The first thing you notice about Black Christmas is how beautiful it all looks.
Director Bob Clark’s legendary 1974 slasher film, a landmark movie for holiday horror and horror in general, turned 50 this year, and in those five decades audiences have come to anticipate and understand its darkness. Fans know all about the brutal kill scenes, the horrifying phone calls, and the eerie aura of the whole film. Still, even now, even if you’ve watched it dozens of times, you’ll be struck in the opening frames by a sense of wintery, haunted beauty.
The first thing the film shows us is the sorority house where all that darkness is about to unfold, and it looks rather idyllic. It’s a nice, expansive house on a quiet city street, Christmas lights are festooned around the trees and along the porch, there’s a dusting of snow. Inside, warm lights glow. It’s an image so cozy and inviting that it calls to mind Bob Clark’s other holiday classic, the very non-horror A Christmas Story, which wouldn’t be released until nearly a decade later.
But we’ve barely glimpsed this beautiful scene, barely encountered any of the people inside, when the idyllic spell is marred, broken by a dark presence. Less than two minutes into the film, a killer emerges, hidden behind a POV camera, breathing heavily, looking for a way into the house where the sorority sisters are hosting a small Christmas gathering. Moments later, he’s climbing the trellis, breaking into the attic, and the horror of it all is on.
We all know what’s going to happen next, even if we’ve never seen this particular movie before, but the real trick to Black Christmas, the thing that makes it the greatest Christmas horror movie ever, isn’t surprising the viewer. It’s sustaining the constant tension between holiday cheer and all-consuming dread, keeping both ever-present in a film that’s as much about the horror of ambivalence as it is about the horror of a killer hiding in your attic.
The film’s basic plot structure is a riff on the “babysitter and the man upstairs” urban legend, a parallel helped along by a constant stream of obscene and haunted phone calls from a figure that Jess (Olivia Hussey), Barb (Margot Kidder), and their fellow sorority sisters have dubbed “The Moaner.” It seems the Moaner has gotten more aggressive with his latest calls, and over the course of the film, his phone calls transform into absolute nightmare fuel, a symphony of voices and snarls and croaks that would keep anyone up all night.
What the girls don’t know, of course, that the audience very much does, is that the Moaner has already set up shop in the attic, and within minutes he’s killed Clare (Lynne Griffin), a sorority sister who was supposed to be leaving town anyway. So when she first disappears, everyone just assumes she already left, and keeps right on planning the rest of their Yuletide schedule.
This is important, and not just because it leaves the other girls vulnerable to attack from a killer they don’t know is lurking right above them.
For the audience, the horror has already arrived. We know where the killer is and what he’s doing, even if we never see his face. For the characters, what sets in is more like a slowly building sense of dread, as Clare’s father arrives to report her missing and the girls set out to look for their friend while also planning various holiday activities around town. Then there’s Jess’ boyfriend, Peter (Keir Dullea), a pianist facing the recital of his life who’s horrified and angered to learn that Jess is planning to terminate a just-discovered pregnancy.
It all serves to make everyone uncomfortable, but life goes on around the sorority house, even when house mother Mrs. MacHenry (Marian Waldman) also goes missing after the killer drags her up into the attic with a hook. The girls go to the police, and Lt. Fuller (John Saxon) takes their case, but Christmas is coming. There are reminders all around us. Everyone is beginning to check out of real life, of real fear, focusing instead on the holiday cheer that Clark’s camera never fails to capture. It’s all right there, even when characters finally do start to sense real danger.
It’s here that we have to talk about a horror in Black Christmas that’s arguably more frightening than the phone calls or the killer in the attic: The slow ambivalence that emerges over the course of the story, as Jess starts to wonder more and more if she’s in danger just like her friends. The police are slow to respond to the girls’ complaints about the phone calls, and almost as slow to respond to fears that Clare has gone missing, not just because it’s Christmas but because they’re convinced it’s overblown. After all, they’re just phone calls, right? And college girls go off on their own all the time, right?
Black Christmas has been praised as a piece of Feminist horror because of Jess’ pro-choice stance and its depiction of women fighting back when men won’t listen to them, and this is where that all comes to a head. These themes would be explored to a much greater extent in the 2019 re-imagining of the film by Sophia Takal and April Wolfe, but here they exist as the dreadful background noise of a young woman’s life in the 1970s. Like the Christmas decorations, this sense that the men simply do not care, or worse, do not consider caring, is ever-present and powerful, closing in until it’s almost claustrophobic.
And it’s this, this sense that the dark forces keep closing in until they’ve swallowed the characters whole, that makes Black Christmas a piece of timeless holiday horror. The short days and long nights of the Christmas season have long been a source of horror story inspiration, and when you’re surrounded by people you love and twinkling lights, that horror can feel safe, fun, easy. It’s why A Christmas Carol has been popular for almost 200 years. But the Christmas season does not just brighten. It can also obscure. It can blind. It can throw long shadows behind all the decorations, shadows we don’t see because we’re too busy looking at the lights. Black Christmas is a horror movie about what hides in those shadows, behind our parties and our laughter and our gleaming Christmas trees. By keeping the Christmassy atmosphere front and center throughout the film, and by keeping the killer’s face a secret, Clark and company are able to craft a film about a horror that feels simultaneously at a distance and inescapable, something that could be lurking outside your house right now, looking at your beautiful Christmas lights. That’s what makes it the greatest Christmas horror movie ever made, still scary after all these years.
Matthew Jackson (@awalrusdarkly) is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas.
The post ‘Black Christmas’ at 50: Still the Greatest Christmas Horror Movie Ever appeared first on Decider.
