Black Christmas (1974)

I'm not exactly sure when I became aware of this film. I'm pretty sure that I first heard the title on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments in 2004 but it wasn't until a few years later, possibly when I started listening to Deadpit Radio and began reading up more and more on horror films of the 1970's, that I actually became intrigued by Black Christmas. I've always enjoyed finding those obscure films that fall into the cracks and are actually similar to and perhaps influenced more well known films. In this case, it was the connection to the slasher genre and Halloween specifically that interested me. Being a huge fan of the Halloween franchise and hearing rumors that Black Christmas may have had some influence on that original film, I knew I had to see this movie (plus, the clips that James Rolfe showed in a review of the movie he did on his website as well as others that I had seen from the film looked really cool). Finally, in December of 2009, I got the 2006 special edition DVD of the film and watched it one Saturday evening that January. Some movies have to grow on you but others you like from the moment you first see them and for me, Black Christmas proved to be an example of the latter. I thought the movie was quite good. Granted, the characters and acting were nothing special but I was really impressed with the mood the film created and how skillfully it made me uneasy in spots. The ending especially gave me the creeps in spades. Plus, I really enjoyed the sense of humor that the film as well. While I do still think Halloween is a creepier and more well-made film overall, I think Black Christmas more than holds its own and should get a lot more attention than it deserves actually.

During a Christmas party at a sorority house one night, an unseen man spies on the partygoers inside and then climbs up a trellis on the side of the house and enters the attic. Soon after, the girls receive the latest in a series of obscene and disturbing phonecalls where the caller makes bizaree sounds as well as says some very perverted stuff. One of the girls gets on the phone and takes on the caller, who eventually tells the woman that he's going to kill her. Not long after that, another one of the girls is attacked and killed by the stranger in her bedroom, unbeknownst to everyone else. The killer then takes her body up into the attic and props her body up in a rocking chair. When the girl fails to meet her father the next day to go home with him for the holidays, he goes to the sorority and eventually to the police. At the same time, one of the sorority girls, Jess Bradford tells her boyfriend, aspiring musician Peter, that she is pregnant with his child but wants to have an abortion. Peter is not happy about this news at all and tells Jess that they are going to meet that night to settle the issue. Meanwhile, the police starts an investigation on the missing girl, while more obscene calls are received at the sorority house and the housemother is eventually murdered by the stranger in the attic, who promptly hides her body up there as well. That night, the police tap the sorority's telephones so they can trace the obscene phone-calls. However, more of the sorority's inhabitants fall prey to the killer and Jess eventually ends up alone in the house with him. By this point, the question is if the murderer could be Peter, who is furious at Jess for not changing her mind over the abortion or if it's someone else altogether.

It's really interesting to think that less than a decade before he created one of the most beloved, and unavoidable, holiday films ever in the form of A Christmas Story, director Bob Clark made a dark and disturbing look at the most joyous time of the year with this film. Now, Clark is someone who had a very interesting career, I must say. I may not be interested in all of his films (the Porky's movies just aren't my cup of tea) and he may have done one of the movies where Sylvester Stallone made an absolute fool out of himself with Rhinestone, but I am interested in seeing the other horror films he did like Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things and Deathdream (the latter of which I hear is actually a mini-classic). It seemed like he was a really nice, likable guy as well as being quite talented and should have gotten the chance to make more films than he did. Not only is it sad that he was killed, along with his son, in a traffic accident in 2007 but also, his last movies were stuff like The Karate Dog and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. Too bad he didn't get to make more good movies before his life was cut tragically short.

Black Christmas is one of several movies that are credited with creating the slasher subgenre. No one is able to decide exactly which film did so but it's always the same three or four movies that are credited with doing so. Psycho (and, to some extent, Michael Powell's notorious Peeping Tom from the same year), is often credited as being the first major building block for the slasher films, obviously with the concept of a knife-wielding killer and so forth. The same year, and month for that matter, that Black Christmas was released, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is also often considered to be a contender for the title of the first slasher movie, hit theaters. Personally, while that is an effectively frightening movie all-around, I see it more as a bad-ass grindhouse movie rather than as a slasher movie. And then, of course, there's John Carpenter's Halloween, which was released four years after Black Christmas and is widely considered to be the start of the slasher film since right after that came Friday the 13th and so on. As I said way back in my review of it, I think the original Friday the 13th is the prototypical slasher film. While all of those films before it were definitely classics, all of the slasher movies that were released in that boom period from 1980 to 1984 were copying Friday the 13th since that movie was the first of those types of movies to be released on a national scale and was a huge hit as a result. So, while I do think that films like Black Christmas and Halloween set the template, Friday the 13th was the movie that made it popular and bankable.

