Bob Clark’s Black Christmas is the holy mother of American slasher films. It predates the film that popularized the genre in America, Friday the 13th, by six years. It feels like a movie that would have been made in the 80s, and the tropes that would appear in later slasher films are mostly present.
The prescient nature of Black Christmas aside, it’s a damn fine movie. A sorority house is harassed by increasingly obscene “prank phone calls”, all of which are barely-intelligible and sound as if there are multiple people talking. Of course, sorority girls begin dying in some rather creative ways, and it’s clear that these phone calls are no joke.
What really sets this movie apart is its characters and its sense of humor. Mrs. Mac (played by Marian Waldman, who would go on to have a non-existent acting career) is the cynical, alcoholic house mother who hides bottles of whiskey in nearly every corner of the sorority house. Jess (Olivia Hussey) is a student struggling with whether or not to abort her child, in spite of her tortured-artist boyfriend’s pleas to keep the baby. Barb (Margot Kidder) is the real stand-out here though. She’s constantly plastered, as foul-mouthed as one can possibly be in a film from the 70s, and enjoys getting children drunk and making every ‘prude’ around her feel as uncomfortable as possible.
Black Christmas also stands out in the way it deals with its killer. We never completely see his face, there is no big reveal, and he isn’t in any way connected with the other characters. Instead, we see brief, shadowy glimpses of what must be a man in his 20s or 30s, and that’s about all we can tell. That is, until you listen closer to the gibberish phone calls throughout the film. They tell a story of a boy named Billy, and his younger sister Agnes. Billy and Agnes did something forbidden (exactly what is unclear), and their parents were furious. Their father chastises their mother for leaving Agnes alone with Billy, indicating they have an idea of how disturbed Billy is. Billy at some point murders Agnes, possibly to cover up whatever forbidden deed they took part in. Now, Billy is a deranged killer who refers to all of his victims as “Agnes.” This is a very simple story, but it’s one that’s conveyed through five or six brief, obscene prank phone calls, which are full of maniacal laughter, voice changes, and extremely graphic sexual language. It’s rather clever.
Every time I watch it, I forget how hilarious, engaging, and well-crafted this movie really is.
9/10