Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Silent Night, Bloody Night is a low budget 1973 Horror Thriller. It is one of the first films of the slasher genre. Filmed before Black Christmas and Halloween it set the foundation for the following films and is really the first Holiday Slasher.

Plot: New England. The story surrounds a family by the name of the Butler's. One of the family members was found dead there, burned to death, many years ago. Deemed accidental. 20 Years later, one of the family members returns as the house is being sold. There's an ax killer inside the house and a mystery.

There's an ambiance and surrealistic quality about this film. It had good atmosphere. It is super low budget and the sound quality and picture are both terrible yet the plot wasn't completely bad.

You can take it or leave it. It was a decent movie.

Comes with interactive menus, scene selection and region free.

I got this movie in a collection of fifty horror films, most of which were goddawful funny (anyone remember "Spider Island" or "Jesse James Meets Frankenstien's Daughter"?) so when I got around to watching "Silent Night, Bloody Night" I was expecting another low-budget camp fest. I could tell I was getting something different from the first few minutes.

Granted, the film's condition has deteriorated a bit. The film appears grainy at times, and damaged at the worst. Don't let that cloud your vision though! The movie itself isn't all that bad. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the original "Amnityville Horror."

The film involves a house that has a bit of a dark history. The patrician of the family, Wilfred (?) Butler (who I kept wanting to call William Butler... Yeats) is introduced, and burned to death all in the same instant. His presense, however, is felt through the rest of the movie. He's got soem dark secrets.

Part suspense, part slasher, part creepy incest (is there any other kind?) this movie moves pretty quick and won't bore you (unlike "Oasis of the Zombies" which seemed too promising to suck). I thought it was cool how, when the film goes into a bit of backstory, the film makers used older cameras. The film quality goes from 70s slasher to "Nosfuratu" in about two seconds flat. I thought it worked. Definatley made the faces look harsher and more demented.

Despite having to retract my original stance that the movie was going to be a laugh, I still kept searching for holes in the plot... couldn't really find many. Though the people in the film seem to be inhumanly on-the-ball about everything (including minor details that the film barley mentions) I still couldn't find many inconsistencies in the story. At one point, the grandson of Butler steals his lawyer's car for seemingly no reason, but this is explained a couple minutes later.

A few things I did think were dumb:

- The sherrif goes out to the Butler house at night... wearing sunglasses. The moral? Don't mess around with a guy in shades.
- Some of the dialogue is poor.
- A good deal of the acting is too, but relax, because the worst offender (the lawyer's love interest AKA Slow Disrobe.) is taken care of pretty quick.