“The Fun We Were Able to Have with Just a Blood Cannon” — Interview: SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT Director Mike P. Nelson on Billy Chapman Slaughtering Nazis

If there’s one scene you’d hope to bring us all together for the holidays, it’s Billy Chapman and his axe going to war with Nazis in the remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night. Needless to say, it’s a real crowd-pleaser of a scene. Nobody full of hate is safe in the sequence—as Billy dispenses his own curious sense of judgment.

In the hands of writer/director Mike P. Nelson, this is a different Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell). There’s a touch of fantasy to his journey this time, and he isn’t driven by trauma. No doubt inspired by Bill Paxton’s Frailty, this Billy Chapman goes after the truly naughty. 

Nelson, who previously directed the exceptional post-apocalyptic horror movie The Domestics, takes some swings with his reimagining. The swings Nelson spoke with Daily Dead about were more literal, though, and aimed at Nazis.

You don’t do the same Billy Chapman story, and that’s a bold choice. Here, it’s a different Billy, more comfortable with his role. When did you decide to deviate from the original film’s journey?

Mike P. Nelson: I think right from the beginning. [Producer] Brad Miska reached out, and he was just like, “Hey man, do you have a new take?” Right off the bat, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do Billy Chapman again, but I wanted to do it from my perspective, from my brain.

It was about bringing in some of that familiarity of Billy Chapman, and maybe his backstory pulls you in with, like, “Oh yeah, this is Silent Night, Deadly Night.” And then kind of turning it on its head a little bit and taking you in a bit of a different direction.

Instead of it being a movie about abuse, the nuns, and PTSD so much, it was more like being dealt a very different hand that, again, you didn’t choose [this path]. Maybe it has a parallel, but it’s also its own thing. There are also some fantastical elements, because Christmas is a magical time of year.

Especially magical when Billy takes out a barn full of Nazis. Did you have that idea from the very beginning?

Mike P. Nelson: Honestly, it was in the outline. It was super important. I didn’t want it to be the climax. I wanted it to be the midway point, because at that point you start to see that Billy has another side to him. As he says, “I have principles.” He’s got this moral compass as well.

Even the voice in his head starts to be like, “What’s going on with this guy?” To me, it was the perfect moment to branch off and start to figure out the darkness of this character and where it really is. I think it makes you root for him at that point, whereas maybe prior you’re sort of figuring him out and not quite sure. Then there’s no doubt. Yep, that’s the guy. Take me with you, Billy.

It’s that funny thing of bad meets worse.

Mike P. Nelson: [Laughs] Yes.

What was some of the work in pre-production with your choreographer and your squibs team? What did the workload involve slaughtering a bunch of Nazis?

Mike P. Nelson: Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, as with many movies, there is never enough time. The stunt team and the pyro and effects team came in… Again, a very low-budget project. We had to be creative. We had a certain number of things we could do.

I think the first draft of the script, they were like, “This is doable, but is there a way to really focus on the key things that you need? Because that’s where we can deliver the best.” As a filmmaker, you have to dial that in. And so they were great to work with.

Kristen Sawatzky from stunts was like, “Look, I want to try to execute as much of this for you as possible.” She choreographed an incredible fight sequence. Obviously, with the Christmas party, we really had a lot of fun finding key moments that were important and just making it insane. Kristen also plays the foster mom in the movie, so she was able to get really wild and crazy.

You got a blood cannon or two for the sequence?

Mike P. Nelson: Our special effects team was a lot of fun. Look, the fun we were able to have with just a blood cannon, what can we do with a blood cannon? I mean, I know we don’t have time and we don’t have money, but we have a blood cannon filled with a bunch of stuff like hair and guts and blood. You can give me different kinds of trajectories, right? They could. It allowed us to paint in many different ways. And then, of course, in our practical effects scene, Doug Morrow and Kristen Sawatzy [who also plays the adoptive mother], were great.

There were a lot of great moments to composite the real actor in, reacting, leaving, taking the next shot, putting the dummy head in, yes, maybe it is a little off, but we’re going to make it work. Put that in, have the split in its head, shove an axe in it, okay, now do some blood spray. And then we merge all those together in the computer.

And that was the joy of also working with our VFX team, because they were then able to elevate some of our practical effects to really sing. Honestly, it is the practical effects merged well with VFX that I think can be an amazing tool.

Any words of advice from the stunt team about pulling off the Nazi bloodbath?

Mike P. Nelson: It was great in terms of stunts. We worked with Rick Skene, who’s an old-timer stunt guy. He’s trained everybody that’s in the stunt business, knows all about squibs and that stuff. He was so nice with it, like, “When you guys shoot this, what I would recommend is moving that light just a little bit over here, because that’s going to pop. When that squib pops, you’re going to backlight it, and it’s really going to get that nice poof of mist and squirt the stuff that we get to do on set.” Man, it’s great.

Every director seems like a kid in a candy store when it comes to having a guts blaster.

Mike P. Nelson: Oh dude, it’s fantastic. But then again, letting your creatives around you help guide you, it’s so important. When you’re on a set, you’ve brought these people in for this very specific reason. Don’t pretend that you know more than they do. You don’t. If something’s not working, sure, get in there and problem-solve together. But that’s why they’re there.

Again, in the amount of time that we had, and just flying on exhaustion by the end of each day, we were so proud of what we ended up pulling out. At the end of the day, I can’t believe we pulled that off. We did that. Ultimately, that’s where so much of the fun comes from.

For example, your costume designer Laura DeLuca. She previously worked on Violent Night. What discussions did you have about Billy’s Santa outfit? What shade of red would pop best with blood and guts?

Mike P. Nelson: Yeah, she already knew going in, like, “Okay, so we have a lot of blood and a lot of people dressed in red.” Especially for that sequence, we’re just going to try to make the squibs big and juicy, to make sure that we capture them on screen. I know that it’s not going to be easy reading [blood] all over the body.

Gathering all that kind of information, she also had the challenge of, "Well, what does this Santa look like?" She designed David Harbour’s Santa in Violent Night, and I wanted to do the complete opposite of that. I said, “Billy’s wearing cheap Santa suits that he gets off Amazon.” What was cool about that was she, of course, was like, “I want to do that. I do want to add this bit of toughness and a little danger to him, that when he comes in, he means business.”

Meaning?

Mike P. Nelson: That was the gloves, that was the special boots that he wears on his missions, like the beard. We’re going to give it some extra texture, so it really pops. Sometimes if you land in a frame, sometimes you’ll layer in some darkness, some dirt, and kind of mud in it. It’s not just a big white poof.

Billy’s axe—is it a pretty close replica to the original?

Mike P. Nelson: It’s not. I wanted the movie to have its own, but it was very important that it was the double-sided splitter. So it was less of the stock axe that you would find next to a fire escape. It was kind of more like an extinguishing axe, which strangely doesn’t make sense, because most of those aren’t double-sided. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m looking into it too far, it doesn’t matter.

It was double-sided; that is something that I did want to carry through to this reimagining. Dude, it’s Billy Chapman. He’s got the double-sided splitter axe now. The one that we found was something online that has a lot of history to it. God, it’s like 60 or 70 years old. It’s got this nice, real engraving of the company that did it. You can see that it’s been through a lot. So really, he’s been using this thing for a while, and where he finds it in the movie is literally just by some guy’s fucking shed.