Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Sorority girls behaving badly. A teen girl lost in the woods. A tortured musician with a possessive streak. Drunk Margot Kidder tricking a dumb cop into thinking “fellatio” is a new switchboard code. A young Andrea Martin with a permed ‘fro. A woman hiding liquor everywhere, from inside a toilet tank to behind coats. A missing girl’s corpse stashed in plain sight. Oh, and the way Olivia Hussey says, “Helll-o? Hell-o?” when she answers the phone.
The original Black Christmas is just…bonkers. It’s a zany must-watch that is at once both a classic horror film and a strange satire of the horror genre. For all its irreverent raucous touches, it’s also menacing to the very last frame. It’s also full of ridiculous comedy bits and feminism with a subversive streak. Black Christmas is also – spoiler alert – considered the first horror film to introduce the goosebump-inducing concept of an unsolved killer and is one of the first films to invoke the infamous “the call is coming from inside the house” trope. It’s been re-made, referenced, and pushed into the zone of the cult classic. But it’s worth a look all on its own.
On paper, Black Christmas looks like a basic psychological slasher film. The Canadian film was directed by Bob Clark (who would later be best-known for another holiday-themed classic, A Christmas Story). The cast featured a pair of actors on the rise — a pre-Superman Margot Kidder and a pre-SCTV Andrea Martin — as well as a pair that had kind of already peaked (i.e. 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Keir Dullea and Romeo and Juliet‘s Olivia Hussey). It was made on a budget and became a box office hit. It’s about a mysterious killer stalking the bad girls of a sorority house. You know, basic horror genre stuff.
However, the tone of Black Christmas is something else. The film vacillates between being a metaphoric orgy of characters behaving badly — a profanity-laced, booze-soaked romp, if you will – to a tense and macabre slasher. The film also has a confused look at women’s liberation. (Or, at least, I was confused by what the film was trying to say about it.) The sorority girls revel in their sexual freedom, but some of them, in particular Kidder’s hilariously decadent Barbara, act out with an almost Jackass-level of mischief. Barbara trolls cops and sneaks children booze. It sometimes seems like the film is satirizing the depravity of this new era, but there is a thread throughout that celebrates these ladies and their lax lifestyles. Part of this is the sheer joy director Bob Clark pulls from depicting their antics as on-going comedy gags, and part of it is the somber respect it gives Olivia’s Hussey’s Jess. Though she is the fresh-faced lead of the film, she’s no pious virgin. She’s pregnant and her moody, controlling boyfriend insists that she keeps it. Her desire for an abortion is not treated as a sin nor a crime, but her choice.
Then there’s the killer’s creepy M.O. He makes himself known with a series of threatening, harassing phone calls, all of which suggest awful acts of sexual violence. I watched this film in the middle of a Mindhunter binge, and let me tell you, Black Christmas almost plays like a creepy prequel to the Netflix thriller. That show depicts the F.B.I. trying to evolve its techniques to understand the serial killers of the ’70s. These murders stymied investigators at the time. They were unusually depraved, often sexually-motivated, and came in streaks. Black Christmas treats the murders in just this way. The killer is not only menacing women using sexual language, but the killer is never identified. The film’s lack of closure is what will likely creep you out the most.
Black Christmas is as entertaining as it is disturbing. It’s funny and it’s nightmare-inducing. It’s a relic of a time when horror was still trying to catch up to the changes afflicting society. Which means it’s kind of a perfect film to watch now.
