Black Christmas (1974) Review

 

Black Christmas (1974)

Black Christmas follows Jess and a group of her sorority sisters, who begin to receive threateningly anonymous phone calls, that, after the disappearance of their friend and the murder of a young girl, lead them to suspect a serial killer is on the loose. Little do they know however, just how close he is. 

Pre-dating the slasher phase brought on by Halloween in 1978, Black Christmas gives us a wholly original holiday slasher that is as bizarre as it is darkly horrifying. Think the first 30 minutes of When a Stranger Calls, and then extend that out for an entire, blood curdling, tense-as-can-be feature film that hardly slows down enough to let you catch you breath, let alone get a grip on the horrors unfolding before you. It’s quite simply, a masterclass in atmospheric and subtle horror, not needing to plaster it across the screen to get the point across, leaving it more to our imagination with slight hints to the terror Billy is capable of. 

What really sets this apart from the likes of Halloween though is that somehow, the killer feels less human than that of Michael Myers (which knowing how big of a fan of Halloween I am, is an extremely tall order). In Black Christmas, you never see Billy, at least not fully, and when you hear him, his mixture of multiple personalities, guttural moaning and screaming, and crudely sick dialogue send shivers down the spine and it’s only made worse by knowing he’s residing just upstairs, in the attic above, placing call after petrifying call. It’s made all the worse however, with the frightening realization that by film’s end, Billy wasn’t Peter at all and thus wasn’t killed, instead leaving a Jess all alone with Billy, in a horrifyingly dark ending to this already incredibly twisted film. 

We also get a good enough cast, starring Art Hindle, Marian Waldman, Andrea Martin, Keir Dullea, John Saxon, Margot Kidder, and Olivia Hussey. Long before the whole sorority cliché was popular within the genre, I think Kidder, Hussey, and Martin do a wonderful job of balancing the humor, foul-mouthed crudeness, and realism that is to be attributed to characters like these, and while she’s no Laurie Strode, Hussey more than competently holds her own as an excellent final girl. 

Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark, is a simple but thoroughly dark and suspenseful Christmas-time slasher, that, more than most any film in recent memory, is sure to leave a chilling and lasting mark on me, due to it’s shear ability to inspire genuine fear from the most casual of things like a phone call. 

10/10