Black Christmas (1974)

Today I decided to revisit a retro early-era slasher from 1974. Much can be learnt about the genre from watching the earliest examples. Where Last House on the Left gave us among the first "bad guy jumps out just as victim is escaping", Black Christmas presents POV killer shots, predating Sleepaway Camp, and even Halloween. As Halloween would go on to do, the opening sequence is from the perspective of our antagonist, here the deliciously ambiguous Billy, who is used to absolutely perfect extent.

Despite the writer's claims that his script was inspired by a Canadian mass murder, it seems far more likely that it originates in the form of the urban legend, The Babysitter and The Caller. We all know it: an innocent young woman is all alone in a big house, looking after the neighbour's child, when she is hassled with threatening phone calls, which are eventually traced from inside the house. On top of the 2006 remake, this concept has been used in several other horrors, including the original and remake of When A Stranger Calls. Now that remake was a really tense, terrifying ordeal... right up until they showed us the killer's face, and then he was suddenly in plain sight for the remainder of the film. It killed the effect like the words 'not tonight' kill a boner. It left my sister and I movie-blueballed, and we were not impressed.

So the first time we saw this fantastically '70s original movie, we were overjoyed. Not a single glimpse of our stalker's face did we get... all we ever saw was a silhouette, and one eye... once. This keeps things terrifying. Consider in Silence Of The Lambs, when Clarice has finally cornered Jaime Gumb in the house, she is confident and proud, and ready to take him down. However, when the place is plunged into darkness, she is scared, because she knows she is being watched, but can't watch back. This is exactly the primal fear that Black Christmas taps into, and it is immensely effective.

This honestly is one of the superior early '70s horror movies. It is simple, understated, surprisingly unexaggerated, and yet overwhelming in its atmosphere. Lesser movies (and certainly the majority of modern ones) like to use that typical shrill string music to create eery, still scenes in which threats may be lurking; Black Christmas embraces the silence, and recognises its merits in scaring people. But where appropriate, sound is used creatively....

The movie is set in a sorority house a few days before Christmas. All the girls are partying and readying to go home for the holidays, the resident gang including Jess, played by the beautiful Olivia Hussey of Romeo & Juliet, and Barb, wonderfully portrayed by Margot Kidder. And all the festivities cause the appropriate ruckus to mask a surprising number of murders within the house, performed by the creep Billy, who lives in the attic. The girls receive illegible phone calls from a guy they've dubbed 'The Moaner', and take it all fairly well. The drama that stops this from being a totally straight-up slasher pic manifests between Jess and her troubled musician boyfriend Peter. He is under immense stress about an upcoming exam at the academy where he's spent the past eight years, and she is unintentionally pregnant, and plans to abort.

This is another pattern you'll notice in early genre examples: these were not just gratuitous gore shows, but often had some political or ideological theme about them. To me, Black Christmas was something of a statement about the women's liberation movement that was gathering such momentum at the time, and the opposition it faced from those not so hot on the idea of equality. Each of the women at the house are independent in nature, and working hard towards a self-sufficient future. They are massacred for their troubles by a confused, reclusive, faceless man. In the foreground, we have the dispute over abortion between Jess and Peter: he insists that she keep the baby, even forbids her to abort it, and Jess refuses, insisting that she will not be forced to give up her future and ambitions. Very noble and sensible sentiments. But Peter is "an artist - he's highly strung", and so when one mad phone call is attributed to him and his anger, the finger is pointed at him. After all...have we ever seen Peter and 'Billy' in the same room at the same time?

Now the ending of the movie concludes its message and stance. It is easy for movies depicting female suffering to be dubbed 'misogynist' and the like. Actually, it is easy for people, out to get offended on others' behalf, to dig out something to complain about in almost any movie. But you know what I mean. Some may say, having watched a house full of independent, middle-class young women being slaughtered by some limp gimp of a man, that the movie itself is misogynist. Firstly, it seems to me that misogyny is rather like going into labour: you notice a million little things that could be a symptom of labour, but when it's actually happening, there's not a doubt in your mind about what's taking place, and how could you, in hindsight, have thought that those tiny things were the real thing?

