Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025) Movie Review

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of the year’s silliest yet goriest horrors, with a great lead performance from new scream king Rohan Campbell.

Billy (an incredibly talented Rohan Campbell, of The Monkey and Halloween Ends) watches helplessly one Christmas Eve as his parents are murdered by a maniac care home janitor in a Santa costume. As the killer lays dying, Billy touches his hand, and his spirit is passed through to him. This possession comes in the form of the killer’s voice inside of Billy’s head, which speaks to him. From the 1st till the 24th December, the voice tells him he has to kill someone for every day of Advent, and leads him to the worst kinds of people to make the murders feel justified. 

The trio of Terrifier films getting an abundance of attention and love has given filmmakers the ‘go’ to delve into their deepest fantasies and make the most grisly movies they can. And after last year’s extremely brutal In A Violent Nature, the slasher sub-genre is truly alive and well. Silent Night, Deadly Night leans into the aspects horror fans enjoy the most about frightful festive features, like killers in blood soaked Santa suits holding a black sack of garbage (Art the Clown and Billy would be good friends). It’s not as entertaining as some of its predecessors, but it still has some enjoyable moments. 

The kills are what makes Silent Night, Deadly Night a success. It’s a gore fest from start to finish. Billy’s kill count is in the hundreds, maybe thousands. The voice tells him that they’re all bad people, so he listens and murders them in all sorts of brutal ways (he doesn’t have much of a choice, though, as he’s essentially possessed). He feels no remorse, but he does have a heart. Whilst on his journey of keeping himself hidden in plain sight by travelling from town to town, he meets a girl, Pamela (Ruby Modine, of Happy Death Day), whom he’d do anything for. 

Pamela falls in love with Billy almost instantly. It’s as if both of their lives had been leading up to this very moment. It’s not a romance we’re rooting for necessarily, as it’s a little odd, especially as we know Billy is a murderer. Will he kill her? Or will the voice inside of his head let him be happy just this once? Whilst the majority of the storyline is predictable, at least his choice on her fate is not. 

Remakes and reboots are being made left, right and centre, and it’s hard to make something with originality. Silent Night, Deadly Night takes the idea of Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s original and spins it to make it a modern day gory love story that has its moments of high value. But as a whole, it lacks depth and sometimes isn’t believable. Billy’s character is seen looking right at a motel camera after murdering a police officer and gets away with it. How is it possible he’s been killing for at least 10 years (which would make his count at least 240) and has gotten away with every murder? He moves around visiting small towns in the middle of nowhere, but still, he’s never caught.

As far as Christmas cheer goes, though, Silent Night, Deadly Night provides us with some good kills and a fun, potent lead performance. If anything, Campbell deserves his flowers as a scream king for his contribution to horror over the last few years. 

Silent Night, Deadly Night will be released in U.K. and Irish cinemas, in U.S. theaters, and globally in theatres on December 12, 2025.