Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation Made the Bold, Idiotic Decision to Forego the Whole "Killer Santa" Shtick for Cronenbergian Body Horror

It wasn't a smart choice!

When he was making Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out, wildly overqualified director Monte Hellman reportedly rejected a screenplay written by producer Arthur Gorson and S.J Smith and had a new script cobbled together in a week. 

I suspect that the reason that Hellman chose not to film Orson and Smith’s screenplay was because it was terrible and also had nothing to do with any of the previous films. Oh, and it also abandoned the killer Santa Claus gimmick that defined the earlier films for reasons no one could quite figure out. 

If you are feeling excessively, unnecessarily generous you could consider Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation the Halloween III: Season of the Witch of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series. 

Like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation is a bold outlier that deliberately eschews what has made a slasher franchise successful and iconic. 

The crucial difference is that Halloween III: Season of the Witch feels like a brilliant subversion of the commercial expectations that come with being a sequel in a hit horror franchise while Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation just feels like a mistake. 

The film’s director Brian Yuzna, feels the same way. When he was making Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation he thought that making a Killer Santa movie without a Killer Santa was a swell idea but changed his mind later and worked as a writer and producer on the next entry in the series, Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy-Maker. 

The final film in the franchise brought back the concept of a killer in a Santa Claus suit. A weary nation was grateful. 

When he made the third sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night, Yuzna had serious horror movie credibility due to his work with legendary fright-master Stuart Gordon. Yuzna produced Gordon’s classic 1985 debut The Re-Animator and its equally impressive follow-up, 1986’s From Beyond. 

Yuzna broke into directing with the 1989 cult classic Society. Yuzna and Society screenwriter Zeph E. Daniel used some ideas they had for Society but were not able to incorporate into the script for the earlier film into Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation. That helps explain why it feels more like a follow-up to Society than a sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night. 

Model turned actress Neith Hunter stars as Kim Levitt. She’s an ambitious writer trying to break into journalism as the editor of the classified section at a Los Angeles publication notable for the undisguised chauvinism of boss Eli (Reggie Bannister of the Phantasm series). 

Eli will give anyone a break, as long they are a man. When Kim sees a woman on fire falling from the roof of a building Eli gives the story to Kim’s journalist boyfriend Hank (Tommy Hinkley). 

Kim is disgusted by the casual sexism of her boss and her workplace so she decides to investigate the mysterious woman’s death independently. This leads her to Fima (Maud Adams), the ethereal owner of a bookstore that deals with the occult.

The misguided Jewish journalist begins learning about figures like Lilith. It’s an old story: feminist consciousness raising leads, inevitably, to Satanism and being sexually assaulted by Clint Howard in a penis mask.

In Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation, the villain is sexism in all of its forms. The men at Kim’s workplace delight in rank misogyny, in treating her less like a respected colleague than a silly little girl to be leered at and condescended to but never respected. 

She wants to be Woodward and Bernstein. Her employers want her to make coffee and do the mindless busywork nobody else wants to do but she wants so much more. 

But the villain here is also, confusingly, feminism as well. Empowerment is a gateway drug to evil cults and doing Satan’s malevolent bidding. In true horror tradition, everything is terrible and everyone is a threat, no matter how harmless they might look or seem. 

Kim also learns to be distrustful of people who look extremely harmful, most notably Ricky, a Renfield-like figure played by a more disgusting than usual Clint Howard, who played a character with the same name in the next film as well for no discernible reason. 

When Kim is checking out the roof where the mystery woman leaped or was pushed she encounters Ricky holding a disgusting slug creature out of David Cronenberg’s vivid imagination. 

It’s only the first of a series of giant phallic bug monsters designed by special effects legend “Screaming” Mad George, whose credits include Big Trouble in Little China, Predator and Society. 

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation belongs to George as much as it does Yuzna. The uniquely misbegotten sequel works best as a delivery system for some truly stomach-churning imagery. 

George is a true artisan of the grotesque. He fills the film with creepy, crawly, slimy insect monsters that travel into the various orifices of our luckless heroine and out of them as well. 

The problem with Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation as a body horror movie is that it has nothing to offer but horrific imagery. The worst scene in From Beyond or The Re-Animator is better than the best scene in Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation. 

The other big problem with its embrace of body horror is that it has nothing to do with Christmas or Santa Claus or anything you would angrily demand from a sequel to three movies about spree killers in Santa suits. 

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is strong enough to justify its bold and ultimately successful choice to leave Michael Myers out of the proceedings. The opposite is true here. 

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation isn’t strong enough to validate Yuzna’s decision to make a body horror movie instead of a killer Santa movie 

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation’s only connection to the films that preceded it is a throwaway shot from Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out of a sadistic Santa in action that causes Ricky to enthuse, “Santa Claus killer!” 

This marks the second time in the series that a scene from an earlier Silent Night, Deadly Night movie was cynically and surreally passed off as a fictional movie within the film’s universe. 

That means that there are multiple killer Santa movies in Silent Night, Deadly Night’s world, at least one of which stars someone who looks and acts exactly like the man who murdered Billy Chapman’s parents, which is of course the catalyst for everything to come. 

If nothing else, deviating so brazenly from earlier entries in the series empowers the filmmakers to not include the sexual assault of Billy Chapman’s mother the way all three previous films did. 

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation instead substitutes its own gratuitous sexual assault scene, this one involving Clint Howard and a penis mask a la A Clockwork Orange and Nothing But Trouble. 

Thanks largely to Screaming Mad George repulsive concoctions Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation isn’t terrible but isn’t good either. Most disastrously it never feels like a Silent Night, Deadly Night movie despite being an official entry in the series. 

When Howard returned for the next film, once again playing a character named Ricky, he’s a in a Santa suit, which feels like the series acknowledging that they’d made a mistake in making a Santa-less Silent Night, Deadly Night movie. It might have been an interesting and unexpected mistake but it was a mistake all the same.