Silent Night Bloody Night (1972)
Directed by Theodore Gershuny
Not to be confused with the similarly titled Santa slasher, this deliciously overwrought, murder-filled mystery not only predates Halloween, it even predates the American films that influenced Carpenter’s watershed horror flick. Gershuny deploys a cast of Warhol hangers-on, as well as stylish flourishes like freeze frames, first-person killings, and Hitchcockian editing, plus a wit as dry as an Arizona Christmas. Wait for a terrifically horrifying sequence in which a group of inmates are actually running the asylum. Night’s massacres and incest confessions add up to a forgotten past coming back to bite, er, bash; it’s about a family willfully forgetting its heritage and a town denying its history—the delirious story of America, a young country with a short memory, built with violence by a bunch of crazies. Henry Stewart (Dec 12, 13, midnight at the Nitehawk)