As was the case with Halloween, I find myself sitting down to watch the movie I’m going to write about for the coming week on the day after a holiday - this year that happened to be the day after Christmas so, well, ‘tis the season and all that. And like Halloween, Black Christmas is an early example of the slasher film, a type of horror film of which I’m generally not very fond - I don’t find the prospect of a bunch of unwitting teenagers getting mowed down by a silent, hulking presence with some kind of gimmick all that compelling.
But I do feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least look at seminal examples of the type. That’s usually where you’re going to find the most interesting films, before they’ve been codified into some kind of genre with rules and clichés and expectations to be met. And, though I don’t know that Black Christmas works as well overall as Halloween does, there are some really interesting choices here alongside early examples of the sort of things that would become slasher film cliché.
The film begins sort of in medias res, as the young women of Pi Kappa Sigma sorority are throwing a holiday party before Christmas break. There’s drinking, conversation, the mood’s mostly festive and relaxed, though one sorority sister named Barb is having a tense phone call with her mother, and another sister, Jess, seems to be considering breaking up with her boyfriend Peter for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Meanwhile, outside the sorority house, we cut to a first-person perspective of someone walking around the house, looking in the windows, trying the doors.
Inside, the party is winding down as most of the sisters begin packing up to leave for the holidays, and then there’s a phone call. An obscene phone call, by the sounds of it. The caller breathes and grunts and moans, as the young women gathered around the phone listen with something between bemusement and numb resignation. The grunting and moaning escalates to surprisingly graphic ranting obscenity, and just before the caller hangs up, one last thing, almost whispered…
“I’m going to kill you.”
In some ways, Black Christmas really does create a lot of the template for future slasher films - even apart from setting the film during a holiday, which would go on to become a staple of the genre, we have a group of young people -in this case, young women - in a fixed location being stalked and murdered by an impersonal killer. The use of first-person perspective, which figured heavily into Halloween and shows up as a device in many other slasher films as well, is a big part of this film. Law enforcement is largely ineffectual and doesn’t really take the protagonists’ concerns seriously, and people get picked off one by one leading up to the climactic confrontation between the last protagonist and the killer.
But there are some important departures as well, things that future copycats wouldn’t include in the formula. Like Halloween, it is a much more deliberately-paced film than its successors would be, with a fairly large stretch of the film given over to the reactions of other characters to the disappearance of the first victim and efforts to locate her. It isn’t immediately clear what’s going on, and because they aren’t in an isolated location, there’s a sense that life continues to go on around this young woman going missing. There are subplots as well, which you generally don’t get in slasher films, about the first victims’ father, who came to campus to pick her up and then stayed to assist with the search effort, and Jess’ relationship with her boyfriend. They’re somewhat tangential to the main story, but end up becoming part of it as well, sometimes in surprisingly effective ways. For long stretches, it feels more like a mystery and how this group of people reacts to it than it does a horror film, except we know right off the bat what’s happened and are sort of waiting for it to happen again.
It’s also a lot less graphically violent than the films that would follow it - a number of people do die, but the murders are rarely lingered upon and in at least two cases occur entirely off-camera. Almost all of the action takes place in the sorority house, an actual house rented and remodeled for the film, which gives it a tremendous sense of geography. It gives the film a real feeling of…not claustrophobia, exactly, but confinement. There’s someone in the house with these young women, and all it would take would be opening a certain door or climbing up into the attic of this sprawling, labyrinthine house to reveal everything, but because there’s no real reason to, people don’t. A lot turns on small details - open doors, the sound of heavy breathing - to cue what’s about to happen, and much more than the films it inspires, this film really leans into the power of suggestion and imagination. There’s something nightmarish about it, this idea that there’s a maniac up in the attic, creeping down when people aren’t looking and lurking in the shadows, just watching. And what a maniac he is. One thing that Halloween does seem to be responsible for is the killer as a silent, implacable hulking figure. That is definitely not the case in this film. We almost never see the killer at all from anyone else’s perspective - just a hand or eyes peering out from the shadows. But we do see a lot from the killer’s perspective, and he rants, babbles, makes strange, inarticulate animal noises, speaking in multiple voices like a man possessed. There’s a horrific energy to this that exists in counterpoint to the fairly restrained depictions of murder. The obscene phone call that begins the film is surprisingly nasty for the time in which the film was made, and it continues in a way that best describes the killer as unhinged. The violence is in the killer’s portrayal, not in his actions, and because the killer is never really revealed in a meaningful way or explained at all, it’s really unsettling.
It’s also interesting to observe how the subject matter of this film interacts with the time in which it was made. It came out in 1974, and mid-70s ideas about gender are very much on display here in a way that communicates with the film. There’s the weary resignation the sorority sisters exhibit at yet another obscene phone call, the way that most of the men are occupied with dictating the lives of the women in the film, from the father’s prudish disapproval of his daughter’s fellow sorority sisters to Peter’s callous narcissism, the way the police dismiss the protagonist’s complaints about obscene phone calls and even the first sister going missing, or even just total strangers acting creepy. These women exist in an environment where they’re constantly under siege as it is from the men in their lives, never mind an unseen killer. And the men in this film mostly exist on a continuum of arrested development, from the police sergeant flustered by the word “fellatio” to the fraternity brother who can’t help but play Santa Claus while spouting obscenities, to Peter’s utter failure to consider anyone’s needs but his own, to the way the killer keeps regressing to a child as he rants and raves. Almost any of the men in this film could be a monster, it’s just a matter of degree.
So even though there is an interesting, almost theatrical feeling to this film (I really could see this being adapted for the stage if it hasn’t been already), it also makes a number of mistakes. The use of first-person perspective is pretty clumsy, and especially overdone at the start, where we basically know about the killer’s existence before we’re even properly situated with the characters and the setting. It burns off some of the suspense, and continually reverting to it throughout the film threatens to take us out of the story since it feels so artificial. Characterization in this film isn’t especially deep across the board, sometimes bordering on caricature, but there are occasionally some exchanges that feel pretty real, especially in the back half of the film when it becomes clear that there’s something going on. But the housemother is almost played for comic relief, and the protagonists aren’t really so much fleshed-out people as they are either a single personality trait or their relationship with another character.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in a film that moved along at a faster clip, but because the whole second act consists mostly of people talking to each other, things start to drag quite a bit. The tension does start to ramp up in the last act, accompanied by good use of long shots of empty hallways from different perspectives, which accentuates how big the house is and how many hidden nooks and crannies it has. I think more of that and less of the first-person stuff would have made it even better, and to its credit it ends strong on a creepily inconclusive note, something a lot of horror films fail to manage.
On its own, this is an idiosyncratic film that does slightly more right than it does wrong, but for as much as it’s contributed to a thoroughly overdone style of horror film, it’s also very much its own thing, and something about it has stuck with me ever since I watched it. That doesn’t happen all that often.
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