There's also apparently another interesting connection between Black Christmas and Halloween. Bob Clark once said that a couple of years after he made the film, he and John Carpenter collaborated together on a film that ended up never being made and that, according to him, Carpenter asked him if he ever intended to make a sequel to Black Christmas. While Clark said no, he did say that he told Carpenter how he would have done a sequel and that idea involved the killer coming back and beginning his killing spree again on Halloween. However, Clark said that he never felt that Carpenter stole that idea for Halloween and, in fact, executive producer Irwin Yablans is the one credited with coming up with the idea for setting that film on Halloween and even having it be called as such. Carpenter, on the other hand, denies that he took any inspiration from Black Christmas and even once said that he felt that Black Christmas was the "wrong" way to do this type of film. While Carpenter is one of my favorite directors of all time, I sometimes feel that he isn't exactly honest about some things when he's interviewed and I do think he had to have taken some inspiration from Black Christmas. If you watch the two films back to back, you can see some cross-over, most notably with the concept of camerawork meant to portray the killer's point of view, young people getting butchered, and so forth. But, to be fair, I think those basic elements are where the similarities end. To me, the story of Halloween, the character of Michael Myers, and so on all came from Carpenter's mind, although, again, I do think Carpenter borrowed more from Black Christmas than he wants to admit.

I have some rather mixed feelings about the film's main character, Jess Bradford, played by Olivia Hussey. I do think that she acts rather insensitive about her boyfriend Peter's feelings on the matter that she's pregnant with his child and that she wants to abort it. She comes out and says that she's already decided what she's going to do and that Peter has no say in the matter whatsoever, even telling him that she originally never intended to tell him anyway. She can see how much the revelation is upsetting Peter but still, she doesn't budge and makes it clear that she doesn't care what he thinks. That is rather selfish of her, I must say. Also, Peter makes a good point when he says that she sees this baby as nothing more than a nuisance that she wants to get rid of. The way she talks to him, she acts like it's all his fault. I just get that vibe when she says stuff like, "Would you please stop attacking me so we can have a rational, adult conversation?" Maybe it's just because I'm a guy but I feel, "You know, Jess, it takes two to tango. You were the one who had sex with him without protection so this situation is your fault. You should let him have some say in the matter and not just shut him out completely." I also think it was rather insensitive of her to tell Peter about the pregnancy on the day where he's supposed to have an important piano recital and, naturally, he's too upset about the news to concentrate and he blows it. However, as we'll get into, Peter isn't exactly a stable person but still, I think Jess was more than a little insensitive to how he felt about the situation. Now, because of this, you would think that I wouldn't like Jess at all but I do. She comes across as somebody who does care about her friends, like when Barb offends Clare at the beginning of the film and when Clare heads up to her room, Jess can tell she's upset and tries to assure her that Barb didn't mean what she said. Also, to her credit, when Peter calls late in the film and is very upset, she does try to calm him down. And, finally, when Jess finds out that the man making the disturbing phonecalls is in the house with her, instead of leaving Barb and Phyl alone with him, she arms herself with a fireplace poker and heads upstairs. Granted, Barb and Phyl have already been murdered but at least Jess was still good enough to at least attempt to save them. Overall, I would say that Jess is definitely a good person but just got herself in a situation that she didn't know how to handle in terms of her pregnancy. Now, if she had been an out and out bitch to everybody, that would have been another thing entirely but for the reasons stated above, I still cared about her in the climax when she's being chased through the house by the killer.

