The cult film that cross-pollinates horror and action with a Michael Myers-esque antagonist augmented by vague science and features a lead performance by someone named Dan Stevens. Despite what that description suggests, we’re not talking about The Guest—which is also wildly underrated—no, we’re talking about the 1982 Chuck Norris film Silent Rage, which is not to be confused with the Rutger Hauer film Blind Fury. You may not have heard of Silent Rage, but it planted the seeds for later films you may know and enjoy. Edgar Wright references it directly during his commentary track of the Blu-ray for Hot Fuzz—a sentence which hopefully will not become obsolete within the coming years. Anyway, Wright references how people highlighted the fact that Hot Fuzz is an action film, albeit a parody of the genre, but the antagonistic threat of the Neighborhood Watch Alliance is tonally closer to the slasher genre and how it was loosely inspired by Silent Rage. Danny (Nick Frost) is actually seen looking at a copy of the film while they’re in the supermarket. If you love Hot Fuzz, Silent Rage paved the way to its inception, no matter how inadvertently.

In the film, Norris plays a cowboy hat-wearing member of Texas law enforcement—clearly trying to demonstrate his range as an actor—by the name of Sheriff Dan Stevens. After the failed arrest of a deranged man named John Kirby (Brian Libby), who murdered two people with an ax, Kirby is taken to a hospital with fatal wounds and is presumed dead. Unbeknownst to Stevens, a couple of doctors inject the nearly-dead Kirby with a syringe full of science that brings him back to life and renders him mute but utterly invulnerable to all harm and able to heal from all wounds. Once he escapes, it’s up to Sheriff Stevens to take him down. This time, for good.

Based on that description, you would likely think this is a mindless action B-movie…and you’re not wrong. The film is absolutely a Chuck Norris vehicle, and much like the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Commando, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s self-aware of its own ridiculousness. What makes Silent Rage unique is how it’s split down the middle of what tone it wants to have. Every scene that Chuck Norris is in feels distinctly like an 80s action film, whereas everything with the character John Kirby feels like it leans into the slasher genre. Similar to From Dusk Till Dawn, where all the characters think they’re in a crime thriller, only to discover that it’s a vampire movie, Chuck Norris as Sheriff Stevens behaves as if he’s in a Roadhouse rip-off, when in fact, it’s a Halloween clone.

For the first half of the film, Norris is portrayed as a small-town sheriff who’s trying to keep the peace. After Kirby is presumed dead in the first twenty minutes, the prime source of conflict is a biker gang that comes into town and starts making things difficult for the townsfolk. If you didn’t see the opening sequence of Kirby being arrested and then shot down, you would totally believe this gang would be the main antagonists, or at least the pawns of a more imposing threat, similar to something like Roadhouse or Invasion USA (another great Chuck Norris film). In an alternate reality, this could’ve been an action movie with a similar premise to the Marlon Brando film The Wild One, but from the point of view of the police. For what little screen time the bikers have, they’re given a lot of personality, and it’s satisfying to watch Norris beat them down. The most entertaining set piece in the movie is halfway through when he takes all twenty or so guys down in a bar fight. However, that’s also the clear-cut line where it stops being an action movie and becomes a slasher.

Until that point, Kirby’s progression into a mindless killing machine was a subplot that was happening in the background, much like The Joker’s plight in the first act of The Dark Knight. But simultaneously, once the gang is disposed of—and never referenced again or brought back as extra cannon fodder for Kirby, kind of a missed opportunity, but whatever—that’s when Kirby escapes and becomes the prime force to be reckoned with. Once he escapes, the film flips completely into a horror film. Director Michael Miller stated that the film was an homage to classic monster movies, more in the vein of Frankenstein rather than Halloween, but when you watch it, there are obvious nods that seem to pull directly from Halloween and Halloween II. The latter of which was released the year before this.

Besides Kirby’s appearance, with his long hair and jumpsuit, which looks similar to the hair on Michael Myers’ trademark mask and mechanic outfit, his stoic, expressionless face and seeming lack of motivation for his choice of victims feels in line with Michael Myers. He kills the doctors who operated on him, but there’s never a real sense of malice he holds towards them. If anything, he seems to do it because they were the first ones he came across, and every subsequent murder occurs to anyone who made the mistake of being within arm’s reach of him. A few other details may ring some bells for fans of the Halloween series, like the synth-heavy John Carpenter-like soundtrack, the climax in a hospital, and even Kirby being engulfed in flames.

Beyond that, the scene that’s the cinematic equivalent of pressing Control-C and Control-V on a keyboard is the long take of Kirby entering his doctor’s house after escaping the hospital. It mirrors identically the opening scene of Halloween, from the sting of the lights going out on the second floor to the flowing camera movement of the first-person POV of Kirby walking in the house, down to the visual of him extending his arm to grab a knife that’s left on the counter. Once he finishes doing the dirty work, later on, there’s even a sequence of someone coming across the dead bodies that’s staged, not unlike the famous Judith Myers headstone scene from the original Halloween. Because whether you’re a 9-to-5 worker or a deranged lunatic, it’s good to take pride in your work. This isn’t all to say these similarities make the movie terrible; if anything, it makes it fun to see what they skimmed off the top of the Halloween franchise. If the director is to be believed, and he was completely ignorant of the similarities, somebody involved had to have been aware of it and just didn’t say anything.

What’s funny upon rewatch is the movie goes to great lengths to portray Kirby as this scary, utterly unstoppable killing machine. He’s a monster, and this is a monster movie. Except, when you think of the film from the point of view of Chuck Norris’ character, he never learns that he’s in a horror film. He never learns that Kirby is superhuman, and he doesn’t even look shocked when he finds out that he’s still alive after he more or less saw him die just a few days earlier. He looks at him with the attitude of: “Sure, this fits with the reality I’ve accepted.” Once it gets to the showdown of Chuck Norris fighting what’s essentially Michael Myers, from his perspective, there isn’t any additional reason to fear him. He’s just a guy with impressive endurance.

Silent Rage is an oddity because it’s one of the few films that come to mind that balance both action and horror. It’s wild, considering the two genres have overlapping themes, often related to the human drive for survival or the emotional drive for revenge. You would think that would be a more frequent occurrence. If you look at John Wick from the perspective of the faceless goons, he’s a ruthless and unstoppable murder machine, and they’re just doing their jobs. If you look at the Friday the 13^th sequels from Jason’s perspective, he wants revenge on the people he sees as responsible for the loss of his childhood and the murder of his mother. If you tweak the synopsis of a film even slightly, you can make a horror movie sound like an action film, and vice-versa.

That’s probably why you don’t see the genres merged very often; it’s because if the dial points too far in one direction, that’s how the audience perceives it. The original Terminator is arguably a horror film, but because the monster is a robot from the future and carries a gun, it’s remembered as an action film. Malignant is a horror film but has some impressive action sequences that could fit snugly in a David Leitch film. Both could be described as action-horror films, but neither of them are defined as that because one genre overpowers the other, and whichever genre dominates the tone is what people remember it as. Silent Rage is a rare exception because it gives both genres time to stretch their legs and embrace their tropes and eccentricities. It’s an action film when it wants to be and a horror film when it wants to be. For a subgenre that doesn’t have as many entries as it could or should have, Silent Rage stands out for dividing its tones so distinctly and evenly while embracing the absurdity of its premise.