from defending the movie's subject matter. The ads ran for one week and were canceled before the movie's opening. The 30-second ad that created the most controversy showed what was obviously a hand belonging to Santa, using an ax to break a door down, and then pulling a knife from his belt while a voice intoned 'The Night before Christmas.' 'We're not sleazy, cigar-chewing profiteers,' said Barmak, who admitted the TV adds were not supposed to run in the early evening, but were meant for radio stations and MTV. In fact, Sellier was so uncomfortable with gore that he stepped aside to allow assistant director Michael Spence to handle the murder scenes. Silent Night Deadly Night was directed by Charles Sellier Jr., who'd previously been known for producing such mild fare as Grizzly Adams, Chariots of the Gods, and Mark Twain's America. A Syracuse Herald critic asked, 'Can any director sink lower?' Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel read the credits out loud on their television show saying, 'shame, shame, shame' after each name. Most dismissed it as just Hollywood's latest attempt to yank dollars away from idiot teens. Tri-Star changed the movie's title at the last minute. Equipped with a new title, the movie opened on approximately 400 screens on the same weekend as A Nightmare on Elm Street. Thanks to the country's increasing appetite for splatter films and an all-out TV ad campaign, the killer Santa movie briefly out-grossed Freddy Krueger's debut by around $161,800 before the surprising backlash from concerned parental groups.Ĭritics hammered it, too. During its three month shooting schedule in Utah, the film was known as 'Slayride' (the script by Michael Hickey, purchased by Barmak after a single reading, was based on a novel of the same name by Paul Caimi).

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