Black Christmas (1974)

directed by Bob Clark

Maggie Karrs

When I was six, I watched Addams Family Values by myself on a family vacation and subsequently had nightmares for two months about the final scene, the one where Thing pops up out of a gravesite to scare Wednesday’s crush. I was thoroughly spooked, but intrigued. As I got older, I would pour over synopses of scary movies. Writers were crafting scripts based on people’s deepest fears—demonic possessions, giant spiders, serial killers who make it a game to escape death—and projecting them up on a screen for the viewer to see. I have always held a terrified fascination with horror films, but unlike my older brothers, who have always gotten more of a thrill from supernatural thrillers (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Conjuring), I have always been drawn to movies based in the human element. I picked films like Prom Night and When A Stranger Calls, which I would then watch through my fingers, all the lights on.

The first time I watched Bob Clark’s 1974 Black Christmas, it was for a class. I had chosen to indulge my morbid curiosities for a film class term paper on exploitation film by watching and writing my final thesis on the slasher film genre. Ignoring my mounting apprehension (would I ever sleep again?) and desire to switch my topic to, say, “beach party films” instead, I buckled in for a week’s worth of classic horror, watching Psycho, Halloween, and Black Christmas in quick succession. I was equally terrified by each of them in turn. Black Christmas, one of the earliest slasher films, stuck with me in particular.

Black Christmas has all the elements that make for a solid standard of the subgenre—a murderer who infiltrates a sorority house, a house mother sneaking booze hidden throughout the house, a sorority sister whom the others describe as “virginal” and her opposite, a sister who is constantly smoking and making sexual innuendos, as well as a beloved cat who unwittingly leads a character to their demise. But Black Christmas has two key features that I believe have helped it withstand the test of time (and two remakes). Like many of the early slasher films, it invokes terror in the viewer through an almost completely identity-less killer. His characterization, or lack thereof, represents a completely visceral trigger for fear: total unknowability. We have no idea of his motives, and he has no backstory. Second, but perhaps more notably, the “final girl” in the film, Jess Bradshaw, has agency. She holds autonomy over her life in ways that were important then and important now.

The film opens with a shot of a snow-covered sorority house, bathed in brightly-lit Christmas wreaths, with a muffled choir playing in the background. Almost immediately the perspective shifts to first person, as though we are seeing directly through the eyes of a person watching the house, muffled breathing obscuring the sounds of the women inside as they look through the window. As the identity-less intruder climbs the trellis and enters the attic of the house, the scene is cross-cut with the women of the sorority enjoying a last party before the end of term. One of the sisters, Jess (Olivia Hussey, aka Juliet from the 1968 Romeo and Juliet), picks up two separate phone calls, and at the second, the entire sorority gathers around to hear the indecent utterings of “The Moaner.” Another sister, a smoking, drinking Barb (Margot Kidder aka Lois Lane from the original Superman films), blouse partially unbuttoned, grabs the phone and tells the caller in no uncertain terms to leave the women alone. Voice suddenly calm, the caller tells Barb he is going to kill her before hanging up.

It has been ingrained in me (and many other womxn) from a young age that being a woman automatically puts me in danger in certain spaces. I’ve been told not to run alone, not to camp alone, I’ve even been warned of sitting in my car. The warnings usually include the mental sketch of a foreboding stranger, or perhaps one who is charming, polite, a little too friendly. “Be careful!” and “lock your doors!” are automatic farewells from my parents at the end of any phone call or visit. The words are so rutted out in my brain they’ve almost lost any real meaning. My mother could be saying, “clocks and spoons” along with her goodbye and my brain would still register it as a mark of caution. It’s a statement fueled by love and fear: fear of the stranger in the parking lot, the van parked down the street—or possibly, the stranger on the other end of the phone.

The first sister murdered by “The Moaner” is Clare Harrison. She’s not who I expected to be the first victim, based on almost every other slasher film I had seen at the time. Clare is described as “virginal” by Margot Kidder’s Barb, and teased for it. She appears to be prim, though she is dating a “townie,” a point acknowledged by several characters as a step outside the norm. The nameless killer—who we never even see in full, just his silhouette, his hands, and once, when Jess is the only sister left in the house, a terrifying close up of one wide-open eye—hides in Clare’s closet, strangles her with a plastic clothing covering, and then hides her body in the attic. The camera occasionally cuts to her lifeless frame, placed in a rocking chair facing a window to the outside world, a sort of proxy for the killer.

When Clare’s father appears at the sorority house the next day to take her home for winter break, it sets off a series of events. Jess goes to the police station, and when the officer attempts to shrug off her concerns, she demands they take Clare’s disappearance seriously. In response to her concerns, the police form a search party. It is the second time Jess asserts her power to a man, as she has just come from telling her boyfriend, Peter, that she is pregnant, but she will be having an abortion.

