Kids These Days Wouldn't Answer The Calls Coming From Inside The House
How does Black Christmas hold up as a proto-slasher?
Two movies came out in 1974 that changed not just the horror landscape, but also the cinematic landscape, forever. The first, by about two months, was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a true masterpiece that I wrote about back in September. The second, released on December 20th of the same year, is Bob Clark’s Black Christmas.
Black Christmas, like Texas Chain Saw, is a true masterpiece of the genre. It masterfully blends tension, solitude, sound, and beautiful cinematography to create a horrifying slasher juxtaposed brilliantly against the cheery backdrop of Christmas. Most people regard it as the original true slasher, as Texas Chain Saw, while coming close, simply didn’t follow the formula as well as it could have, because that formula didn’t exist yet. However, Black Christmas was not the first movie of its kind. Psycho, the actual first slasher movie in my humble opinion, released fourteen years earlier. And Texas Chain Saw, while technically not a proper slasher, hit all the marks of tension, implied and actually seen gore, and disturbing auditory experiences as well as visual. But Black Christmas had two things that worked for it perfectly: the Christmastime setting, and the dramatic irony of the calls coming from inside the house.
Christmas is, surprisingly or not, a near-perfect setting for a horror movie. The various accoutrements of the season provide a wonderful backdrop for terror, with the cold and the dark pressing in all around, and bright white snow just primed for blood to splash across it, winter just begs a horror movie. Throw Christmas into the mix, where you can set all of that darkness against the childish cheer of the season, with its cocoa, carolers, goodwill, and innocence, and you’ve got yourself a thematically pleasing story, even if it manages nothing else.
Luckily for us, though, Black Christmas did manage plenty else. Directed by Bob Clark, who would later go on to direct my favorite Christmas movie of all time, A Christmas Story, it is everything a good horror movie should be.
First, the famous twist. The entire movie is steeped in dramatic irony from the word ‘go’, as the audience watches the killer climb up into the attic during a Christmas party at the sorority house, calling the downstairs phone not even five minutes later. Every character in the movie operates - as is reasonable - under the assumption that the killer/caller is outside the sorority house, on the loose elsewhere in town. This idea, however, puts the girls in even more danger, as all of their efforts to keep the killer out just make it harder for them to escape him. Watching Jess receive that information is no less terrifying for having been in on it the whole time, though, and the sequence that follows is genuinely on of the scariest I’ve ever seen, as Jess first confronts the real killer (the audience only sees his eye through the crack in a door, but it’s still enough to haunt anyone’s nightmares), then kills her boyfriend, who she believes to be the killer, with a fireplace poker.
This twist, and the whole movie in general, is based on the urban legend “The Babysitter And The Man Upstairs”. This legend is based on a cold murder case from 1950, where a teenage babysitter was murdered and the killer never found. It developed into a proper oral tradition urban legend in the 1960s, eventually to influence Black Christmas, When A Stranger Calls, and Halloween, to name a few. I absolutely love the fact that there are still oral traditons-type stories like this. Keep it up, people.
Black Christmas is also surprisingly feminist, to add to its excellence. One of the main reasons that Jess believes her boyfriend, Peter, is the killer, is because he spends the entirety of his screentime being awful to her about her needing an abortion. When she tells him that she’s planning on getting one, he tells her that she’s not, that she can’t “kill this baby”, and that they’re going to get married. He compares the way she talks about getting an abortion to the way one might talk about getting a wart removed, a phrase which the real killer, Billy, repeats in the call following that conversation. It is made very clear that Peter is not, by any means, in the right here, and should just let Jess get the abortion. (Did I mention he’s later beat to death with a fire poker?)
Black Christmas also explores feminism and bodily autonomy in other ways throughout. The first girl to die, Clare Harrison, has a father who is very strict, especially about sex. Through the lens of his arrival there, it is shown that the sorority house is a place of freedom for the young women who live there, a place of safety away from the prying eyes of fathers and boyfriends. Or, it’s supposed to be, at least. Billy’s presence in the attic is a direct violation of that sanctity. He makes lewd calls to the girls before and after he kills them, and, not only that, but one of them, Barb, jokes about these calls because they’re so commonplace at sororities. In true horror movie tradition, Black Christmas takes real-world problems - lewd phone calls, abusive partners, and other such attempts made by men to control women’s bodies - and blows them up to such proportion that the audience has no choice but to look, and see just how horrible they are.
Finally, to really drive home how good and impactful this movie is, I would like to point out the artistry in Black Christmas. Most critics and other film-snob types look down on horror movies because they believe that they can’t be artistic or smart *cough cough Oscars cough cough*, but there are countless films that prove them wrong. Not the least of which is Black Christmas. From the advertising to the costumes to the set to the music to the framing of shots like the one of Billy’s eye, just about every minute of Black Christmas is a piece of art. The shot of Billy’s eye in the door, so brown that it almost glows red in the light, used against the sight of Peter’s bright blue eyes to prove he isn’t the killer? Perfection. The phone ringing continuously over the end credits as the police stand on the porch not answering it to show that not only is the killer still there, but that the police won’t do anything? Brilliant. The pro-choice commentary used to set up just how evil even normal-seeming men like Peter can be? Inspired. Barb, the one known for her swearing and lewdness dying by being stabbed by a glass unicorn, literally a fragile symbol of purity? Groundbreaking. Even the image that became the iconic poster is loaded with symbolism, as Clare, in death, is kept young, the little girl her father wanted her to stay in life, holding a doll in a rocking chair. As many movies did before and after it, Black Christmas proves, once and for all, that horror movies are just as smart and artistic as any other genre you could stack them up against - even more, in some cases.
In short, Black Christmas is a brilliant piece of cinema, setting the bar for all other slasher movies after it with its masterful use of tension, sound, and writing to make one of the best horror movies in history. It doesn’t pull any punches, is unabashedly pro-choice the whole way, and provides the kind of social commentary that is proof of a truly excellent horror picture. Black Christmas really is a movie worth calling home about, even fifty years later.
Because of the theme of abortion and bodily autonomy in Black Christmas, I am including a link to donate to the Prairie Abortion Fund, a non-profit orginization that provides assistance for abortion, birth control, STD/STI testing, childcare, food, and other essentials for people in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota, as well as those traveling to those states for care. Donate here. (prairieabortionfund.org/support) Please donate if you are able.
I will be adding links like these to all of my posts for the foreseeable future, as horror movies are most often based in real-life terrors that have real-life solutions, and orginizations that need support to provide those solutions. I may also go back and add them to old posts, like adding a link to a domestic abuse help resource to my post about Carrie, for example. I highly encourage all readers to donate, if they can.