Black Christmas (1974)

This review of Black Christmas (1974) has two theses. The first thesis runs thus: despite the tendency among reviewers to classify Black Christmas as a "forerunner" of the slasher, I would argue that it is a slasher—and a good one at that. The second thesis of this review doubles as a spoiler alert: there are some slashers in which the killer is never revealed, and there are some in which the killer's motivation is never explained; Black Christmas succeeds because it combines both of these elements.

Black Christmas is about a killer-on-the-loose who has narrowed his focus to a sorority house, harassing its denizens via obscene phone calls. We meet among the sorority sisters a pre-Superman Margot Kidder and a pre-SCTV Andrea Martin. Playing the hardboiled detective is John Saxon, whose presence has never been a detriment to a horror movie. The film was made in Canada but is set in the United States, and the ubiquity of American flags among people pronouncing “about” like “a-boot” should annoy viewers on both sides of the border. Indeed, Black Christmas takes patience. The film is not fast-paced and streamlined like later slashers. Yet a body count gradually piles up, slowly but surely, with kills that would not look out of place in slashers of the late 70s and early 80s. Considering the fluidity (and ludicrousness) of genre criteria, it is difficult to speculate on the originary point of any given genre, but there’s a good case for Black Christmas being the singular ur-slasher. (Though Texas Chain Saw Massacre saw a limited release two months before Black Christmas, that film is less a pure slasher than it is a perfect celluloid distillation of America.) Preceding the slasher cycle that commenced in the late 70s, Black Christmas is a film years ahead of its time. That said, Black Christmas is in alignment with horrors present from time immemorial: the fear of a deranged man taking out aggressions on a plurality of people, especially women, with a bladed weapon might just be transhistorical.

The chief merit of Black Christmas is its ending. There are, of course, a number of sub-types of slasher films: In some, the killer is killed (his resurrection in sequels notwithstanding), while in others the killer escapes. In some, we find out why the killer did what he did, and it others, the killer's motivation is never explained. In some slashers, we know the killer from the outset, while in others, in the whodunit fashion, we learn who did it at the end, often via an unmasking. In some, however, the killer is never revealed. Such is the case in Black Christmas. Moreover, in Black Christmas, the killer escapes. We never find of who did it or why (though we suspect, in the late-Freudian mode of the early 70s, that it has something to do with a maternal and/or pubescent sexual trauma). In the end, Black Christmas offers us with nothing in the way of answers. We are left with pure speculation. Through some overdubbed laughter just before the credits, there is a strong suggestion that the killer is still in the attic, possibly metaphorically but more likely literally. This is underscored by the ringing phone to which the credits roll. Either way, the killer and the threat of sexualized violence he personifies will continue to haunt the survivor (played by Olivia Hussey). By not being killed, the killer takes on what novelist Nancy Wayson Dinan has called, in the context of missing persons, a “hyper-appearance.” It's a "conspicuous sort of absence"—the most conspicuous variety, I would suggest. Whether he is in the attic or not, the unrevealed, uncaptured killer in Black Christmas takes on an omnipresence, and so while the immediate terror of the predator has started to subside, a deeper horror has begun to set in, and it will never go away. That killer, and the gendered violence he embodies and iterates, will persist like that ringing phone; frustrated sexuality, as any incel will testify, cannot go unanswered. As Dinan explains, the conspicuous absence of hyper-appearance is “the kind a person can never ignore”—this is just the sort of timeless, violent, sexualized horror that Black Christmas realizes at its finish by not revealing the killer. This killer has disappeared, but he's not gone—in fact, he's now potentially everywhere. There is no closure, only an open wound, and this is the punctum of Black Christmas. The audience members have themselves been effectively slashed. The mysterious, deranged stranger will perpetually fill that gaping rent. Like the survivors in the sorority, he will continually be with us, too. On account of this repulsive timelessness, one of the first slashers ever made happens to be one of the best.

Perhaps this is why Black Christmas has earned not one but two remakes. These later Black Christmases stand as abject failures, though, as they are purely products of their times (2006 and 2019); as such, whatever limited frights they offer are historically bound. The horror of the 1974 original is timeless and expansive, ever-burgeoning, and it does not end at the conclusion of the movie. There is more horror in questions than in answers.