When I first saw this movie, I wasn't aware that Keir Dullea who plays Peter was the same guy who played Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I guess just didn't make the connection but then again, that movie is one you watch for the visuals rather than the acting (besides, Dullea looks a lot different here than he did in that film). In any case, like I said, Peter is a character that I really feel for. He's initially thrilled to learn that Jess is pregnant but becomes extremely upset when she tells him that she's going to abort it and that he has no say in the matter. He's so upset and distracted that he miserably fails an important piano recital (like I said, I think Jess was at fault for telling him that news on the very day of the recital). And I can also understand his frustration about Jess' attitude about the baby because, let's face it, she is coming across like it's nothing more than an inconvenience and not a living human being growing inside of her. So, yes, I do feel for Peter. But that said, it's also clear that Peter has some serious emotional problems. He's more than a little neurotic, practicing his piano skills almost nonstop for three days to prepare himself for the recital, and when he fails it, he angrily smashes his piano to pieces with a mike stand. And when he meets with Jess that night to discuss what they're going to do about her pregnancy, he tells her that he's quitting his practice and marrying her. Now that, I think, is rather crazy of him to expect her to drop everything that she's doing and marry him just because he's messed up his future. And, like I said, while I do understand his getting upset at Jess due to her attitude about the baby, I think threatening her the way he did was going overboard. His actions end up implicating him in the recent disappearances and the way he lurks around the sorority house and watches it, it would make you suspect that he is the killer. He ends up unknowingly causing Jess to think that he is so when he breaks his way into the basement where she's hiding after being attacked. While he did so only because he heard her screaming, this leads to her killing him with the fire-poker when she thinks he's trying to attack her. By the end of the movie, everybody is convinced that Peter was the killer but, as we find out, he was just a red herring and the real killer is still lurking in the attic of the sorority house. You have to feel bad for Peter. He was a well-meaning but tortured guy whose emotional problems and erratic actions got him killed and branded as a murderer afterward, allowing the real one to remain uncaptured.

The inhabitants of the sorority house are a colorful bunch to say the least. The most memorable one is Margot Kidder as Barbara Coard, or "Barb" as everyone calls her. She's the residential drunk, always getting plastered at a moment's notice and also has quite a mouth on her both in terms of profanity and graphic sexual innuendos. She's got the balls to actually get into an arguement with the obscene caller at the beginning of the movie, telling him, "Why don't you go find a wall socket and stick your tongue in it? That'll give you a charge." She has a bad habit of being a bit of a bully towards the other girls, particularly Clare, whom she offends after that obscene phone call, implying that she's a "professional virgin." We learn early on that she's been at Clare for a while and when she disappears, Barb is sure that everybody thinks that she drove Clare away, lashing out at Clare's father, the housemother, and one of the other girls after becoming extremely drunk. She has some problems at home as well, getting a call from her mother at the beginning of the movie that informs her that she can't come home for Christmas because she's going off with some guy, prompting Barb to tell her mother that she's a real whore. Fortunately for her, Jess and Phyl take pity on her and accept an offer to go skiing with her in a few days. Despite what a troubled person she is, Barb is a real hoot with some of the stuff she says. There's a moment where she's offering this little kid some booze and when he takes a sip, she says, "I think the little bugger's schnockered, son of a bitch!" Later on when Sergeant Nash asks for the number of the sorority house, she tells him that it's Fellatio 20880 and Nash, being the complete dumbass that he is as we'll see later, falls for it. And before she lashes out at everybody at dinner that night, she drunkenly tells them that there's a species of turtle that can have sex nonstop for three days. She goes on to say that she knows this because she went to the zoo and watched them. However, she makes it clear that she didn't stay for the whole three days and instead went over to watch the zebras, which only took thirty seconds because of premature ejaculation. Even if Barb is a drunken, slobby bitch most of the time, I can't help but crack up at some of the stuff she says.

For me, the most uninteresting tenant at the sorority is Phyllis Carlson or "Phyl" (Andrea Martin). She's not a horrible character or anything but she's basically just a goody two-shoes type character. Don't get me a wrong, there is a place for those types of characters and some of my favorite characters of all time do fall into that category, but Phyl just doesn't grab me that much. Still, we do see how sweet and caring she is when she becomes worried over Clare's disappearance and later in the night, she breaks down crying, suspecting that Clare is probably dead and says that she feels so bad for Clare's father. That was nice. So, not a bad character but just not that memorable to me. Now, the housemother, Mrs. MacHenry (Marian Waldman) is something else altogether. She could be my favorite character in the entire movie because of how hilarious she is. I think she does like being the housemother but is glad to get away when she can. Like Barb, she has some awesome dialogue, like at the beginning of the movie when the girls give her this horrendous nightgown as a present and while she says the obligatory thank you, under her breath she says, "Got about as much use for this as I do a chastity belt." Later when she's brushing her teeth and sees herself wearing the gown in the mirror, she comments, "Jesus, I wouldn't wear this to have my liver out." I also like it when Clare's father visits the sorority and he chastises Mrs. Mac for the atmosphere and decor of the house. In a scene afterward, she's mocking his statement, "I didn't send my daughter here to be drinking and picking up boys," to which she says to herself, "Tough shit." She knows the morals of the girls that stay in her sorority, saying, "These broads would hump the Leaning Tower of Pisa if they could get up there." And there's a really funny running gag with her in that she's got booze bottles hidden everywhere in the house, like in a book with a bunch of pages cut out around it and even in the upper section of a toilet! Despite all of this hidden liquor, she never gets drunk like Barb though. Finally, I have to mention this stuff that she sings while she's packing to go to her sister's for the holiday: "Alligators come through the gate, but goodbye leg if you get away late! Lollies love to pop!" That's awesome. It's a shame she gets killed soon after that. There are other people in the sorority but other than Clare, the others are never named and they go home for the holidays after the first part of the movie so they don't matter anyway.

