Film

The Original ‘Black Christmas’ Is Perfect Yuletide Viewing For The Scrooges Of The World

It's time for you to discover the true yuletide classic.

by Joseph Earp  17 December 2019
Black Christmas

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According to conventional wisdom, it was John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween that kicked off the slasher boom, inspiring a wave of copycats and earning the GNP of a small country at the American box office. But four years before Michael Myers ever graced the big screen, a Canadian comedy nerd named Bob Clark released the true slasher ideal — Black Christmas.

The story of a sorority house of smart and loveable young women who find themselves terrorised by a masked killer, Black Christmas established a thousand tropes that still get regularly trotted out today.

In fact, one of the most famous gimmicks in slasher history — “the call is coming from inside the house” twist — starts here, revealed in one of the most chilling scenes committed to celluloid.

But despite the sheer number of those carbon copies, no film has come close to replicating the terrible power of Black Christmas. When it comes to Christmas horror movies — hell, when it comes to Christmas movies full stop — Black Christmas stands in a league of its own, a work of bizarro, cruel genius that few filmmakers have ever had the gall to truly replicate.

Scream Queens

Before Black Christmas, Clark was best known for a string of bizarro comedy-horror films with titles like Deathdream and Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. Black Christmas is a more straightforward exercise than either of those works of gonzo provocation: it’s almost thrillingly simple, establishing the murderous threat of the serial killer in the first act, and then following through as his victims get picked off one by one.

But Black Christmas isn’t a total departure for Clark. To it, he brought from those early exercises in suspense a jet-black sense of humour, and a deep vein of empathy. Black Christmas is too mean and ugly to really be described as a horror-comedy, but it’s certainly very funny. The older Sorority Matriarch who is meant to be looking after the doomed girls is a gossipy drunk, and Clark relishes in showing her utter ineptitude at protecting her charges from the masked threat that lurks just outside their walls.

More than that, Clark cares about his characters, even as he starts picking them off. The Sorority sisters aren’t the airheaded fools that can sometimes sit in the centre of horror movies. They’re whip-smart, incisive and intelligent young women who immediately address the terror that’s facing them, and quickly come up with a way to combat it.

They aren’t simply chattel for a killer, either, and their stories are handled with real grace and intelligence. One subplot sees Jess (Olivia Hussey) struggle with her controlling boyfriend Peter over her decision to get an abortion. Peter’s anger turns out to be something of a misdirect — you’re meant to think that he is the real killer, until it bloodily and abruptly becomes clear that he can’t be.

But it’s not just Clark playing games with his audience, throwing them off the scent. It’s the director showing a rare care and interest in his characters. They’re not cows to the slaughter. They’re smart and capable young heroines, brimming with agency.

The Horror

Of course, that care also means that the deaths hit even harder to home. Black Christmas is unrepentantly savage — the serial killer’s victims are dispatched with an oversized meat hook and a plastic bag, amongst other vicious means.

Those deaths sting all the more because of the deep connection you feel to the dispatched and doomed protagonists. They’re real human beings, not just stock standard tropes, and so their sad ends feel worth mourning.

Paradoxically, by spending an unusual amount of time away from the horror in order to build up his heroes, Clark makes the whole thing that much more upsetting.

That’s particularly true in Black Christmas‘s infamous ending, a twist that the decades since its release have done nothing to reduce. With a simple, wordless crane upwards towards the Sorority House’s attic, Clark reveals just how much danger our heroines are still in. It’s the kind of jolt that Halloween, as excellent as it is, could never replicate — a sick thrill of voyeurism and horror that you can only get from the very best of horror cinema.

You Better Watch Out

Clark’s career after Black Christmas is pretty rocky. He won considerable commercial and critical success with the genteel and decidedly less murderous yuletide classic A Christmas Story, and considerable ire and shame with the infamously terrible Baby Genius movies. But with Black Christmas alone, Clark earned himself a place in the horror pantheon of fame. Sometimes all it takes is one classic to make an artist’s reputation — and Black Christmas is that for Clark.

In fact, so classic is Black Christmas that it’s inspired not only countless rip-offs, but a series of respectful homages too. In 2006, director Glen Morgan — best known for his work on The X-Files — remade the film, producing something sick, slick and deeply reverent.

And this year, acclaimed horror filmmaker Sophia Takal took to the opposite route, crafting a remake that works precisely because it throws out the blueprint of the original, rather than just copying it.

Takal’s film doubles down on the pro-choice, deeply feminist bent of the original.

Written, shot and edited in just eight months, her film channels the rage felt by women the world over in the age of Trump, taking the politics of Clark’s film to their natural endpoint. It’s angry, it’s ugly, it’s wonderfully sick — and it’s proof, if ever any more was needed, that the power of Black Christmas hasn’t been reduced yet.

See Black Christmas in cinemas now.

Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @Joseph_O_Earp.