subject: Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1975) [print this page] Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1975)
It might seem hard to believe to many that the director of the beloved A Christmas Story could craft a truly frightening, downright disturbing film such as Black Christmas (also originally released under the titles Silent Night, Evil Night and Stranger In Our House) around the same wintry holiday, but here it is -- the original sorority slasher and one of the first horror films to deal exclusively with Christmas (only one segment of 1972's Tales From the Crypt was set at Christmas), except it has much more style and substance than the average sorority slasher that "borrowed" its formula.
There's a talented all-star cast on hand here also, which we know is ridiculously rare in typical sorority slashers. We've got Juliet herself, gorgeous Olivia Hussey, as our tragic heroine Jess, with solid support from John Saxon as the concerned Lieutenant Fuller, Andrea Martin as Phil, Keir Dullea (2001, David and Lisa)as Jess's troubled boyfriend Peter, and standout performances by a young Margot Kidder as the alcoholic, occasionally ill-tempered and always entertaining Barb and veteran Canadian stage actress Marian Waldman as the equally alcoholic (and even more so) house mother Mrs. Mack, who appears respectable and polite but secretly has a mouth as nasty as Barb's and a wicked sense of humor. These two characters provide the majority of the film's comedy relief, of which there is plenty. Frankly I think the comedy has aged shockingly well in this film compared with comedy that was often clumsily thrown into horror films of the same era, that being 1974, and enhances rather than weakens the suspenseful scenes -- of which there are certainly plenty also.Black Christmascan and does frequently switch between pitch black comedy and unrelenting terror and creepiness, and it does it effortlessly.
In fact, I think Black Christmas has aged beautifully in many ways. Even 37 years after it was made, it's still extremely unsettling due to those CREEPY, inhuman, rambling phone calls the demented killer makes which come from a world of their own and reflect a twisted mind fixated on a childhood trauma involving "Billy" and "Agnes"... from what can be gathered, one is to assume that Billy killed Agnes -- possibly his younger sister -- as a child. Part of the film's creepiness is that the identity of the killer is never revealed and the mystery remains unsolved, leaving to the imagination of the viewer the identiy and history of the psychopath.
Black Christmasdoes not rely on jump effects to creep the viewer out like the films that followed it, but nonetheless there is one incredible jump scare that is surprisingly effective today and must have rely had audiences pissing their pants in the theatres when it first came out. It features enormously talented Canadian actress Lynn Carlin (who was also great in a total 180-degree reversal of this role in 1983's Curtains) as the sweet-faced Claire being grapped suddenly and brutally about the throat by the hands of an unseen assailant from behind a plastic curtain in a closet. A simple but stylishly directed and unnerving scene, way ahead of its time and no doubt enormously influential to many filmmakers that followed, so much so that the slashers came to rely on the "jump scare" and repeated it ad nauseum. Black Christmas has just what it needs to be terrifying and doesn't need anything extra -- in fact, anything extra, such as more gore, more shocks or more plot exposition would only detract from the film. As with the best horror films, the film prods and activates the viewer's imagination rather than showing every gory detail of every murder and laying out every piece of the puzzle in clockwork order.
A slasher classic of the highest order, I rate Black Christmas a 10 of 10 and cite it as essential viewing for all film buffs, period.
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