Since Clare Harrison (Lynne Griffin) is the first person to get killed in the first ten minutes or so of the film, there isn't much to say about her. All you learn is that she has a rather proper and conservative father whom Clare wants to eventually introduce her boyfriend to but not before she lets her father get used to the idea of her having one and that Barb is constantly getting all over her for one reason or another. Other than that, there's nothing to say, although Clare, ironically, becomes the iconic image of the film when she's killed with plastic sheeting stretched over her face, some of which got sucked into her mouth, and her body is set on a rocking chair in the attic. You really do get to know Clare's father (James Edmond Jr.), whom begins looking for his daughter when she doesn't meet him to go home for the holidays. Mr. Harrison is as strict and proper as you would expect him to be, even a little stoic. The minute he meets Mrs. Mac, he tells her that he's not at all happy with the state of the sorority house, which consists of raunchy posters on the walls as well as the fact that his daughter's been involved in a lot of drinking and partying as well as dating boys.  Despite his strict ideals, you really feel bad for the poor guy when the police initially don't take Clare's disappearance seriously, when Barb lashes out at him and everyone else because she feels they're blaming her for Clare's disappearance, and when he and everyone else are searching in the park, which results in the discovery of a dead child. You especially feel bad for him when it hits you that he's going through all this crap to find Clare, hopefully alive, but in reality, unknown to him and everyone else, she's dead and her body is in the very house that most of the film's action takes place in. Mr. Harrison eventually suffers a strong case of shock at the end of the movie has to be taken to the hospital so his story is just sad all-around. It's also interesting to see Art Hindle, who would go on to appear in Philip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and also star in David Cronenberg's The Brood, in the small role of Clare's boyfriend, Chris. Hindle is really just kind of there and doesn't have much of a part in the film but he does come across as genuinely caring about Clare as well as determined to find her. And he's the one who puts stupid Sargeant Nash in his place when he doesn't take her disappearance seriously. (Interesting note: Warner Bros., the American distributor of the film, asked Bob Clark to shoot a new ending where Chris is revealed to be the killer but Clark stuck to his guns and refused to do so.)

The most well-known actor in the film is John Saxon as Lt. Fuller, a character that's rather similar to his role in A Nightmare on Elm Street a decade later. I thought Saxon, as always, handled himself rather well in this film. Saxon is one of those actors who kind of gives the same performance over and over again, with the only difference being whether he's playing a good guy or a bad guy but he has such a presence to him that you can't help but enjoy him. Fuller is definitely a sympathetic, take charge-kind of cop whom, once he hears about the disappearance of Clare Harrison, gets right on the case at the same time he's helping a hysterical woman find her missing daughter. He goes as far as to lead a search party in a nearby park to find both missing girls and he also installs a tap on the sorority's telephones in order to trace the obscene phonecalls they're receiving. He's the one who suspects that Peter has something to do with what's going on due to his actions and his anger at Jess over the pregnancy. By the end of the movie, like everyone else, he's convinced that Peter was indeed the killer. Little does he suspect that the real killer is still hiding in the attic. On the other side of the police in this film is Sargeant Nash (Douglas McGrath). Nash is a complete idiot in every sense of the word. He wants desperately to do good at his job but he either doesn't think things through enough or is just absolutely rock-stupid. He doesn't take Clare's disappearance seriously, which leads to him getting chewed out later on by Chris, is too dumb to know that Fellatio is not a real exchange, doesn't make the connection that since the report of obscene phone-calls is coming from the house where the missing girl lived, that it might be important to investigate, and at the climax of the movie, blows Lt. Fuller's instructions not to tell Jess that the obscene caller is in the house. It's weird because I should hate Nash because of how arrogant he is when Clare is first reported missing and also because his stupidity complicates things but I find it really hard to hate dopey characters like him unless they're so stupid that they become annoying after a while (which Nash almost becomes but not quite). Plus, his dumbness leads to one hilarious moment that we'll get to later.

