By JASON COMERFORD

A modest low-budget chiller that gets more mileage out of its concept than it may initially appear, Theodore Gershuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night was an early entry in the set-‘em-up, knock-‘em-off genre derived from, among others, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. (It would also be one of the first in a series of holiday-themed slashers, including Bob Clark’s Black Christmas.) Shot in 1972 but not released until two years later, the film’s copyright later lapsed into the public domain and can now be seen only in greymarket releases of highly variable quality, making its technical aspects difficult to properly assess. Regardless, the film’s merits are surprisingly numerous, with some inconsistent acting offset by a handful of effectively creepy sequences and a memorably grim finale.

Electronic music pioneer Gershon Kingsley’s string-heavy orchestral score owes an obvious debt to Bernard Herrmann’s iconic music for Psycho, but Kingsley’s sinuously composed effort immediately establishes its own identity. The holdover Herrmann approach actually works quite well – the music is intimate and contained, appropriate for the film’s humble scale. A lengthy sepia-toned flashback late in the film gets a particularly memorable boost from Kingsley’s compositions, the score a perfect match with the story of Gothic excess answered with bloody vengeance. As escaped mental patients swarm to attack their uncaring overseers, unresolved piano figures float above a bed of uneasy strings then gently segue into a melancholy interpolation of the titular German holiday carol, giving the film a shivery, timeless resonance.