A complex, massively-influential slasher film blackening a joyous time of year with groundbreaking POV-transposition, bone-chilling horror sequences, phenomenal characterization, prognostic mental health cogitation, & wild twist-ending. 8.8/10.

…

Plot Synopsis: As winter break begins, a group of sorority sisters, including Jess (Olivia Hussey) and the often inebriated Barb (Margot Kidder), begin to receive anonymous, lascivious phone calls. Initially, Barb eggs the caller on, but stops when he responds threateningly. Soon, Barb’s friend Claire (Lynne Griffin) goes missing from the sorority house, and a local adolescent girl is murdered, leading the girls to suspect a serial killer is on the loose. But no one realizes just how near the culprit is.

*Possible Spoilers Ahead*

The Official CLC Review

Ah, Christmas – A time of cheer, presents, gingerbread cookies, snow flurries, egg-nog, and.. mutilated corpses? Canadian Director Bob Clark certainly loves the yuletide season, having directed two classic-level entries on the holiday thematically in Black Christmas (1974) and, perhaps even more infamous and complete-opposite spectrum, A Christmas Story (1983). However, only one of these wildly subverted and innovated its genre entirely, establishing tropes, rules, and ideas that persist to this day: Black Christmas. The first holiday-themed horror film and one of the earliest (and, to this day, best) slasher films ever, B.C.’s influence and impact on the genre’s history cannot be understated and warrants praise/recognition now it was coldly deprived of when it release back in the mid-1970’s. A complex, massively-influential slasher film blackening a joyous time of year, Black Christmas deserves status as one of the All-Time great subgenre entries – with groundbreaking POV-transposition, bone-chilling horror sequences, a starry cast of phenomenal performances/characterization, prognostic mental health cogitation, one of the genre’s most fascinating slashers, and dark twist-ending.

What is most singularly-auterist about Black Christmas is the decision to take us into the very eyes of the killer through POV transposition. Words cannot express how much of a groundbreaking technique this was at the time – although not the first to ever utilize the style, the first to pioneer/elevate it to a whole ‘nother level and definitely the first to use it on a mass scale in horror: the scariest place for it by nature. The very essence of the horror genre is to beguile and scare us by taking us into the darkest corners of mankind and our psyches, and what could possibly be a more brilliant way to express that than by making us feel like we’re the killer ourselves by taking us into the eyes of the slasher’s POV on-screen? We’re helpless bystanders and watchers in this bloodbath we’re made to feel almost complicit in by visual stylism – made even more harrowing and authentic a horror experience by the kill sequences themselves.

From the moment he stumbles onto the Kappa sorority house in the bleak cold of a winter night to the macabre way he mutilates and bludgeons his victims, Black Christmas’ horror is bone-chilling – made even more impressive and influential by the fact that it was one of the first slasher movies ever. We’re taken on a whirlwind tour of suffocated corpses rocked sadistically like some kind of doll in a chair, sorority sisters stripped and mutilated on top of one another in a bed, hooks pulling house maidens up into the recesses of the attic, college-girls stabbed with ice picks while they’re sleeping, and multiple shots of a singular eye achieved through masterful lighting selectivity that will play an important role in the story thematically. The film’s visuals and cinematography are brutalistic in all the best ways you expect from a horror movie, whose biggest success metric is to freak you out and make it hard to sleep at night after like Black Christmas does through POV and its kill sequences. The film barely even uses establishing shots or gore to relate the horror until that jaw-dropping climactic finale, an impressive/effective trick of early slashers extremely refreshing to see before the genre devolved into constant bloodbaths and stock jump scares of today. We see members of the Kappa house – made even more tragic and hard-hitting by the youth factor invoked again by fellow-1974 and legendary horror/slasher film Texas Chainsaw Massacre – picked off one-by-one by a killer who stalks in the dead of night with alarming efficacy and barely a trace, a mysterious and ominous presence bolstered by the film’s soundtrack choices.