There are a couple of other characters I want to quickly mention. One is Phyl's boyfriend, who I think is named Patrick (Michael Rapport), who gets roped into playing Santa Claus at a department store or whatever that place is. In any case, he's not too thrilled about being forced to play Santa in the first place but when he hears that Phyl has cancelled a date they were supposed to go on during the holiday, he becomes absolutely cantankerous. It's really funny to see him wearing a Santa suit and have a kid sitting on his lap while he's saying stuff like, "Ho ho ho, shit," and ripping Barb a new one, calling her a bitch and the like. Finally, I feel that I must mention Les Carlson as Graham, the technician who puts the tap on the sorority phones in order to trace the obscene calls. Carlson should be well known to horror fans, having appeared in a few David Cronenberg films like Videodrome and The Fly. Nothing really special about his character but I just thought it was interesting to see Carlson pop up in another Canadian horror flick.

While there is quite a bit of humor in the film, it's not overt as it is in other horror films like An American Werewolf in London and it also doesn't interfere with the mood either. When it hits, it's quite funny but it sticks around for only a few moments before going on with the story and it feels very natural instead of forced. I've already mentioned a lot of the funny lines from characters like Barb and Mrs. Mac but there's other stuff to talk about. One that I find really funny is when Lt. Fuller is about to call the sorority when he finally looks at the number that Sargeant Nash wrote down from Barb. When he reads it, his reaction is hilarious. He's like, "What the hell is this?!" This other cop then cracks up laughing and Fuller finds it really funny as well. When he questions Nash about it, Nash tells him how it's a new exchange. Fuller says, "Nash, I don't think you could pick your nose without written instructions." He sits back down and the other cop continues busting a gut while Nash just stares at them with that dumb expression on his face before finally saying, "Oh, I get it. It's something dirty, ain't it?" That scene always causes me to at least crack a smile (which is needed because the very next scene is when Peter basically threatens Jess about having an abortion). There's another great moment later on when another cop and this crotchety old man get pulled into the station and you find out that the old man shot the cop right in the rear! The old man rants, "I'm not letting no son of a bitch trespass on my land in the middle of the night! I don't care what he is!" When Fuller is told that the guy fired on an officer, the old man yells, "You goddamn right! I'll do it again, too! The bastard was trespassing!" The wounded cop says, "I'm gonna make the son of a bitch pick every one of 'em out with his teeth," to which the old man says, "Next time you're gonna get the gun up your ass... sideways!" After that commotion, Fuller turns to see the cop that was laughing earlier at Nash's stupidity about to crack up again and, while trying to contain his own laughter, tells him, "You laugh and I swear to God I'll bust you to boyscout!" That's hilarious.

The humor aside, this film is first and foremost all about atmosphere and mood to create tension and it does so quite well. A majority of the film takes place at the sorority house and while the place at first doesn't look like a location that would inspire fear, with its humorously raunchy wall decorations and light atmosphere due to the rowdy girls who live there, when most of the girls leave for the holidays, it does become quite creepy, especially when night falls. The camerawork that pans around the hallways, showing the length the halls and the hint of a corner at the end and so forth really help set the mood and, ironically, the Christmas lights and fireplace in the main room lend themselves to the atmosphere as well. The attic where the killer hides is especially eerie because of the darkness and all the junk that's crammed up there, punctuated even more so by the shots of Clare's body in the rocking shair next to the window. I find it rather creepy that the body was up against the window the entire movie and yet, it was never seen because the window is so high up. The same goes for the basement that Jess hides in at the end of the film. It's a really, dark eerie location filled with a lot of junk that is darkly lit and you can't quite tell what it all is. So, yeah, the sorority house becomes a spooky setting by the end of the film, especially during the very end when Jess is left alone and the house is darkly lit. Very creepy.

