Merry Christmas friends! Please note that the following event took place December 22nd, this past Tuesday. I’ve only had until this morning to finish the article due to work commitments. 

In the trenches of Hollywood there’s a small one-screen theater nestled on Beverly Boulevard that boasts a big lit up marque with bold red letters. This is the New Beverly Cinema which is now famously owned by director Quentin Tarantino who fought to save the theater from closing down a few years back and continue the theater’s preservation of using old film stock projection over digital. Last night, as a belated birthday present to myself, I drove down for the 7:30 double feature of two horror classics, 1974’s film Black Christmas and 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night.  The former film I had the terrifying pleasure of watching for the first time last Christmas Eve, late at night no less which was just a terrible idea, but this was my first time seeing the latter. Silent Night, Deadly Night is infamous more-so for its sequel, (GARBAGE DAY!), but the original met with serious controversy upon it’s release due to the film’s protagonist/serial killer being a man who dresses up as Santa and violently murders everyone. We’ll talk more about that down below as the audience was treated to an introduction of the film by one the executive producers and musical composer.

7:oo: After taking a detour that circled around the icky LA traffic that surely would have had me late, I arrive at Beverly Blvd. promptly on time. I then spend the next 15 minutes trying to park and nearly got into a car accident with a woman who decided that the rules of how stop-sign intersections work wasn’t really for her. Mercifully I found parking just across the street at the corner Starbucks.

7:17: I got Starbucks. (Chai latte).

7:25: I walked up to the New Bev., happily surpassing the stand-by line (the showings were sold out) as I walked over to the box office booth. I noticed beside me was an alternate poster for SNDN, one that made a great effort not to show in any way an axe-wielding Santa Clause. More on that later.

7:30: Inside the theater, I realize how teeny-tiny this place actually is. For some reason I had it in my head that this was bigger and more elegant, but of course a guy like Tarantino isn’t trying to save some beautiful Dolby Theater-like building, he’s saving the place that very appropriately would show grindhouse theaters. I love it.

7:35: Coming attractions! After a jaunty old school Dr. Pepper and popcorn commercial, the reels start up to play the trailers. Anyone familiar with the film Grindhouse in particular will recognize the psychedelic backdrop and funky music that plays before the trailers start. This time we had Breaking Point, a trailer that’s escalating ridiculousness was devoured by the audience and a second trailer that I can’t for the life of me remember (but if I do I’ll come back and edit this).

7:40: Black Christmas begins!

As I said this was my second time seeing Bob Clark’s slasher classic and it stands to be, in my opinion, one of the scariest of the slasher genres. The basic premise revolves around an escalating series of murders happening in a sorority house that just happens to be the home of an unknown and unseen psychopath who dwells in the attic. Unfortunately no one ever considers checking the attic, even by the end of the movie, which leaves the film with a very haunting image of the film’s first victim Clare Harrison which is depicted on most of the film’s posters. As a young college-aged woman who lives alone, this setup is downright terrifying. The phone calls that the girls receive from the murderer Billy become increasingly more disturbed and bizarre as the story progresses. The audience was quite receptive of the film, particularly the sillier parts like the constantly inebriated house mother Mrs. MacHenry, the insanely incompetent and naive Sargent Nash, and Olivia Hussey’s accent for some reason (I guess these were the same people who laughed at Ken Watanabe’s pronunciation of Gojira). The crowning moment however was the shift in tension during the film’s climax, where all of the laughs and cheers were inhaled with a sharp gasp once the killer Billy “reveals” himself. It’s a truly heart-stopping moment and the audience was quickly silenced and amerced in the final confrontation up until the closing book-ended shot of the now deadly silent house as each of the lights turn off.

I suppose due to its early release in the genre, predating Halloween by three years, and it’s lack of any sequel or fanfare outside of a 2006 remake no one cares about, Black Christmas is often overlooked despite being a wonderful little thriller. The key to its success was proven just by how the audience reacted and why watching scary movies in a crowd is really fun to begin with; there’s a sense of false security because we’re laughing but the moment we’ve let our guard down –GASP! There’s Billy staring at you through the door crack.

