Black Christmas (1974)

Directed by Bob Clark

Viewed on Shudder

 

Summary: Slasher classic Black Christmas has aged surprisingly well, and I will never forget the disturbing noises made by the villain. Recommended!

 

Ah, my second favorite time of the year is finally upon us. Obviously my favorite time is that sacred month of October where we all wait patiently for the glorious day of Halloween, but Christmastime is a close second because dammit I do love the Christmas season and the Christmas spirit and all that. So why not combine these two wonderful holidays and spotlight some Yuletide horror during the most wonderful time of the year? Let’s start with one of the granddaddies of both the Christmas horror subgenre and the slasher genre, Black Christmas!

Black Christmas is the classic tale of a sorority house beset by a crazed killer over the Christmas break. This all starts with a series of obscene phone calls that the house receives, but quickly escalates as it’s made clear to the audience that there is a prowler about, lurking outside and breaking into the attic via a conveniently placed rose support. Soon after this happens, the sorority sisters leave to go home, or elsewhere, over the break, but one of them mysteriously vanishes. This search for the missing sorority sister is the main story, with her father, boyfriend and sorority sisters trying to figure out where she disappeared to. While that is happening, the relationship of another sister, Jess, and her boyfriend, Peter, faces a radical change as Jess talks to Peter about getting an abortion.

The plot here seems pretty simple, but that’s kind of the beauty of the film, it approaches the subject matter in a way that’s stylish and disturbing enough that the scarcity of plot doesn’t really become a problem. This style comes from a few different places, the most immediately noticeable being the distinct way that the film is shot, with almost all the sequences of the intruder being shown from his point of view, which gives everything a creepy voyeuristic feeling to it. I’d say it’s reminiscent of Halloween, but this movie came out several years before Halloween, so really Halloween is reminiscent of Black Christmas. Speaking of the slasher genre, it’s so fascinating to look at a slasher movie that came out before the slasher tropes were codified, particularly in regards to the hero of the film, Jess.

Usually these slasher movies, especially ones in the 80s, would have the final girl be the ‘good girl’ of the group, the person who was sexually pure, didn’t do drugs, that kind of stuff. All of this makes Jess so much more interesting as a protagonist because, as I mentioned before, a big part of her character is that she is pregnant and makes it clear early on that her intention is to get an abortion. Jess is not demure, she never apologizes for being her, she knows what she wants, does not feel guilty about wanting an abortion, and (SPOILER ALERT) never changes her mind or suddenly decides that it’s wrong to have an abortion. To say Jess is an unlikely slasher protagonist is an understatement, I don’t think studios TODAY would feel comfortable having this character, as is, be the lead of a slasher film, making it all the more interesting as this movie came out barely a year after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case was decided.

Just because the movie is progressive doesn’t mean everything in it is good, though, as the film has an incredibly baffling sense of humor. Humor is always kind of strange to try and fit into horror movies, especially mysteries and slasher films whose main plotlines take themselves seriously, but it can work in some cases if the jokes are told at the right time to defuse some tension or to lean into black comedy. That does not happen here. Here, the humor is awkwardly placed in such a way that it seems specifically designed to be jarring. After a tense scene where Jess tells Peter she’s getting an abortion and Peter does not take it well, we cut to a party where the local drunk lady is giving champagne to children and loudly slurring curses. It’s a bit of a tonal shift and that happens rather frequently, often taking me out of the movie with how jarring the change of moods seems to be. We see a scene where a cop is shot in the ass by a farmer and it’s played for laughs, a scene where the local idiotic cop gets a prank pulled on him by the previously mentioned drunk lady who tells him that ‘fellatio’ is a new phone extension so the cop tells the other cops about this in a really long and unfunny scene. So much bad comedy happens and I really wish it had all been cut because it adds nothing to the actually tense plot.

The missing sorority sister plot is compounded by the frequent calls to the sorority house, which are actually pretty creepy. These phone calls consist mostly of obscene gibberish that gets shrieked at whoever was unfortunate enough to pick up the phone and they happen with some frequency. Later on, when the police are trying to trace the call, they need Jess to try and keep the caller on the line, which results in her getting screamed at over and over and over, in a sequence that is genuinely upsetting and kind of hard to watch. The loudness of the caller and the intruder form an interesting contrast with what slasher movies ended up becoming, usually the villain would be silent (Halloween, Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp) but here the constant gibbering and shrieking form an extra unnerving layer to what is happening.

The acting is mostly okay. There’s a fairly large cast of characters here and not everyone is great, but the main characters are all at least decent and there were some bright spots in the cast. Jess and Peter’s performances were probably the best, with Jess trying to keep herself together while everything around her is going to hell and Peter entering this downward spiral into insanity. They played quite nicely off of each other as well, having some real chemistry that made their scenes quite tense. I also have to give a shoutout to John Saxon who plays Lt. Ken Fuller. Saxon is probably best known for playing Lt. Thomspon in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Saxon is quite good in those movies and he’s good here, a welcome veteran character actor who really knows how to play a cop well. Some of the performances aren’t great but nothing stands out as terrible so it’s not a big deal.

I was a bit hard on the comedic aspects of the film, the goofy cops and also the alcoholic housemother who hides the same pint of sherry in a dozen different places around the house, but when it isn’t indulging in those moments, Black Christmas is a pretty solid slasher movie that helped lay the foundation for films like Halloween. The characters are unique and interesting, and I liked the use of sound here. Sound, both the score and sounds people made, added layers of tense discomfort and kept me invested even when silly things happened between the good scenes. Overall, Black Christmas is a quality piece of horror history that still holds up today. If you’re into slasher movies I would definitely recommend it, if you’re interested in the history of horror movies at all then, even if you don’t like slashers, you should probably see it at least once.