Silent Night Deadly Night Souvenir Cup

About Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Charles E. Sellier Jr.'s Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) caused one of the biggest controversies in horror history when parents, led by outraged PTA groups and critics like Siskel and Ebert, organized protests against a film that depicted Santa Claus as a killer—TriStar Pictures pulled the film from theaters after just one week. The irony is that the film itself is a surprisingly earnest exploration of childhood trauma, following a boy who witnesses his parents' murder by a robber in a Santa suit and grows up to become a psychotic killer triggered by Christmas imagery. Linnea Quigley's impalement on mounted deer antlers became one of the most iconic death scenes of the 1980s slasher era, and the controversy only fueled the film's massive success on home video. The film spawned four sequels and proved that there was no subject too taboo for the slasher genre, while the "garbage day" scene from Part 2 became one of the internet's earliest viral memes.