Black Christmas
Directed by Bob Clark
Released: 1974
Starring: Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Keir Dullea, and John Saxon
Running Time: 98 minutes
Reviewed By Eric Grubbs

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Believe it or not, there was a time when Black Christmas was considered a distinctly different kind of horror movie. Released in 1974, a few years before Halloween or Friday the 13th appeared on the radar, and long before the splatter genre went to absurd depths by the major Hollywood studios. So with looking back, it’s easy to see why plenty of horror movie buffs point to this movie – instead of Halloween – as the preeminent slasher flick. I agree, but if it wasn’t for Halloween’s box office success, we wouldn’t have the slasher/splatter genre and even more, most of the films reviewed on this site.

Black Christmas’s set-up sounds very familiar: there’s a killer on the loose as a sorority house’s residents get ready to leave for the Christmas holidays. But what separates this movie from a whole bunch of others is how well it’s acted, directed, and also how the main characters have actual depth to them. Shocking – albeit plain-sounding – in explanation, but it’s true. And the film still holds up after all these years.

Aside from their alcoholic house mother, the sorority members are not one-note characters. There isn’t a clear-cut distinction between the sexually-repressed and the promiscuous or the smart and the stupid. Rather, these are strong women in crisis. And it’s not just the fact they’re being stalked. Seriously dealing with pressures from boyfriends, parents and school, they are not treated as ham-handed plot points that occur between gory murders.

As more residents turn up dead and more disturbing phone calls come in, there is the inevitable climactic showdown. What appears to be a saw-it-from-a-mile-away unmasking turns out to be rather something else. And surprisingly, it’s not a cheat or entirely implausible.

Two very peculiar aesthetics of the film are point-of-view shots from the killer’s perspective and mysterious phone calls coming from inside the house. Now, before you start accusing Halloween or When a Stranger Calls of plagiarism, understand that the film was not very well-known upon original release. Director Bob Clark, who made other horror flicks before and after this, never had sour grapes towards those films or filmmakers. Besides, he made another classic holiday movie and it didn’t involve murderous stalkers: A Christmas Story.

Black Christmas is the kind of movie that, despite its formula becoming so commonplace even just a few years after its release, is a true original. Going beyond simple scare tactics and fleshing out sometimes sympathetic and always complex characters, the film is an accidental trailblazer instead of an intentional exploitation piece.