Acoustically, Black Christmas utilizes the prevalent sound of ominous wind to evoke an ancient-feeling macabre from its opening scene. Juxtaposed is one of the genre’s best utilizations of silence to relate the death/loss-of-life being unable to call back, as well as one of the early slasher themes signifying the presence of our cold-blooded killer: a dissonant string of piano disharmonies that feel completely unnatural. Composer Carl Zittrer was able to achieve such an atmosphere of dread and oddness by going beyond convention in film scoring too – tying forks, combs, and knives onto the strings of a piano to warp the sound of the keys and create an unforgettably dark effect. These are, however, peculiarly antidoted by something you wouldn’t expect from the genre: harmonic, airy pads that feel more out of the mystery genre than horror. Their utilization is tremendously effective though, hypnotizing you into a feathery lightness as we float towards the inevitable doom that lurks behind the door or curtain in every sequence it’s used to make the horror hit/bludgeon harder. It’s almost used like an alley-oop (forgive my basketball reference, but a nice metaphor for this) setting the horror up to be thunderously-dunked down upon its revelation, none-better visualized than in the film’s breathtaking climax when Jess is told the killer is in the house and slowly approaches Barb’s room before seeing what became of her roommates and coming eye-to-eye with the man of the hour: Billy.

The film’s killer is one of the most fascinating I’ve ever witnessed in the genre. Never even revealed beyond a singular shot of an eye (and one that looks more like a scared child than a cold-blooded, remorseless killer’s), he is one of the most bizarre and mysterious slashers ever-scripted – by-design to provoke our curiosities from the first time the phone rings. What starts as a downright-bizarre string of phone calls made to a seemingly-random sorority house on a nondescript college campus cascades into a canvas of blood-curdling macabre by the end of the film’s brisk 1hr38min-runtime. What’s happening? Who is this killer? Why is he doing this? What is his connection to these people? Why here? The film never ostensibly gives any motive, backstory, characterization, or exposition of who the killer is and why he’s carrying out this naughty plan – that is, until you look closer at the subtextual story packed within the frame of these all-important phone calls. At first, they seem like the ramblings of a clearly-deranged lunatic – but as the screenplay progresses, a narrative of vignettes starts to evolve: each with additional voices, characters, and scenarios related through very-specific dialogue. We hear children, a woman, a man, and two names of Billy and Agnes come into the mix; The overarching theme across these vignettes/clippings is dysfunction, wherein there is some sort of abuse, violence, and problem going on here – especially in one character: Billy. Described as everything from ‘sick’ to a ‘monster’ to ‘how could you leave Billy alone with Agnes?’, we can piece together that something bad happened to a younger-child named Agnes and that Billy was responsible. The killer in the film refers to his female victims as Agnes before killing them and to himself as Billy, making it tremendously important what these seemingly-nonsensical calls mean between-the-lines.

Bob Clark was always by-nature very secretive with what this, but did reveal in an interview that Billy and Agnes were brother and sister. This changes the reading of the character of Billy – a clearly mentally-ill and bullied-boy who did something taboo with his sister Agnes and is deathly-afraid of her telling people (presumably, his parents). The final call’s scenario of an inability to find Agnes and fear that the worst has happened to her likely signifies that Billy killed her for wanting to tell and reveal what they did, as well as perhaps the rest of the family that would either-way scar Billy for-life and likely trap him developmentally in that stage and a loop/cycle he relives constantly, wherein these traumatic memories replay in his head and he kills and tells people to try to get them out of him. The family revelation would also explain why this random house, the bizarre children’s decorations in the attic, and how Billy is able to get in and out so easily: perhaps this was his childhood home and the return here (maybe from an escaped mental-institution or the like) sets off a flood of memories and trauma that results in bloodlust, death, and the peculiar way he looks: not an experienced, detached killer with no qualms about killing others but a frightened child in shock/disbelief of what he just did. Though it’s naturally-impossible to fully piece together the backstory of Billy by how little is revealed, this is the film’s golden achievement – brilliant analytic complexity and nuance making you think/interpret perhaps the most I’ve ever seen in a slasher movie. This doubles as a mental health cogitation and depiction eons ahead of its comparatively-archaic time in the 1970’s, before criminal psychology was even on-the-radar of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and society beyond.

