Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987) is an Egregious Misuse of Recycled Footage

Happy Holidays, reader! Today’s newsletter contains some major spoilers for both of the first two Silent Night, Deadly Night films. I don’t think that knowing what happens in a movie like this will affect your enjoyment of it, but nonetheless, you’ve been properly cautioned.

All throughout the 80s and into the 90s, slasher flicks terrified the nation as studios kept pumping out franchise sequels left and right. But there was one thing these producers weren’t afraid of: recycling existing footage.

After Halloween kicked the door down and Friday the 13th took a machete to it, there was a veritable Space Race to keep the major (and even some minor) franchises going. But in order to keep audiences coming back for more, sacrifices had to be made. One of the easiest ways to expedite delivery, save on production costs, and maintain a reasonable runtime was to simply write fewer pages and shoot/edit less film.

Do reused clips from previous installments improve these sequels? Absolutely not. But demand was high and budgets were low, so I guess I get it. Besides, the home video market was just getting started, and viewers didn’t really have many opportunities to rewatch the previous films to prepare for the new ones. I bet plenty of people appreciated having their memories refreshed.*

You know what’s unforgivable though? What producer Lawrence Appelbaum did with Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2.

If you’re a genre fan, you know that October isn’t the only month for gory affairs. The Christmas season has long been fertile ground for horror.** And in 1984, Tri-Star Pictures took a gamble on Silent Night, Deadly Night, a deranged holiday slasher that made $2.5 million on a $750,000 budget. Not a huge payday, but the gamble paid off. It’s no surprise that a sequel was put into the pipeline soon after. 

Now, you may assume that because the original film more than tripled its production budget at the box office, the sequel would’ve been made on a larger or at least equal budget. Reader, that was not the case. With the franchise now in different, less capable hands, the budget was slashed (no pun intended) to a measly $250,000.

To make matters worse, according to director/editor/co-writer Lee Harry, Appelbaum instructed him and his team to not just lean into recycling footage from Silent Night, Deadly Night but to re-edit it—without shooting any new scenes at all—so that they could pass it off as a sequel or even a re-release of the first film.*** It’s a strategy that truly boggles the mind. To his credit, Harry demanded that they be allowed to shoot new footage if they’re going to release the project as a new film. And so they did.

Harry and company did what they could with the resources they had, and as a result, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is more theirs than anyone else’s—but just barely. The resulting film adds up to 45 minutes of new footage chopped up with an egregious 40 minutes of recycled footage.**** That has to be some kind of record.

The producer in me is disgusted by this misappropriation of resources, but the writer in me is irked for a different reason: The recycled footage totally upends the film’s narrative logic.

The original Silent Night, Deadly Night begins with two young boys, Billy and his baby brother Ricky, witnessing a madman dressed as Santa Claus assaulting and murdering their parents. (Cheerful stuff!) The rest of the film follows Billy as he turns 18, gets a job at a toy store, puts on a Santa suit, and goes on a killing spree of his own. The film ends with Ricky, still living at the orphanage this whole time, seemingly next in line to continue his brother’s “work.”

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 picks up where its predecessor leaves off (sort of) as an adult Ricky is being interviewed by psychiatrists. Ricky has murdered a slew of “naughty” people himself by this point, and as he recounts his crimes, he throws Billy’s in there as well—the recycled footage is treated as flashbacks. The problem there is that these aren’t Ricky’s memories. He was at the orphanage the whole time Billy was on a rampage, and Billy dies at the end of the first film, so how could he possibly know what happened? It’s not only cheap, it’s insulting and ineffective.

But the real tragedy of the film’s structure is that Harry’s new footage…kinda rocks? It’s not Citizen Claus or anything, but he really understood the assignment, crafting some solidly campy slasher set pieces that include one particularly unforgettable scene. The film ultimately bombed at the box office, making even less than they spent (just over $150,000). It probably didn’t help that it was released on…April 10th.***** But the strange mix of old and new footage ultimately made the film a cult classic of a sort.

Hell, I watched it on a big screen last year at the Sidewalk Cinema in my hometown. And if you get a chance to catch a screening yourself…well, at least you don’t really need to watch the original film first?

*Even Rocky II used recycled footage, presumably for this reason (since it’s a full 120 minutes and didn’t need the stuffing).

**Lest we forget, Black Christmas not only predates Halloween by four years, it may have directly inspired Carpenter’s industry-shifting film.

***When I say co-writer, I mean that Harry was one of six people who received writing credits on this project. Harry shared screenplay honors with Joseph H. Earle while Appelbaum and another collaborator (Dennis Patterson) shared story credit with them, and the scribes of the original film (Michael Hickey and Paul Caimi) also received story credit since the characters they created were being used. That’s a lot of credits for a film that barely has a story at all.

****This statistic was provided by The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, and I trust his Last Drive-In staff to do their research. By contrast, Wikipedia claims “approximately 30 minutes” of recycled footage, but you know they love to lie.

*****It wasn’t the first holiday film to be released on the wrong side of the calendar, though. As my editor John wrote last year, even a Christmas classic like Miracle on 34th Street was released in June.

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is now streaming on Amazon Prime, Shudder, AMC+, Hoopla, Tubi, Pluto TV, and Night Flight, and it is available to rent elsewhere.