Black Christmas

There are plenty of winter-set horror films, and that’s for good reason: if you’re looking to put a chill in the audience, a dark, cold atmosphere has already done half the work for you. Films such as The Blackcoat’s Daughter or John Carpenter’s The Thing make it clear that even if there was no demon or alien shapeshifter to contend with, the weather alone could suffice to kill you. We have a similarly atavistic reaction to chilly temperatures and being scared – look at the language we use: our blood runs cold, we shiver in fright. This leads to my clear choice for the greatest yuletide horror film, Bob Clark’s masterful 1974 Black Christmas. 

In a Canadian sorority house, the young women and their friends are having a party. In the midst of their merriment, they receive what they think is simply an obscene phone call from someone who refers to himself as Billy (voiced by Nick Mancuso). It’s a disturbing call, full of grunts and multiple voices, and one of the young women, Barb (Margot Kidder), steps in to tell the caller to buzz off. His voice changes from manic to eerie calm. “I’m going to kill you,” he says, and hangs up. What the young ladies don’t know is that Billy is already in the house, hiding in the attic.

Later that night, one of the girls goes missing, but everyone assumes she just went to visit her boyfriend. House mother Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman) is oblivious, more concerned with all the bottles of alcohol she has stashed around the house than the whereabouts of her charges. Jess (Olivia Hussey) becomes more concerned as the deranged phone calls continue, and she begins to wonder as time goes on if her estranged boyfriend, Peter (Keir Dullea), might in fact be “Billy.” As Christmas approaches, the house begins to empty out (either from people leaving for the holidays or via foul play), and the police are engaged to try and find the missing girl and the crazy caller. And yet Jess, cozy and warm inside the sorority house, is in much worse danger than anyone realizes.

Hussey was unusual casting for a film like this, and her performance is oddly on the formal side, but it works regardless, especially in a scene in which she firmly explains to her boyfriend that she doesn’t want to marry him and is going to get an abortion. She and Dullea play that scene for the serious drama of it, and it’s a bit admirable that a horror film from 1974 would be so straightforward in discussing that topic. Dullea (following up his work in 2001: A Space Odyssey) is effective as the angry and emotional Peter, particularly in a segment in which he furiously and sweatily conducts a piano recital in front of judges, but he has a plot element (which will be discussed in the spoilers section) that heavily weighs on his portrayal. Kidder is funny and striking as the outspoken Barb (and it’s interesting to see her in such a different role four years before she was Lois Lane in Superman), and she turns in a layered performance.

Waldman is quite amusing as the blowsy Mrs. Mac (described vividly by Barb as the “Queen of Vaudeville circa 1891”), playing the role as sheer comedy. She gets one of the best lines, referring to the chastity of her charges thus: “These broads would hump the Leaning Tower of Pisa if they could get up there.” A young, pre-SCTV Andrea Martin is very good as the kind, quiet Phyl, but she also demonstrates strength as the only one who stands up to Barb’s drunken tirades. Douglas McGrath is terrific as the hapless Sergeant Nash (who believes it when Barb tells him that the new phone exchange is spelled F-E-L-L-A-T-I-O), John Saxon inimitably saxons it up as the investigating lieutenant and James Edmond is simultaneously absurd and effective as the missing girl’s father. Finally, two Cronenberg alumni make appearances – Art Hindle from The Brood and Les Carlson (Barry Convex from Videodrome!) as a phone company rep trying to trace the killer’s location.

The thing that distinguishes Black Christmas from the tsunami of slasher movies that followed in its wake is not simply its originality (fans will argue who did what first) but more importantly the brilliance of its filmmaking. There is so much that this low-budget horror film gets right that it’s astonishing. There are plentiful kudos to go around, but the main one needs to go to director Bob Clark (who provided the thematic antithesis to this film with another holiday classic nine years later – A Christmas Story). Every aspect of this movie is considered and powerful, from the frequent handheld POV shots to the chilly atmosphere, from the evocative sound design to the unusual score. Roy Moore’s script is smart, but apparently Clark changed the film’s setting and added a lot of humor as well. This film is very clearly directed, has a clear vision of what it’s going for, and achieves its goals superbly.

I’d like to discuss plot specifics now, so from here on out, SPOILERS FOLLOW:

One of the very best elements of the film is how Clark and his team create an incredible sense of foreboding atmosphere, something they maintain from the instantly creepy first shot to the unforgettable final sequence. The opening image is that of the sorority house surrounded by a snowy landscape, Christmas lights draped along its walls. A party is going inside the lit windows. But the only sounds we hear are the lonely rush of the frigid wind, a tolling bell off in the distance, and the distant chorus of a choir singing “Silent Night.” The title comes up. We don’t feel cozy or comforted. If anything, the warmth inside the house seems fragile and threatened. As it will almost immediately be.

A moving camera, representing the killer’s POV, moves toward the house. We hear his heavy breathing. Discordant low piano notes are struck, as if to represent the chaos going on in his head. He climbs up the trellis of the house, unseen by the revelers inside. Then he’s in the attic. The safety of the house is already broken, minutes into the film. That wasn’t hard. This sets up a suspenseful counterpoint that runs throughout the story – scenes of holiday joy that mask an unexpected evil, such as the choir performance that later covers up the noise of Barb’s gruesome death. Perhaps the best example of this is the unfortunate missing girl, Claire, who is suffocated with a plastic bag and placed by the killer in a rocking chair in the attic before a window. Clark returns to this shot of her, more or less hidden in plain sight, throughout the film – as if saying, if people were paying more attention, this could have been avoided. 

Clark’s mobile camerawork, Carl Zittrer’s hammered piano score, the sharp writing and the talented ensemble are all great, but without a memorable villain we wouldn’t be still talking about this film fifty years later. The phone calls are the dark, disturbing heart of Black Christmas, and they haven’t lost their alarming power to this day. Mancuso’s performance doesn’t seem so much like acting as it seems like he’s channeling demons or is in the throes of dissociative identity disorder. He screeches and screams, grunts and gargles, snorts and snickers, multiple voices all shouting out to be heard (a couple of uncredited people apparently assisted with this). A tortured psychodrama plays out in these calls. “What your mother and I must know is, where did you put the baby, Billy?!” Billy is genuinely not well. At one point the killer begs for help – the original title of Moore’s script was Stop Me. 

The filmmakers try very hard to convince the audience that Peter is the killer. He’s not just a red herring; he’s an entire school of red herring. This affects Dullea’s performance somewhat – it’s hard to seem like a reasonable character when you’re essentially a plot device. And yet this gambit works, because a large part of the horror of the story is that the killer moves among his victims with ease. The calls are coming from inside the house! The cops are useless, the search party is well-intentioned but doesn’t help. It could be Peter. It could be anyone. 

The ending is perhaps the most memorable sequence in the film, beginning with that iconic shot of Billy’s blazing, crazy eye looking through the crack in the doorway at the terrified Jess. She manages to get away, only to mistakenly kill Peter in the cellar. The cops arrive and sedate her, and then, like a nightmare, leave her there in the house, asleep and helpless. They think Peter was the killer, so she’s supposedly safe. But we know better. The camera moves slowly through the house, lingering on the rooms where the young women met their demises, moving inexorably up into the attic. We hear Billy talking to himself, still reliving his torment. The camera moves past Claire in the rocking chair, her silent scream covered forever in plastic, out the window, a reset of the film’s first shot. The wind blows. It’s cold, cold, cold. And then the phone begins to ring. The credits roll. Barb sleeps on as Billy melts down upstairs. The ringing gets louder as the credits proceed. Louder. Cut to black. Happy holidays!