Beyond Billy and the resulting magnificent voice performances put on to make even something as routine and harmless as a phone call scary (that many genre entries would take inspiration from, the biggest of which being Scream), the acting and characterization of Black Christmas is sublime. This is where truly most slasher films of the modern era fall apart, and where the ’70’s-’80’s shiny as the golden age of what the genre can be at peak performance. The cast is full of heavy-hitters of the era. Shakespearean method-actress Olivia Hussey steals the show as strong-and-independent final girl Jess, who does the unconscionable for the time coming right off the heels of Roe v. Wade: challenge a man about her right to an abortion if it interferes with her life goals (political opinions (and the fact that the man does deserve at least some part in the discussion about life he’s half-responsible for creating) aside, this is a refreshing showcase of feminist power and one of the genre’s strongest ladies I can remember). Margot Kidder is, of course, the biggest star and name here having become an iconic part of motion picture history with the release of 1978’s Superman: The Movie, here showing why she deserved that fame by an opposite-spectrum, snarky, lascivious sorority girl spewing obscenities and dirty jokes. Definitive horror-policeman John Saxon delivers a classically-charismatic detective, Doug McGrath plays the gullible Sargeant Nash well, Marian Waldman side-splitting as comic-relief Mrs. Mac stashing an unheard-of amount of booze in nooks and crannies around the house, and Keir Dullea of ‘I Can’t Let You Do That Dave’ 2001: A Spade Odyssey-legend is mesmerizing as insecure concert-pianist-with-a-dark-side Peter Smythe making you truly belive he was the killer until the final scene. There is not a weak link to be found across the rest of the characters and performances in the film’s periphery either, as this elaborately-scripted tale of dead bodies and sisterhood makes you actually – *gasp* – care about the characters and what happens to them: a lost art in the horror genre. Brilliant.

Flaws in Black Christmas are pretty much limited to its wildly-abrasive opening and, often, inauthentic portrayal of college students. Being in my 20’s having recently graduated from college and higher education, I was even offended by the constant obscenities and crass, tasteless language thrown around constantly in the first act; I can’t even imagine what someone in their 30’s or ’40’s would think of it. College students do NOT talk like that, and are not even remotely so stereotypically-rude/brash/sex-crazed as the portrayal here it feels like was screenwritten by a 70-year old shut-in on how he thinks the younger generation thinks – one that isn’t the best portrayal of women either, in a film outwardly the point of it being (or should have been) centered around a sorority. Among these lines are some that are so inexcusably-vile that you simply can’t believe someone said it on-screen, like Kidder’s infamous ‘townie’ quote that aged about the worst I’ve ever witnessed a line age (not that it was even ever acceptable, but still.. wow). The first call by Billy mirrors this problem in being so dirty and offensively-worded that it comes across as tasteless and unwatchable, perhaps a vignette of abuse or relations between him and some other family member that apparently shaped a traumatic memory he’s recalling, but should’ve been way less prominent, lengthy, and forced.

…

Conclusion

Overall, Black Christmas is one of the greatest & most groundbreaking slasher movies of All-Time. Its influence can be easily seen reverberated throughout the genre today – from the tropes it helped establish like the basement/attic to taking something ostensibly normal and making it scary like its phone calls (new-age films like Scream took cue from) and the holidays to killer’s POV exposition to sadistic corpse-mutilation to mental-illness cogitation. It’s clear to see why mythic horror-legend John Carpenter claimed it was the most influential film to his genre-defining Halloween – in case you’ve ever heard of it (constantly referencing Black Christmas from its opening Michael-kill scene of his sister (basically Agnes), holiday-theme, return to his family home years later, & escape from an asylum – Bob Clark’s revealed plan for a sequel that would’ve also been Halloween-themed but got scrapped and, clearly, conceptually-borrowed). Together with Psycho & The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, the film laid the foundation for what would become cinema’s most profitable and visceral subgenre: slasher movies. A complex, massively-influential slasher film blackening a joyous time of year, Black Christmas deserves status as one of the All-Time great subgenre entries – with groundbreaking POV-transposition, bone-chilling horror sequences, a starry cast of phenomenal performances/characterization, prognostic mental health cogitation, one of the genre’s most fascinating slashers, and dark twist-ending.

…