If an entirely male crew wrote, directed, produced a movie which expressed severe hatred for women; if the casting agents said to each actress hired, "Thing is, we hate bitches, and we plan to degrade, marginalise and otherwise offend you by making this picture"; if the entirely male crew had showed up to press releases and premieres vocalising their hatred of the female population, and highlighting the movie's intention to express hatred and discrimination... then perhaps, we could say a movie is 'misogynist'. But otherwise, movies of quality tend to carry some message or moral at their core, not necessarily shared by its creators, but something worth expressing. It is a medium. Don't shoot the messenger, right?

If this movie, broken down into a basic motive, was something close to Independent Woman = Threat to Masculinity, therefore Independent Woman + Threatened Man = Dominant Male, therefore Problem = Solved, then perhaps there would be some undercurrent of masculine insecurity, as raved about by Siskel and Ebert back in the day. But if the formula were as simple as this, with women being punished for their independence and self-assurance, then surely Jess would pay the ultimate price for daring to abort Peter's baby. Perhaps we'd even be subjected to some MacDuff-style forced c-section for a particularly melodramatic effect.

But, if ambiguously, Jess survives the ordeal, and Peter is killed. If basic survival vs. death is totted up, does the movie's sympathy swing in Jess' favour? But what of the ambiguity of the ending? Billy is obviously still lurking, so it obviously wasn't Peter. He may yet kill Jess, but so far as we witness, he does not. The way I read it, Black Christmas is addressing the opposition to the women's liberation movement. Billy, the opposition, has claimed many victims, who remain unnoticed and unmissed. Jess, the liberated woman who will have an abortion, has come through male oppression, and will live on to do as she wills. However, Billy is still stalking, observing her with the potential for being another victim. Bottom line: Female liberation has gained its momentum, but it is still under threat, and must be conquered by assertion.

NOTE: I felt the ending I just concocted was sufficiently emphatic that I should leave it there, but I must somewhere add that this movie contains some of the most psychedelically '70s outfits a vintage hippie like myself could ask for. Guys in fur coats, anyone?!

Eden Lake (2008)

Holy shit, what a movie!! Our British cinema industry isn't really in too much of a habit of making horror movies nowadays, although Hammer was recently revived for periodic releases. Eden Lake is a tragedy, a living portrait, a social statement - it is everything you don't really find in modern horrors. Back in the '70s and '80s, as I have discussed in other reviews, horror was used as a channel for points to be made. Black Christmas examined the defensive patriarchal opposition of the women's liberation movement, Last House on the Left reflected on class tensions and Vietnam angst, and it is exactly the movie that I saw serving as inspiration throughout Eden Lake. It is a powerful, gripping, appalling horror of the strongest kind: the ones that lie squarely within the bounds of reality and possibility.

Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are your typical young middle class couple with their whole lives ahead of them. Jenny, a sweet thing with a very Mia Farrow quality about her, is a nursery school teacher, and approaches everything sensitively and smilingly scorns her partner for swearing. Steve is the lovable, rugged Irishman, who likes to kid about, but thinks and acts with reason. Steve is planning to propose to Jenny, and so takes her for a weekend away at a remote quarry that he visited with his dad as a kid, which is due to be developed into a luxury gated community. The first night of their trip, the couple stay at a pub B&B, where flabby slobs wearing tracksuits and gold chains clutch pints of 'Wifebeater' and spit at the pavement. The beer garden is overrun with gobby Northerners who smack their kids about and constantly yell. The opposition is established.

When the couple get down to the quarry, it is a vast and beautiful wildland with a lake running through the centre, but thankfully, they are driving some fancy Jeep which handles the terrain with relative ease. The sign for the new development called Eden Lake is graffitied with the eloquent slogan Fuck Off Yuppy Cunts! Down on the beach, a gang of chavs show up and start wreaking chavoc (see what I did there?!) Naturally, they have an aggressive dog in tow, that terrorises strangers, and an obnoxiously loud boombox. Steve casually approaches, and quite reasonably asks them to turn the music down and keep the dog in line. Here we have a defining moment, which fully establishes the theme of the picture as class conflict.

