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?!