9:20: At this time after visiting the ladies’ room, which weirdly didn’t have a line whereas the men’s room did, and grabbing a four-pack of Twix, I sat back down as Silent Night, Deadly Night‘s executive producer Scott Schneid and musical composer Perry Botkin Jr. took to the front to introduce the movie. The pair had a treasure-trove of interesting facts about the film’s production, particularly about the film’s director (their last choice after much more prominent and experienced directors were passed over) Charles E. Sellier who was a Mormon and had never directed a film before. The other interesting thing was Schneid’s perspective on the film’s burst of infamy when a group of bored mid-western housewifes banded together, going so far as to create a name for themselves (Mothers Against Movie Madness) to ban the film which at this point had only been released to a third of the country.

Since the film was released in the mid-80s the slasher genre was already reaching a point of exhaustion, which Schneid attributed to the reaction of the film and the “boredom” that these parents had in regards to targeting the film. This wasn’t helped by the combination of studios that were distributing the picture, including TriStar, Columbia, and Coca-Cola of all things, who were not found of the poster’s depiction “Santa” climbing out of a chimney with an axe when they were so hugely known for their Christmas products. As far as the alternate poster goes, the film was re-released after the controversy had long passed with a complete removal of the Santa and any weapons instead going for this odd poster that seems straight of the 1950s.

9:30: Trailers! Lots of goodies, mostly promoting movies that were going to be shown during Christmas week. First there was Three Days to Condor, then Jingle All the Way (which made me feel old, I know I’m younger than some of you but I remember this movie when it came out. Sinbad isn’t a thing anymore you guys), then Gremlins, and finally Die Hard. Be still my heart that we were not actually going to be watching Die Hard on a big movie screen, but that’s okay. I’ll just watch it during Christmas.

9:40: Silent Night, Deadly Night begins!

The gentlemen in front of me said it best after the film when we all got up to leave, “This is a mean fucking movie”. Silent Night, Deadly Night is made for audiences to enjoy because when left on your own to think about it, it’s an incredibly cruel movie. A little boy watches as a man in a Santa suit murder his parents in cold blood on Christmas Eve. He is then sent to an orphanage where the Mother Superior terrorizes him and for some reason is idiotically incapable of understanding that he has been horrifically traumatized by the events but still insists that he participate in Christmas activities like sitting on Santa’s lap. Only Sister Margaret understands this but somehow still allows him to be tortured this way, like an even less helpful and useless Dr. Loomis. That’s the best way I can describe this, as though the climax of Halloween traumatized young Tommy Wallace so much that he started stalking babysitters but no one seemed to understand why he became like that.

When Billy (a different Billy) eventually snaps and goes on his rampage to punish all the “naughty” people, this is when the real fun kicks in because of how ludicrous it gets. There’s a scene where two young teens are making out on a pool table and Billy just happens to find their particular house, just happens to know what they are doing, and decides to kill them, but even then the girl is walking around topless and threadbare jean shorts even though it’s clearly the dead of winter. Billy also decapitates a bully who steals some boys’ sled in the middle of the night, and he saves a girl from work whom he has a crush on from being raped…only to stab her to death because she was kind of a slut… It’s kind of funny in a way that the movie is so twisted and mean to Billy in particular that we the audience go back and forth on how much we should feel sorry for him. I mean, he did agree to go work in a toy store, he had to have known that Christmas was kind of a big deal around there. (And why did he age ten years but his little brother didn’t?)

Anyway the other thing that you’ll notice is that there is no actual licensed Christmas music in the film, it’s all original songs that were composed for the film. So you’ll hear people caroling a song “Christmas Fever” and “Santa’s Watching”, both of which are legitimate enough to fool you but at the same time give you that eerie sense that something is amiss since these songs don’t exist anywhere else except in this movie. That’s something to admire from composer Perry Botkin, a very nice old man who seemed to be completely flummoxed that this seedy little movie actually had quite the cult following.

Once the film ended everyone shuffled outside into the cold LA night, (weird right?) as the New Beverly closed its doors for the evening. I had an awesome time, and it truly put me in the festive spirit unlike anything else has all month. I will certainly be returning to the New Beverly soon because it is such a great experience to watch older movies on a big screen with an enthusiastic audience. I don’t believe that the people, with maybe one or two exceptions, were watching these movies “ironically” so is the trend these days. These were film fans who love scary movies. That’s a great crowd to be a part of. Yes there was a lot of giggling and laughing, but when the tension and scares captured our attentions, and that’s the difference between watching a movie with people who cares as opposed to watching a film with people who aren’t taking this seriously. I had an absolutely awful experience with this when Fathom Events showed Psycho back in September, but this was genuinely fun and I think everyone had a great time.

Also don’t name your kid Billy. He will become a serial killer.