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.

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“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.”

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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?

“I feel like I'm anxious every time I go to make any movie,” he admits.  “Even The Monkey, 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.” As a fan of the Halloween franchise and Silent Night, Deadly Night, Campbell says there was no way he was going to turn them down, “I'm just a massive fan of these movies and these franchises, there's no way anyone could have convinced me not to do it if someone asked me to. So that's about as far as my brain goes with that whenever I think about it, and then I just dive into trying to do it well and do it for the true fans. When it comes to big swings like that, you just got to try it. You got to try it, and you got to keep it exciting. That's not going to be for everyone, but I think the people it does work for, they have a really good time with it.”

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Having a couple of slashers under his acting belt, between Halloween Ends’ Corey Cunningham and now Silent Night’s Billy Chapman, Campbell reveals that they really couldn’t be more different experiences. “Corey was such a dark place for me,” he says. “Corey felt like there was never going to be any way out, even at the best of times. And then with Billy, I just feel like he's still such a regular guy, and he's got so much hope that it's going to work out, and why wouldn't it work out? ‘But I just have to do this job in between those moments of it not working out or working out.’ The darkness of being behind that clown mask in Halloween Ends, I can still feel it to this day. With Billy, wearing a Santa suit felt silly, joyful, and insane. They're two very, very different feelings, but I don't know if I can say which one I preferred. It was just two very different things.”

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Campbell racks up a pretty massive body count in Silent Night, Deadly Night, in no small part thanks to that massive mowdown mentioned above. But will he ever play a character that tops Billy’s kill count? “God, I hope so,” he grins.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is in theaters December 12.