SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT Star Rohan Campbell Breaks Down *That * Viral Scene
By Fangoria.com
5 min read"It's scary to go try at anything, but I can't live any other way. I sometimes feel that I'm addicted to the adrenaline of these kinds of experiences.”
Rohan Campbell is no stranger to the genre, after starring roles in Halloween Ends and The Monkey, the actor is tackling a Christmas horror classic. Campbell plays the lead role of killer Santa Billy in Mike P. Nelson’s reimagining of Silent Night, Deadly Night. There’s one scene in particular that’s already set the internet ablaze.
“That was one of those things that was in the script, I read it, and I was like, ‘This is insane. There's no way they're going to let us do this. This is such a fun thing to write, and I would love to go shoot this, but come on.’ And then we did it. I remember showing up, and it was one of my first days in town, shooting the movie. The most amazing stunt team taught me the entire sequence step by step. I got to show up in a barn, and I walked in, and Mike and I looked at the set and said, ‘Yep, this feels really weird and insane, and we're actually doing this.’ Luckily enough, we had enough time in rehearsal that I had sort of memorized all the steps and just piece by piece mowed our way through the White Power Christmas party.”
And mowing it down is absolutely the most accurate way to describe how Campbell moves through the scene. He wields an axe, swinging it about as though it’s an extension of his arm rather than a tool he had to learn to handle in a way that makes it look effortless.
“That was a fun two days,” he laughs. “People forget that you shoot this stuff for 16 hours a day, so it's like you were chopping up Nazis for 16 hours with all these swastikas all over the place. I don't know if people notice this when you watch it in the theater, but the lamps on the table are swastika-shaped. It was so insane. It was just one of those shooting experiences where I'm like, ‘What is my job? What is happening?’ But yeah, it was such a good time.”
Campbell is no stranger to tackling established horror franchises and the added pressure that comes with fans’ expectations for beloved favorites. But does the thought of that make him anxious?