I have lived in various parts of England all my life, and have a fairly diverse experience of social classes and cliques. Our society has changed immensely in recent years as 'benefits culture' and what sociologists refer to as the Underclass have been on the dismal rise. This means that the timewasting dickheads from school who came from bad homes no longer have to earn a lifestyle for themselves, but have it handed out to them, and the formerly widely-held working class pride of providing for one's family seems to have gone out of the window. The actual working class, who work in lower paid and lower skilled roles, is shrinking in population, as the effortless underclass lifestyle begins to be inherited. A whole generation have seen their parents sitting on their arses, smoking and screaming and getting everything for nothing, and so the cycle begins. The majority of violent offences are committed by people of this very nature. In this country, turn on the TV at 9am and you will be treated to a smorgasbord of the nation's most dim-witted, thuggish, shameless and useless, being made into a spectacle, and at the most tasteless of times, celebrities.

Eden Lake addresses the battle of the classes. Jenny and Steve are middle class, respectable and well behaved. The gang of youths, which includes Jack O'Connell and Thomas Turgoose from This is England, are the underclass, who have no respect for others and no idea of civil boundaries. A wide shot of both parties sat on opposite sides of the beach illustrates the spectrum of not only class, but inherently morals, values and humanity. The gang further antagonise the couple, and steal their car. This leads to a fistfight in which Steve accidentally stabs the dog. You can practically see the infamous 'red mist' fall over the owner's eyes. From this point on, it's fair game, as far as the kids are concerned.

Let's discuss the kids, and that's what they are. The ringleader is the terrifying thug Brett (O'Connell), who is volatile, controlling and violent. Everything that goes on is his idea. He has a few other boys with him, some look no older than 12, and a witless girlfriend Paige, who is ordered to film the gang's atrocities on her phone. Brett literally forces these children to inflict violence on the couple, and when things don't go his way, the most effective, yet vile and haunting moment in the movie takes place. Another child, a very young boy named Adam, who looks about ten or eleven, is roped into the proceedings, and when Jenny narrowly escapes her death and runs for the hills, Brett hangs a petrol-soaked tyre around the child's neck and sets his head on fire. This image haunted me for years after I first saw this movie, and it was with it in mind that I approached a rewatching with caution. But it is exactly what it should be: it is the crucifix in The Exorcist, it is the eyeball in Hostel... for a serious movie (and I say this to exclude any ceaseless exploitation fests that are lesser works) to reach its full impact, it has to dare to make its statement without any sugar coating. If we are to fear for society, for our children, on the message we take from watching this movie, we have to be given something to really fear. And here, we fear not demons or even evil adults, but twisted children. Brett's rage is boundless, he is wicked to the very core, and this we can be sure of, because of this single act.

Poor Steve has bled to death and been burned after being captured and tortured by the kids. It looks like Jenny might make it, now that she's managed to kill one of the kids, stolen a van and sped off towards town. But if the middle class heroes, or at least one of them, survived the ordeal, then the movie wouldn't be making its point. She unwittingly crashes the van in the garden of (here comes the Last House twist) Brett's parents' house. The family assist her at first, until they get a frantic call from Brett telling them what's happened, and they realise the van belongs to a family member. As is typical of these sorts of people, a gang of about half a dozen furious men arrive to avenge their thug kids, and Jenny is dispatched. But not before we see Brett appear, and get beaten like a puppy by his old man, and disappear to his room where he glares at himself lengthily in the mirror, as if in acknowledgement of his disease, but gutless self-absolution. He sees his own treatment, as many a PC social worker would, as justification for his own actions. He is not human enough to recognise his responsibility in breaking the cycle he knows all too well the effects of.

There is a primary and secondary message in all this. The first is that Britain is finally broken; no matter how the civilised reason and negotiate, they will be beaten down by senseless violence. The second is that violence is a cycle; the aggressor was formerly the victim of a senior aggressor, and has been conditioned into a mindset of violence. Eden Lake is terrifying because it is so true. It was met with some criticism over stereotyping of working class people, but as I have already addressed, the numbers of people like the children in this movie are on the rise, warranting a classing of their own. There is still, as ever, a perfectly peaceful, respectable working class out there who live honest and good lives. But in a country where Jeremy Kyle can make three shows a day for ten years and still find new people to appear, I concede that people can't really be blamed for drawing such conclusions.