Reel Terror: Silent Night Deadly Night 2025 is a Lump of Coal with an Inner Monologue

Remaking a cult classic is like walking a tightrope: lean too far into nostalgia and you’re a cheap copy; lean too far into reinvention and you lose the spirit of the original. The new Silent Night, Deadly Night decides to just cut the rope entirely and plummet into a snowbank of boredom.

This 2025 iteration attempts to modernize the trauma of Billy Chapman by giving him a literal inner voice that directs his violence. It’s a bold choice on paper, but on screen? It turns one of the 80s’ most unsettling slashers into a repetitive, accidental vigilante movie that forgot to be scary.

In the original 1984 film, Billy was terrifying because of his silence. When the trauma took over, he would lock into a thousand-yard stare that told the audience everything they needed to know: the little boy was gone, and the punisher was here.

This remake scraps that subtlety for a constant, droning narration. Billy’s internal voice explicitly tells us who to target, followed by quick-cut flashes of the impending gore. Instead of a broken man snapping, Billy feels like he’s bickering with a roommate he can’t evict. It reminded me of the dynamic in Brain Damage—where a parasite controls the host—but without the campy charm or Frank Henenlotter’s wit.

Worse, Billy constantly talks back to this voice out loud. Watching a grown man mutter “Shut up!” and “Not now!” in public isn’t scary; it’s just awkward. The people around him offer confused glances, but nobody seems concerned enough to, say, call a doctor. Or the police.

Horror fans will recognize the leads, though they might wish they didn’t. Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends) essentially reprises his role as the “misunderstood psycho successor,” while Ruby Modine (Happy Death Day) plays Pam, the love interest. Both are capable actors, but they are trapped in a script that demands they build a romance simply because they spend time together.

The film spends an excruciating amount of runtime on Billy resisting the voice’s urges and courting Pam. It tries to make Billy sympathetic—a victim battling a condition he can’t control. This might work if the movie didn’t also try to justify his murders.

Here is where I think the script goes off the rails. Billy doesn’t just kill random people; the movie goes out of its way to reveal that his victims are secretly monstrous people. The older man who flirts with Pam? Turns out he murdered his wife and hid her in the crawlspace. The rude woman at the hockey practice? She’s literally a white supremacist.

Billy even drops the line, “Even good people do bad things sometimes,” framing himself as a dark anti-hero rather than a slasher villain. It robs the movie of any real tension. We aren’t watching a tragedy; we’re watching Dexter in a Santa suit, but dumber because Billy isn’t even aware of the awful things these people have done.

However, I must address the (white) elephant in the room. There is one sequence so wildly entertaining that it feels like it was spliced in from a different, better movie.

Billy tracks the rude woman to a party, only to discover it is a “White Supremacist Christmas” gathering where everyone is dressed as Santa with Nazi regalia everywhere. Realizing he fits right in, Billy decides to ignore his inner voice’s caution and slaughter the entire room. It is a blood-soaked, Kill Bill-style brawl reminiscent of the Crazy 88s fight. It is absurd, violent, and undeniably fun.

It culminates in a chase where the woman flees on a four-wheeler, only for an injured Billy to somehow teleport ahead of her into the woods and decapitate her as she drives past—a nice nod to the original’s sled scene. But why is this energy absent from the other 80 minutes of the film?

Aside from that fever-dream sequence, the movie is a slog. It paints over a generic script with Silent Night, Deadly Night iconography (the toy store, the “naughty” catchphrase, the grandpa), but misses the heart of the original. We don’t see Billy’s struggle with Mother Superior or his slow descent into madness. We just get a guy who has been killing for a decade with zero police on his tail, drifting through a plot that refuses to start.

It’s not a remake; it’s a boring script wearing a cheap Santa costume.

Score: 1.5 out of 5 (The half-point is strictly for the Nazi Santa massacre).

Have you seen this movie? What did you think? Let us know in the comments!