Buried beneath the blood-soaked Santa suit, "Silent Night, Deadly Night" has something a lot of slasher films lack - a unique identity, and thus cult film status.

if his eventual explosion delivers all the by-numbers cat & mouse and multitool culling that is expected of thesubgenre, it is his personal psychodrama which keeps us engaged with what is as much a human tragedy as a succession of sensational thrills

We're not knocking the transformation of a hallowed holiday figure into a homicidal maniac...it's the pleasure Billy and the movie take in leering at, then dicing up young women that lands Charles E. Sellier Jr.'s sicko Santa on our worst list.

It really is the movie’s fearlessly exploitive emotional and physical violence that cements its all-time placement in the Evil Santa canon.