Black Christmas (1974)

Once again, I call your attention to a slasher film that beat Halloween to the punch by a number of years. This time around, the topic of discussion is Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, a movie more often talked about than seen (having mostly flown under the radar of all but the most dedicated fans for the last three decades), but which is nevertheless a major milestone in the development of the slasher subgenre. Black Christmas appears to have been the first such film ever made in Canada, the originator of a lineage that produced some of the most unusual (if not always especially good) movies about maniacs to appear over the course of the 1980’s. It was also the first in North America to utilize the sorority-house setting which would become so popular in the years to come, and the first anywhere that I know of to use some instantly recognizable occasion as a shorthand means of establishing the mood. In terms of plot structure and characterization, Black Christmas proved far more influential than the contemporary and better known The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, although it also resembles the latter movie in being notable as much for those areas in which it failed to exert any pull on subsequent filmmakers as it is for its conspicuous contributions to the 80’s slasher template. Though it has been repeatedly plundered for individual plot points during the 30 years since its release, Black Christmas has never, so far as I’ve seen, been treated to anything like the wholesale copying that attended the advent of, say, Friday the 13th.

What we have here is quite possibly the world’s smartest slasher movie, but adequately explaining why is going to require me to give away a few things that a first-time viewer is going to want to remain in ignorance of; if you haven’t yet seen Black Christmas, but believe that you’re going to want to, then I recommend that you stop here and come back after you’ve had a chance to watch the film. What makes Black Christmas such a joy to behold is that it answers every one of the most common complaints about slasher films, despite having been made at least six years before the vast majority of the movies eliciting those complaints were more than a twinkle in their creators’ eyes. We have cops here, to begin with, and not only do we have cops, but they’re competent cops for the most part. Screenwriter Roy Moore sends them off in exactly the wrong direction, of course, but he does so in a way that plays completely fair— longtime slasher fans will conclude very quickly that Peter Smythe is not the killer, but there’s every reason to believe that he may be evolving very swiftly into a killer, and Fuller and his fellow policemen are therefore right to be chasing after him. Moore has also devised a set of circumstances in which it is possible for the characters caught by the killer to disappear one by one without attracting undue attention. Everyone simply assumes that Claire Richardson has gone home until her father shows up to tell them otherwise. Mrs. MacHenry tells Jess and Barb that she will probably have left the sorority house to embark on her own holiday trip by the time they return from the police station, and because her plan was to hire a taxi to take her to the airport, there’s no cause for concern later when her car is around and she isn’t. Barb, for her part, is sleeping off an economy-sized drunk when the killer gets to her. The only victim whose disappearance couldn’t reasonably go unnoticed for at least a little while is the one whose unexplained absence finally alerts Jess to the full extent of her peril. Black Christmas even manages to employ what would become the slasher movie’s most obnoxious cliché— the killer who isn’t dead even though he certainly ought to be— in a way that is not only perfectly reasonable, but which actually improves the film as a whole! It possesses the most shockingly downbeat ending of any slasher movie I’ve seen, and it carries the convention of the red herring suspect further, with more upsetting results, than any film I know of in any genre. Simply put, Black Christmas is about as thoroughly unsafe as any slasher flick you’re ever going to find.

Black Christmas also enjoys the benefit of an extraordinarily capable cast. In a film like this one, in which no character can fairly be described as Expendable Meat, a high uniform standard of acting is essential, and everyone involved here really delivers. Margot Kidder is so much better here than she was in The Amityville Horror that it’s hard to believe we’re watching the same actress at work. Keir Dullea stops just short of going too far in his portrayal of Peter Smythe’s downward spiral. Olivia Hussey manages to be memorable in a part which permits her neither quirks nor eccentricities. John Saxon’s performance, in retrospect, leaves the audience with the fascinating impression that we’re seeing his character from A Nightmare on Elm Street as a young man, an effect which, while obviously accidental, enriches Black Christmas in a small but significant way. Hell, even Miriam Waldman, whose main job is comic relief, makes a strong showing for herself.

There is one audience segment that probably won’t find Black Christmas to its liking, however, and to the movie’s disadvantage, that segment happens also to account for the great bulk of slasher fandom. Despite the presence of an eye-catchingly dreamy, Argento-like murder scene involving a glass unicorn bust, Black Christmas is almost completely devoid of graphic violence and gore. Those who come into a horror movie expecting to see heads roll will receive no satisfaction from this one. I myself don’t find that to be much of a problem, though. Really, the only serious defect I see in Black Christmas is the rambling, repetitive, unfocused quality of the second act. There are too many failed attempts to trace the Moaner’s phone calls, too many scenes of the sorority girls trying to behave as though life were going on normally, too many out-of-place jokes predicated on the density of Sergeant Nash. The film almost seems to be stalling for time. Luckily, that section isn’t inordinately long, and it is bracketed by both a strong setup and an absolutely wicked conclusion.