Bob Clark took the "less is more" concept to the hilt in regards to the movie's killer. He remains a complete enigma for the entire film. You never find out who he is, where he came from, or why he's killing people. You don't even get to see him. The only scene where you kind of get a look at his face is when he murders Barb in her room but even then, his face is mostly hidden in shadow. The rest of the time, all you get are shots of his shadow, POV shots, a well-known and particularly creepy shot of his eye watching Jess from behind a door, and glimpses of his hands. So, basically, who he is isn't even up to speculation because you're literally given nothing to go on. As I said earlier, Peter is portrayed as a possible suspect throughout the film and they subtly punctuate this by having the killer wear a shirt that seems very similar to Peter's green sweater. If you carefully watch some of the moments where you see the killer's hands, you can tell that he is indeed wearing a shirt that does look like Peter's sweater. But, by the end of the movie, it's revealed that Peter was just a red herring and the real killer is still on the loose. For what little you see of the killer, the film makes up for it in the fact that you hear him an awful lot. He's sort of like an in-verse of Michael Myers in that you see Michael but he's completely silent whereas you never really see this guy but he's quite vocal. Obviously, he makes obscene phonecalls and you learn that he's been doing so for a while (suggesting that he's been stalking the inhabitants of the sorority house long before he made his way to the house and started his killing spree). The phone calls mainly consist of him making all sorts of weird noises like slurping, snorting, laughing, yelling a bunch of nonsense, imitating several different noises, and saying a bunch of graphic sexual stuff. The only time he says anything calm and rational over the phone is when Barb provokes him and he says, "I'm going to kill you," which is really eerie when put up against all the other insane stuff he does. Some of the phonecalls actually shed some possible light on his identity, suggesting that his name is Billy and that he had an incestual relationship with his younger sister, Agnes. This comes from him imitating a conversation between several different people, where he yells stuff like, "Where's the baby?!" "Where'd you put Agnes?!" "You left her alone with Billy?!" "Billy, no!" He also constantly talkes to himself as well and a couple of times he says, "Agnes, it's me, Billy," and "You won't tell them what we did." Whenever he attacks someone, he starts yelling and screaming like an absolute maniac, which I find scary because, while he sounds like a kook who is enjoying scaring and killing people the rest of the time, here he sounds really pissed, particularly when he's chasing Jess at the end of the movie after she hits him with the door to a room. After he kills Mrs. Mac, there's a weird moment where he watches the taxi that was supposed to pick her up drive off and then he goes crazy, running around the attic and smacking things while yelling at the top of his lungs. God knows what caused that but it further proves that this guy is is really unstable.

Despite his insane babbling, there is evidence that he is very intelligent and is watching and listening to everything that goes on in the sorority. It's when he talks to Jess over the phone and says, "Just like having a wart removed," which is what Peter said to describe how Jess seems to view the prospect of abortion. In fact, he may have said that to further implicate Peter, suggesting that he'd been watching long enough to know that Peter would be a great scapegoat due to his neurotic tendencies. Heck, since he's in the house, he likely knew that the phones were bugged and may been listening in on the conversations between Jess and Lt. Fuller to see if his plan to implicate Peter was working. You can even see Billy's shadow in the background in one scene where Jess is talking to Fuller, so he's apparently interested in what Jess is saying while she's on the telephone. That's very effective in my opinion because I always find it really scary to think that somebody is not only crazy and dangerous but that there is also real intelligence behind the madness as well.

Like Halloween, the body count in Black Christmas is low both in terms of the number of victims and in terms of actual blood spilled. While there is a bit more blood here than in Halloween, it's not a gore-film in the slightest. The first death is Clare, who is suffocated when Billy grabs her and stretches plastic sheeting across her face. Her death is short and sweet but her body is carried up into the attic and set in a rocking chair against the window, which you see many of shots throughout the film, (including some where Billy is rocking it and quietly singing nursery rhymes, which is eerie beyond belief). Mrs. Mac is killed when she goes up into the attic looking for her pet cat Claude (whom Billy took up there with him for some reason, most likely to lure her up there) and gets a crane hook right in the face, which Billy proceeds to use to hang her body up in the air. The most graphic death in the film has to be that of Barb, whom Billy stabs to death in her room with a small glass unicorn sculpture she has up there. There's a fair amount of blood in this murder but it's not flying everywhere like in a splatter movie. The rest of the victims are killed off-camera. Phyl is later found dead alongside Barb and while you never find out how she was killed, she was probably stabbed to death as well. And finally, a police officer left to guard the sorority is found dead in his patrol car, his throat having been slashed (again, not a graphic effect in the slightest). Also, Peter, of course, is bludgeoned to death off-camera by Jess since she thinks he's the killer (the aftermath of that isn't too graphic either). It's also suggested that Billy may have murdered a young girl whose body (which you never see) is found in a nearby park but it's never proven. I don't really know if he did it or not myself, since I don't think Billy would have left the attic during the day since he could have been seen but, then again, he did go outside to kill that policeman and even though it was at night, somebody could have seen him there since it was right on the street so who knows? Billy may or may not have also been responsible for a rape that Clare mentions at the beginning of the movie. So, all in all, fans of gore would probably be disappointed by Black Christmas but this isn't that type of movie. It's about atmosphere and suspense and I for one really like that not all of the crimes are concretely linked to the film's killer, leaving it for you to decide whether he was responsible or not.

