Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974)
A man who inherits a decaying New England mansion, once a private asylum, arrives on Christmas Eve only for a killer to begin picking off the townspeople connected to the estate's buried history one by one.
Shot in a real abandoned mansion in Oyster Bay, New York, Silent Night, Bloody Night predates the slasher boom of the later 1970s and 80s, and its producers’ bankruptcy left the copyright unregistered — the same lapse that put it into the public domain.
Background
Silent Night, Bloody Night is a 1974 horror film directed by Theodore Gershuny and co-produced by Lloyd Kaufman, starring Patrick O’Neal, Mary Woronov, and John Carradine. It opens with Wilford Butler killed while returning to his decaying New England family mansion, once used as a private insane asylum, which then passes to his grandson. When the grandson arrives to arrange its sale, he and the townspeople connected to the estate’s history are stalked one by one by an unseen killer. The film was also distributed under the alternate titles Night of the Dark Full Moon and, in a 1981 reissue, Death House.
What to watch for
The cast and crew shot much of the film inside a real abandoned mansion in Oyster Bay, New York, which gives the film a decayed, lived-in look that its low budget alone would not have afforded. Made a few years before the slasher cycle took off with films like Halloween, it anticipates several of that genre’s conventions, including a killer picking off townspeople tied to a buried local history, without the polish later slashers would adopt. Its producers’ bankruptcy left the copyright unrenewed, which is how the film passed into the public domain.
