silent night, bloody night (cinema history class)

Session: Christmas Themed Creepiness, Week 4
Movie: Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972)
Directed by Theodore Gershuny
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Jeffrey Butler returns to rural New England, ready to sell the house he inherited decades before. Little does he know that the house and the whole town have some secrets that just may get out. Hilarity ensues.

Background and Reaction:
This movie proved that you don't need a big budget to make a good film. This came in for under $300K, but was really good and creepy. In fact, in some ways the lower budget ended up helping this out. The nighttime exteriors (including the driving scenes) are haunting in their bleakness. I can't help but feel that a major studio with a major budget would have ruined these scenes.

Relatedly, this movie fell into the public domain immediately upon release*, so it was never properly cleaned up for the DVD issue. Again, the fact that these night scenes weren't cleaned up actually worked well in giving the movie its feel. And that feel? It was cold and bleak. Disturbing. It really got under my skin.

This was especially true of the sections late in the movie where there are a lot of sepia-toned stills and sequences showing the former patients of the inherited house -- when it was a makeshift mental hospital.

There was some really good misdirection -- scenes where you're sure that things will go one way, and they go another. In the scene where Diane meets Jeffrey, I was sure that he was going to attack her (once he earned her trust). Wrong. There were all sorts of other places where I was sure I knew what would happen, and I was just wrong.

The town leaders are all weird in that "can't put my finger on it, but something's wrong" kind of way. Especially the guy with the bell. And the reveal makes it all just plain weird.

There were some drawbacks -- somehow I had a bit of a hard time keeping up with who was whom. But ultimately that didn;t matter.

Ratings:
Me:9
Dave: 9.7 - 9.8
Ethan: 7
Joe: 10
Scott: 8.5 - 9.0
Sean: 1 out of 4

Bechdel:
Silent Night, Bloody Night fails the Bechdel test.
As someone pointed out, I was wrong. SNBN passes the Bechdel test. Barely.

Bonus line from the conversation that I'll present without context:
"You mean the weird shit like putting cereal in your ass?"

*This has something to do with identification cards. I don't really understand the legal issues.