Silent Night, Deadly Night VHS Diorama

Some people might think Reclaim Hosting is just posing with its VHS-and-vinyl aesthetic across our website. I’m here to disabuse you of any such notions: we take our retro media culture seriously at Reclaim. So seriously, in fact, that we took time out of our very busy holiday schedule to build and install a 4' × 2.5' scaled-up copy of a Silent Night, Deadly Night VHS tape to celebrate the season.

While some liberties were taken with the front of the tape to streamline the message, rest assured the scan was taken from an actual 1986 VHS release of this holiday exploitation classic. Why this tape? It’s one of those examples where the art for the film is arguably—definitely, in this case—better than the movie itself. I can make plenty of arguments for watching Silent Night, Deadly Night, but the real reason I watched it in the first place was the VHS box art.

Seeing Santa clutching a double-headed axe while descending a chimney was sensational. It flew in the face of everything we were programmed to associate with Christmas—peace, love, family, and goodwill. In one fell swoop of the brush, this videocassette obliterates that image. And all a 12- or 13-year-old kid can think after seeing it is: How did it get to that point? How did things go so wrong for Santa?!

There’s a lot to learn from discovering just how far we can stray from what we were told was the “true spirit” of just about anything.

So, for the eighth day of Christmas, Reclaim gives you a real-life, scaled-up Silent Night, Deadly Night diorama—currently live in Trento, Italy, though I’d argue the sentiment travels. From our bad ’80s horror movies to yours: have a very vigilant holiday.