Have Yourself an Evil Little Christmas, Part 1: BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

(Warning: video contains obscene language.)



Though Halloween gets most of the attention when it comes to grisly teen murders, witchcraft, and other general supernatural happenings, Christmas doesn't lag far behind.  The difference is that it's a lot harder to make a horror film set around Christmas without seeming cynical.  Any movie featuring a serial killer in a Santa Claus suit is merely using the holiday ironically as a platform for disturbing imagery.  However, there are films that manage to avoid that pitfall.

Bob Clark's Black Christmas, which predates Halloween by four years, is the foremost example.  I'm surprised that it's not widely counted among the best horror films ever made, because it certainly is.  Though it's not the first of its type (Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood pioneered the genre), it set the trend for the American stalker/slasher film.

The setup is intricately played.  A group of sorority girls is preparing to celebrate Christmas.  Some are going home, others are staying at the house, some are clandestinely staying with boyfriends.  A phone rings.  It's an obscene caller, and it's made clear that the call is not out of the ordinary.  Gradually the call transforms from sexual to threatening, and future calls become more and more psychotic.  Then a girl goes upstairs to the attic and never returns.

It seems strange at first that Clark would go on to direct the funniest, most endearing Christmas movie of all time, A Christmas Story (not to mention Porky's, and lamentably, Rhinestone and Baby Geniuses), but the two holiday films are not worlds apart.  Both are held together not primarily by plot but by character.  Clark toys with our expectations, not through the lazy whodunit game of which-one's-the-murderer, but through subtle character development and imagery.

The police, led by Lt. Fuller (genre stalwart John Saxon), are well-meaning but of limited help.  A high school girl reported missing at the same time is both a warning and a distraction.  At a time when many college girls are disappearing to undisclosed locations with boyfriends, no one is sure what to suspect.

At the center is Jess (Olivia Hussey), one of the sorority girls, who is the victim of most of the obscene calls.  She is pregnant and unsure if she wants to keep the baby, which disturbs her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) to the point where he exhibits destructive behavior just as the killing begins.  Surely suspicion falls upon Peter, who is a credible suspect.  Or is he?

Clark doesn't rely on gore.  In fact, there is barely any blood in the film. He sometimes uses non-graphic but unsettling images (e.g. a dead girl wrapped in plastic rocking back and forth in a rocking chair) to drive the horror element of the film. The rest of the time, he uses suggestion, often cutting away before anything gory happens. He knows that people are scared most by what they can’t see and what they don’t know; he carefully shows us some things and obscures others, and tactically reveals to us some things of which his characters remain unaware.

The obscene calls that punctuate the film are a masterwork of oddball terror.  It sometimes sounds like there are multiple speakers on the other end.  They soon escalate beyond mere sexual harassment and into madness.  The calls are wild and disorienting; no overt threats are made, but the voice on the other end is wild and disorienting.  No sense can be made of the killer's ramblings, but they have a definite urgency that makes them threatening.  By the end of the film a certain amount of lucidity can be deciphered, as if the calls reveal an alternate story that makes sense to the killer but no one else.

The movie works largely because, like A Christmas Story, it feels authentic.  The sorority setting is believable, and the girls who inhabit it are likable and complex.  Margot Kidder in particular is dynamic as a foulmouthed, brutally honest sister who refuses to be victimized.  Even the cops, usually a stereotype in movies like this, aren't written off but are given real personalities: Douglas McGrath is particularly memorable as Sgt. Nash, a slightly boneheaded policeman (who incidentally ends up blurting out the movie's most memorable warning, plagiarized five years later by the far inferior When a Stranger Calls).

The conclusion is sure to disappoint many, since there really isn't one.  People often look for some sort of catharsis at the end of a horror film, which Clark and his writer Roy Moore refuse to provide.  There's only the tension left hanging there; it never releases.  The final tracking shot seems to tease some kind of certainty, but there is only a final line: four words which make no superficial sense, but are as taunting and crushing as anything I've ever heard spoken in a movie.  And a ringing phone.

**** out of ****