Like Michael Myers, I think it's possible to surmise that Billy may be more than human. This isn't suggested by the fact that he won't die or anything like that but is done so more subtly. Listen to those phonecalls, where he makes all those bizarre noises and also imitates several different voices, sometimes two or more at once. During the very first obscene phonecall of the film, Clare wonders if those sounds could be created by just one person. In fact, those sounds were, in reality, created by the voices of two or three people at the same time, including Bob Clark himself. Putting aside the different voices speaking at the same time, Billy also seems to be able change his voice rather skillfully. Now, I know it's possible to change your voice through tones and volume but Billy's voice appears to change throughout the film. Maybe it's just me but I thought the voice on the phone at the beginning of the movie sounded very different from the one that spoke Billy's last line in the film. And let's not ignore the fact that he's able to make his voice sound very much like that of a woman over the phone, so much so that Jess thought it actually was a woman after listening to one call. Besides the voice thing, Billy seems to be able to appear in places rather skillfully, most notably when Jess discovers Barb and Phyl's bodies near the end of the movie. When she opens the door to the room, it seems to open all the way and hit the wall and yet, she soon turns and sees Billy looking at her from the crack of the door. He did something similar earlier when Phyl walked into Barb's room and then suddenly the door shut after she walked in, suggesting that Billy was behind the door and waiting for her. How was he able to stay behind the door and remain perfectly still and unseen even when it was open as far as it could go? Maybe I'm just reading into this a little more than I should but I can't help but wonder about it. Human or not, though, the ending is creepy as shit. Jess is left alone in the house while the police take Mr. Harrison to the hospital, the camera pans away from her room and eventually goes up towards the attic, where you hear Billy singing to himself. The last shot is a closeup of the face of Clare's still undiscovered body, with Mrs. Mac hanging in the background, and you hear Billy say, "Agnes, it's me, Billy." The camera slowly pulls back away from the window to reveal the entire sorority house, as the credits roll and you gradually hear a phone ringing. That is scary stuff right there and it freaked me out the first time I saw the movie. It gave me a feeling of not wanting to look out the window for fear of seeing something that I did not want to see!

There's isn't much music in Black Christmas to be honest. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the "score" is made up of sound effects that are meant to just creep you. The main sound that you hear throughout the film is a low, rumbling piano that is meant to suggest Billy's presence or make you feel uncomfortable in the darkness of the sorority house. Also, in the scene where Peter is smashing his piano to pieces, you can hear the rumble every time he comes down with the mike stand. Whether it's meant to be on the soundtrack or the actual sound of the piano keys being smashed I'm not sure but it's an interesting touch nonetheless. In any case, composer Carl Zittrer said that the created the sounds by attaching various objects like forks and knives to the piano's strings and then playing the keys like normal. He would also distort it even further by recording on audio tape and then slowing the tape down. The effect is quite unnerving. There are also some eerie sounds that you hear at the beginning of the film when Billy is lurking outside the sorority as well as later in the film which are also creepy. Combine that with the typical sounds of Christmas, like a group of carolers singing outside of the house while Barb is being murdered, and you've got a soundtrack that, while not exactly iconic, does its job well in making you uncomfortable.

For my money, Black Christmas is a minor classic. It's atmospheric, eerie, has a creepy enigma of a villain, some likable characters and good acting, good humor that doesn't interfere with the mood, and an ending that's sure to give you the shivers. I really do think it's a film that deserves to stand alongside Halloween, Psycho, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because it's every bit as influential as those films and it's a shame that it's not as well known to the general public as they are. I know there was a remake in 2006 but I've never seen it because I've heard a lot of bad things about it, including that they explain everything about Billy, which is a huge mistake. I'll stick with the original film and you should too. If you've never seen it, give it a watch. It's quite an enjoyable minor horror classic.