Back in 1984, an advertising campaign for a film called “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” shocked consumers with its poster donning an ax-wielding Santa Claus.
The often-scorned horror genre was tainting the sacred ground that is Christmas.
When the film was released in November of that year, a bit of hysteria ensued. People picketed theaters. A group called Citizens Against Movie Madness in Milwaukee, Wis., formed, according to a report by United Press International. TV stations stopped showcasing the ads. Some theaters stopped booking the movie. Why on Earth would anyone depict Santa Claus as a murderer?
Thirty-four years later, the Kiggins Theatre, 1011 Main St., Vancouver, isn’t shying away. The blasphemous 79-minute slasher flick, which has since gained cult following and spawned four sequels and a remake, will light up the screen at 9:30 p.m. tonight as part of the Kiggins’ monthly horror series called “Frightmare on Main Street.”
A collaboration
The series started last year when local horror buff and podcaster Brian Houghton approached the theater about the idea of holding a monthly horror movie showing. His horror movie podcast, called “The Horror Aisle,” only two years old, had attracted a bit of a following on SoundCloud. He co-hosts the podcast with a close friend.
“We’d be sitting around talking, and we realized a crowd would kind of gather around us,” said Houghton, who grew up in Grants Pass, Ore., and has lived in Vancouver for the last 10 years. “I started thinking, ‘OK, this is going really well. What can be the next step?’ ”
Houghton said that he was inspired by a film festival that another horror podcast called “The Movie Crypt” had held. And knowing that there is a community of horror fans just about everywhere, “That kind of piqued my interested about what it would take to be the person who is bringing these movies to the audiences.”
Kiggins Theatre movie programmer Richard Beer was on board.
“One of the things we love to do is collaborations with folks. We seem to find that if we partner with other people, we can reach a much larger crowd than we usually do,” Beer said. “For the first six months or so, (Houghton) just gave us a list of films. We started with those, and I started getting a little bit more involved with curating the films and bringing some different stuff to town.”
They’re usually shown on the last Friday of the month. Houghton is mainly interested in showing the campy, ’80s flicks — especially slasher films. He’ll get up on the Kiggins’ stage and introduce the film before it plays, then discuss and analyze the film with the audience afterward.
They’ve even had an appearance by Stephen Chiodo, the director of the 1988 cult classic “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.” The May showing drew a large crowd, Beer said. Chiodo happened to be in town because his son was graduating from Washington State University Vancouver. A showing of John Carpenter’s original “Halloween” in October filled 220 seats, Beer said.
There have been a few low-attendance movies in the series, however. “Jack Frost,” (a 1997 horror film) which showed last Christmas season, didn’t do so well. He isn’t quite sure how “Silent Night, Deadly Night” will do. Originally, Kiggins Theatre and Houghton hoped to screen “Gremlins” (1984), a Christmas horror comedy that is more family friendly. However, the film’s studio, Warner Bros., wasn’t allowing theaters to obtain it this season.
This tends to happen, Beer said, when a new film in the series is coming out. A “Gremlins” reboot is in fact in the works, though the release date is unclear.
Floating on the dark side
Houghton, 41, is a former metal musician. He sports a big silver ring with horror movie icon Jason Voorhees’ face on it and has an unfinished “sleeve” of horror-themed tattoos on his arm. He has been intrigued by horror movies since he was young. His parents would indulge with the occasional horror movie rental and attempted to prevent him from viewing, but he sneaked a peek through the window drapes, he said. “Friday the 13th” was his foray into the genre.
“After (my mother) caught me watching the movies, she asked if this was something I could handle,” he said. “Even as a kid, I wanted to know how they made the blood fly across the room. I wanted to know how they made Freddy (Krueger’s) face look like that.”
He said that he appreciates the immense amount of work that goes into creating the special effects and prosthetics for horror films — a genre that collected $733 million in ticket sales last year, according to The New York Times. Not to mention, the “courage to kind of float on the dark side of things and be able to make a story out of something that usually is something you wouldn’t want to talk about.”
Beer agrees, though he said they probably wouldn’t have shown “Silent Night, Deadly Night” — about a man who suffers serious post-traumatic stress ,after seeing his parents get murdered by a man in a Santa Claus outfit — on Christmas Eve. A showing a few days after Christmas seemed more tasteful, though he thinks audiences nowadays have “other things to worry about” and are a bit more numb to horror than previous generations.
Beer also had a few thoughts about other films that are in the traditional Christmas mainstream.
“I mean, ‘Home Alone’ is considered a Christmas movie. That’s basically about a little kid torturing adults,” Beer said. “That movie is really dark and sadistic.”
The title of Houghton’s podcast, “The Horror Aisle,” comes from wandering the aisle of horror movies in video stores. Though video stores are a thing of the past, he thinks streaming platforms such as Amazon and Netflix have actually helped grow the horror community.
And why are there so many people who enjoy all things gruesome and gory, anyway? Are they disturbed? Demented? Not so, Houghton said, though it’s hard to explain. (Some researchers say people with anxiety actually find comfort in watching horror movies.)
“It’s really not (communicable). You can’t force someone to like horror,” he said. “I’ve got some really close friends who love me and support me but will not come to my movie nights, because they don’t like seeing people get hurt.”
