Silent Night, Bloody Night

On Christmas Eve a grandson inherits a New England mansion that used to be an asylum — and the town starts dying. Theodore Gershuny’s 1972 proto-slasher, written with Jeffrey Konvitz (later The Sentinel), is an early holiday horror: locked rooms, old sins, phone calls in the dark, John Carradine as the half-blind newspaper man. Mary Woronov and Patrick O’Neal anchor the living; Warhol Factory faces (Candy Darling, Ondine) flicker among the inmates. Shot on Long Island, released by Cannon, with a young Lloyd Kaufman among the producers. Gloomy, cheap, and a few years ahead of the Christmas slasher boom, it is the silent night that isn’t.