Silent Night, Deadly Night

A slasher whose one real innovation was picking the single costume guaranteed to enrage parents. A boy watches a man in a Santa suit murder his family, grows up traumatised in a punishing Catholic orphanage, and eventually snaps into a Santa-suited rampage of his own at Christmas. The film underneath is a middling early-80s body-count picture, but the marketing put an axe-swinging Santa on television during family hour, and Siskel and Ebert read the filmmakers' names on air like a roll of shame. The public fury got it pulled from theatres inside a week, which of course guaranteed it a cult and four sequels. Ordinary movie, extraordinary tantrum around it.