Theodore Gershuny shot this melancholy horror film on the fly in Oyster Bay, Long Island, with some borrowed players from Andy Warhol's Factory, a handful of actors from the Dark Shadows TV series and a couple of Hollywood ringers. While cheaply produced and intended as little more than a cash cow, Silent Night, Bloody Night remains an effective thriller and a resonant study of human disaffiliation taken to its logical and gory extreme.

In the tumbledown Massachusetts hamlet of East Willard, the proposed sale of the abandoned Butler estate– once a private mental instution- attracts to town moody heir Jeffrey Butler (James Patterson), slick city lawyer Carter (Patrick O'Neal), Carter's European mistress (Astrid Heeren), and unbeknownst to them all, an escapee from the Margaretville State Hospital for the Criminally Insane– who, by axe, shovel, and knife begins to demand bloody retribution upon all who would involve themselves in the sale. As the bodies begin to pile up, Jeffrey forms an uneasy alliance with Diane Adams (Mary Woronov), the pushy daughter of the local mayor (Walter Abel), to get to the heart of the mystery.

Silent Night, Bloody Night kicks off with a morose instrumental rendition of "Silent Night" that sets a perfect tone of loneliness. For a film resplendent with axe choppings, shovel bashings, limb severings and burnings alive, Silent Night, Bloody Night is an affecting group portrait of people isolated from one another by status, by age, by geography and psychology. Seemingly the only happy couple in the film, divorcee Carter and his mistress are cut to ribbons before the half hour mark.  The remaining characters live alone, in isolation – most notably the Mayor’s pretty, young daughter, who avails herself of the local bourbon ("It's a big favorite around here") to kill the hunger for humanity. Where Silent Night, Bloody Night distinguishes itself from so many other killer-in-the-house vehicles is in establishing a human context for the mayhem; the survivors who queue up for the downbeat finish seem determined to do so in order to matter to someone else- even if that someone else is a homicidal maniac.

Sadly, a great many of the cast have since passed away: Patrick O'Neal's brief turn is warm for such a reptilian character, and amused as he sings the C. Austin Miles hymn "In The Garden" for his eye candy mistress. Co-star James Patterson (who died of cancer in 1972, and is dubbed by another actor in his final scenes) had appeared with Heeren and O'Neal in Sydney Pollack's Castle Keep. Holiday Inn's Walter Abel (who died in 1987) gives a compelling, pained and at times intriguingly awkward performance, while John Carradine (who died in 1988) plays a mute whose preferred means of communication is via a clerk's bell. Most of the Andy Warhol crew, seen in the sepia-tinted flashback sequence, have died, including Ondine, Candy Darling and performance artist Jack Smith.

Shot by documentary cameraman/editor Adam Giffard (Gimme Shelter), Silent Night, Bloody Night makes commendable use of its limited means and gets great mileage out of the simplest of setups- all we need know of the benighted town of East Willard is the shot of the viaduct overhead that takes the modern world right past it.

Silent Night, Bloody Night is available on a number of public domain-raiding gray market DVDs.  A proper release is long overdue.