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BLACK CHRISTMAS

Warning!!! Plot spoilers ahead!!!

In the short history of the slasher film, only four films really matter. PSYCHO is often called the grandaddy of the slasher film and for good reason. It contains the first true slasher set-piece in a film that deals very explicitly with sadism, voyeurism and madness, all of which are common thematic elements of the slasher film sub-genre. BLACK CHRISTMAS, Bob Clark's pitch-perfect Canadian slasher, was released almost a decade and a half after Hitchcock's masterpiece. BLACK CHRISTMAS takes the thematic elements of PSYCHO and applies them to more melodramatic framework. Four years after BLACK CHRISTMAS, John Carpenter created HALLOWEEN, a film that took the framework created by Clark and Co. and boiled it down to the basic, minimal elements - the young girls, the holiday setting, the mad stalker. The success of HALLOWEEN led to FRIDAY THE 13TH, a film that tossed out anything resembling plot and focused solely on the sadism and cruelty of the killer. It is a film with little in the way of audience sympathy or intellectual efficiency. From there...

Well, it was mostly all downhill from there.

Some horror fans smugly assert that the slasher film is a purely "American style of film". I wouldn't be so proud of that fact but that doesn't really matter as it's simply not true. Besides borrowing heavily from the Italian giallo films of the 1970s, the slasher film sub-genre also benefitted greatly from the Canadian film industry. Knowing full-well that the market for these films was expanding, Canadian producers threw their hands in the pot hoping to make a quick buck. What they managed to do was create some of the best examples of the sub-genre - MY BLOODY VALENTINE, VISITING HOURS, HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE, PROM NIGHT and TERROR TRAIN are easily some of the best slasher films you'll find - and BLACK CHRISTMAS stands at the forefront, bested only by HALLOWEEN, the film it directly inspired.

BLACK CHRISTMAS focuses on a group of sorority girls, a popular target group for slasher film killers through the years. It's killer, an escaped nut job named Billy, breaks into their sorority house as the girls are getting ready to go on holiday. He hides in the attic, makes obscene phone calls, creeps around the place and eventually starts knocking the girls off one-by-one. This is routine horror material. Anyone who has ever seen a single slasher film from the 1980s would recognize this set-up immediately. But Clark and his writer Roy Moore do something almost unheard of. They provide us with actual characters and not just big-titted bobbleheads. At times, BLACK CHRISTMAS feels over-plotted - how many times have you ever heard that said about a slasher film? - but it never meanders and never wastes your time. If you find yourself enjoying the company of the girls, all the better. Empathy with, compassion for and interest in the characters is what makes films like this work. Clark certainly includes a few cheap scares along the way but, for the most part, he plays even with us, allowing our attachment to the characters to really drive home the tension.

And BLACK CHRISTMAS is tense. Almost unbearably so at times. Of all the horror films I've watched, re-watched, reviewed, analyized, and dissected over the years, only a few can still manage to creep me out. BLACK CHRISTMAS is one of them and it is all because of the sound design of the film. Creaking floorboards, the lonely sound of a cat crying, the strange, disquieting - and minimalist - score all add a degree of creepiness to the affairs but it's the phone calls and the vocalizations of the killer that pushes BLACK CHRISTMAS through the roof. It's important to note that we never really see Billy. He remains virtually invisible for the entire film except for a few shots of an eye or hands. We only hear him. By the film's end, he remains a mystery. Clark offers no real explanation for who he is or where he came from but we are clued into what he has done in the past. Through-out the phone calls, Billy's voice changes pitch and tone. It often sounds like multiple individuals talking at once. As the film goes along, the phone calls become more explicit. Billy talks, through the voice of his parents, about "the baby", someone he calls "Agnes". We sometimes hear Billy making noises that sound like a child's scream. By the film's end, Billy speaks in this way repeatedly, often saying "No, Billy stop". It's clear that Billy had killed - possibly even raped - his little sister, "the baby". This little nugget of plot ties Billy explicitly to Jess, the film's heroine, a young woman planning on aborting an unwanted pregnancy.

The Final Girl - the obligatory slasher film character that survives the madness by being rational, reasonable, emotionally solid and usually virginal - is here embodied by Jess, played by the impossibly beautiful Olivia Hussey. Jess is unusual in the canon of Final Girls. Unlike Laurie Strode, whose only real problem in life is whether or not Ben Tramer is going to ask her to the dance on Saturday night, Jess is saddled with the emotional turmoil of her relationship with Peter, a slightly wacko music major, and the weight of her decision regarding an abortion. She is clearly marked by Clark as the film's heroine through a rather subtle touch. Much like a Hammer heroine, she is wearing a crucifix around her neck. Also unique for a Final Girl, Jess doesn't manage to kill the murderer. The most terrifying moment of the film occurs mere seconds before the credits crawl. Jess, having killed Peter in perceived self-defense, is left drugged up and unconscious in her bed by the police. The camera crawls out of her room and down the hall before revealing the attic hatch opening. The camera cranes out of the attic window and into the street as we hear the phone begin to ring in the house. Clark has denied us the usual feel better ending of the typical slasher film. He has left our heroine unconscious and vulnerable in the house with a madman.

BLACK CHRISTMAS is easily one of the best horror films of the 1970s. It's mixture of humor - the fellatio gag never gets old - and terror makes it an absolute joy to watch and the solid performances by a surprisingly able cast keep the proceedings engaging and, most importantly, believable. It might lack the visual verve of Carpenter's classic HALLOWEEN and the gore of Cunningham's inferior FRIDAY THE 13TH - if that sort of thing matters to you - but it is incredibly frightening.

And that's what really matters.

Essential viewing.