Jess’s assuredness struck me as a 21 year old, but even more so with my most recent watch of the film. Black Christmas was released in 1974, just a year after the decision came down from Roe v. Wade. Though the movie was made in Canada, which had made abortion legal in some, but not all cases, in 1969, the way the film handled it was so...matter of fact. When Jess tells Peter of her decision, she does so bluntly. She quickly rebuffs an offer of marriage, firmly declaring that she neither wants to have a baby, nor to marry him, even when he threatens that if she goes through with the procedure she will “regret it.” Even so, she is unabashed and unashamed, and when she hesitates to tell Lieutenant Fuller—the officer searching for the anonymous caller—the entirety of the situation, it seems more for Peter’s sake than any sense of self-preservation.

In a political climate where reproductive rights are constantly under fire, where senators are menacingly referring to birth control as “abortion inducing drugs” during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, as though either are some sort of evil, and when friends are telling me they’re thinking of getting a IUD right now and then chuckling emptily to hide the fear many of us currently have—this 45-year-old film feels prescient. The threat from a partner left me stricken, but the way Jess affirmed her decision made me feel powerful.

As the Moaner terrorizes the house, we see shades of humanity painting the women in the moments before they’re slain. The house mother, Mrs. MacHenry, is seen drinking and trying to hide a lewd poster the women have placed in the house from Mr. Harrison; she is almost immediately killed in the attic when she goes to look for Claude the cat.  Barb, the same girl who taunted Clare for her “virginal” behavior, and who brazenly told a police officer that part of the house’s telephone number was “FE-llatio,” is later comforted by Jess after having an asthma attack in her sleep. The Moaner later murders Barb in her bed, with her own glass unicorn figurine. While Barb is dying, Jess is happily watching a children’s choir perform at the door. She looks peaceful, unaware of the chaos around her. By keeping the murderer faceless and nameless, and giving the women in the movie more substance than their stereotypes would normally allow, Black Christmas pivots the focus back on the victims rather than the killer. Unlike many modern slashers (including the remakes of Halloween and Black Christmas), that either get caught up in single-dimension characters or bogged down in trying to give the killer a backstory and motivation, here we are able to empathize with the women in the story and we feel the full terror of a killer with seemingly no discernible reason for killing.

When the police are finally able to trace the call, Jess finds out the worst possible news: the calls are coming from inside the house. In another moment of astounding agency, Jess grabs a fire poker and runs up the stairs to take on the attacker and hopefully save her sisters. It is a move of pure altruism as she is standing literally feet from the front door. Rather than run, Jess decides to fight. In my recent rewatch I found myself first yelling at the screen, “GIRL, RUN,” and then saying aloud, “Okay, I guess I would also try and save my friends.”

It’s not that we don’t have modern day heroines in horror films, or films that subvert the genre in their characterizations. But Jess’s plight seems, simply, so real. Her decisions throughout the film are to protect and advocate for herself and her friends. At no point does she back down from her convictions, and though in the final confrontation with the killer she may be afraid, she picks up the fire poker and runs up the stairs anyway.

The movie ends morbidly, as most slasher films do. As Jess is hiding in the cellar from the killer, having narrowly escaped him and locked the door, she sees Peter at the cellar window. When he breaks in to get to her, she assumes, as has been suggested by Lt. Fuller, that he is the anonymous caller, and the police find them intertwined with Jess having beaten him to death with the fire poker. The police also conclude that Peter must have been the killer, and after removing the bodies from the house, they leave Jess to sleep in her bed. As a shadow passes across the screen and the phone rings, however, the audience knows the truth.

That Peter is not the killer is the red herring the movie needs to be memorable. It would be so much neater, and in some ways more comforting if he were. It would be horrible—a marker of an insidious belief in his own righteousness, to be sure—but it would be cleanly resolved. There would be some discernible motive and rationale. The element of the anonymous, reasonless killer remaining loose in the house leaves the viewer with an adrenaline rush, a general unease, and the urge to leave all the lights on when we go to sleep, as a good horror movie does.

As the credits rolled at the end of my most recent viewing, it struck me that Jess was not inherently wrong to fear Peter in that moment. Right now in particular, it seems prudent to be aware of our reactions to and fears of both the known and unknown threats, to our personal safety and to the safety of those around us. My hope is that we can acknowledge these fears and threats and then, like Jess, pick up the fire poker and run up the stairs to face them.

Maggie Karrs (she/her) is based in Richmond, VA. Her writing has appeared in wig-wag and the Adventures in Isolation journal. When she’s not working on her DPT, she’s exploring the outdoors, writing questionable poetry, and pitching errant thoughts like “Is Phoebe Bridgers a millennial-driven AI compilation?” and “Did We Come Full Circle on John Mayer?”as essays.