Director Mike Nelson talks cult horror reboots…
The era of reboots and remakes has been with us a long long time but what we’re now getting is the reboots and remakes of cult films. And falling into that bracket is ‘Silent Night Deadly Night’ a horror film from 1984 that caused outrage and controversy having turned Santa into a psycho with an axe! Spawning a whole load of sequels (five at the last count) it’s was firmly in the sights of director Mike Nelson to make a Silent Night Deadly Night reboot.
The Silent Night Deadly Night story
The film sees Billy Chapman as a child seeing his parents killed by someone dressed as Santa. years later and now a grown man and still suffering the trauma of that fateful night Billy himself dons a Santa suit himself and seeks violent and extremely bloody revenge.
The original film opened on the same weekend as A Nightmare on Elm Street and briefly out-grossed it by around $161,800 as this film was playing in more than twice as many theaters as “Nightmare” but by the second weekend, sales dropped by about 45% when the film was picketed by angry parents who were not happy to see Santa Claus depicted as an axe murderer.
So what did Mike Nelson tell us?
Mike Nelson had previously made a reboot of the Wrong Turn franchise back in 2022 which was very good but had several of the franchise fans up in arms (unnecessarily) and so doing another reboot might have put off a lesser director. We had the opportunity to chat with Mike nelson about his rebooted version of the film and he gave us a whole load of behind the scenes stories that included Easter eggs, cameos, on set accidents and the sequel.
related feature : Silent Night Deadly Night (2025) reviewed here
related feature : ‘Whistle’ director Corin Hardy talks spooky props, difficult special effects….and Evil Dead
Watch our full chat with the writer director here….
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