‘Tis the season for spooky, so here’s a little retrospective piece on my favourite Canadian horror film, the original Black Christmas, directed by the late Bob Clark, best known for his other holiday classic, A Christmas Story. I rarely watch A Christmas Story at Christmas, despite the charm of Darren McGavin, my dearest Kolchak. My tradition during those holidays is to watch Black Christmas, in conjunction with its polar opposite, White Christmas. It amuses me to imagine that that old crooner Bing Crosby got tired of the honey of his baritone, took a belt saw to it, quit the act, and became Billy, that stealthy, squawking stalker.
Filmed around Toronto and released in 1974, it features a cast that includes Zeffirelli’s Juliet, Olivia Hussey, a pre-Superman Margot Kidder, and the power house and horror staple John Saxon in the role of an ineffectual police lieutenant that prefigures his role in A Nightmare on Elm Street. The film holds a signification position in horror film history. Billy seems to descend from Ed Gein, and his celluloid alter ego, the shy, ridiculously handsome and diffident, slasher Psycho, Norman Bates.
They are killers with a terrifying connection to “Mother”, located in relative isolation, featuring eerie houses with too many places to hide to be safe. Clark riffs on Psycho even as he improves on its ending (yeah I said it) and it’s his film that defined and solidified what would be the major features of what would become the slasher genre. Billy does not wait to kill, but seeks out sexualized teen victims, for no clear purpose, and while he remains almost invisible, thanks to extensive use of a shoulder cam, we often see his actions through his unspeakably evil eyes, through that killer point of view, and in the climax of the film, we still do not know who he is, or the whys of what he’s done. We only know that it is a matter of time before he kills again.
Many films have since been made in this mould, and what might be the most successful slasher film of all, John Carpenter’s Halloween, clearly owes a debt to Black Christmas: Michael Myers is only known credited as “the Shape” in the movie that would break box office records and kick start the successful film franchise. Carpenter plays with the same conventions he admired in Black Christmas and further elaborates on them: the Shape is seen and not heard as Billy is heard but not seen.
It is always Billy’s voice that echoes through any discussion of Black Christmas. It is legion: cobbled together, Clark said, of his own voice, and four others including that of a woman (for Billy also speaks in his mother’s voice), and the guiding track, laid down by actor Frank Mancuso, edited and engineered together into one sprawling human caterwaul. His voice is all we really “see” of Billy, except when he watches us through the crack in the door with that freaky eye, and randomly, when a hand or shadow, appear now and again. He shrieks, he cries, he whines, he moans, into the phone, uttering what should be unutterable. He has to spread this pain, first in the calls he makes to the sorority house, and then in his actions within it, when he sneaks in, and begins to strangle, and suffocate the women, systematically snuffing them out before they can leave the house for the holidays, muttering to his mother, and as his mother, to his victims’ corpses up in the attic of the house.
Did I say Black Christmas was spooky? I think I meant it’s one of the most horrifying auditory experiences on film. And it makes excellent holiday viewing, at Christmas or in another tradition, sandwiched between Hitchcock and Carpenter, an unofficial trilogy that showcases the progression of movie terror at Halloween.
