John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is often credited as the first true “slasher” film. But Black Christmas (1974) may deserve that distinction probably more than any other horror movie. It’s a Canadian film about a maniac who taunts, stalks and kills a group of college girls over Christmas break.
While Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (both films from 1960) were progenitors of the modern slasher genre, they were only proto-slashers.
Black Christmas was the first movie to meet the categories that typically constitute a true “slasher” film: a serial killer who stalks and kills people in rapid succession, heaping up a body count and squaring off with a “final girl” in the end of the movie.
An argument can also be made that the first official slasher flick was Sergio Martino’s 1973 Italian giallo film “Torso”, but I digress.
Black Christmas has:
1) The most annoying killer of any slasher movie I’ve ever seen. His incessant whining and crying drives me nuts.
2) Margot Kidder playing her typical obnoxious self. She went on to play Lois Lane in Superman a few years later… and was just as obnoxious.
3) The beautiful English actress Olivia Hussey as lead actress Jess – who I struggled to accept in this slasher movie role because all I had ever seen her in was Jesus of Nazareth where she plays the role of the comely virgin Mary. It was really pissing me off that a serial killer kept trying to butcher the mother of the Son of God.
4) Keir Dullea as Jess’s psycho boyfriend Peter who is pissed that Jess intends to abort his baby. At least it wasn’t baby Jesus, I guess. Dullea previously appeared in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as Dave. “Just what do you think you are doing, Dave?” – HAL 9000
Unfortunately, Bette Davis (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962) does not appear in the movie because she turned down the role of Ms. Mac.
Anyway, Black Christmas should be a part of every horror fan’s Christmas season movie list.
4 out of 5 Skulls
PLOT SUMMARY FROM WIKIPEDIA (SPOILERS)
An unseen man climbs the exterior of a sorority house, where a Christmas party is being held, and enters the attic. The house phone rings, and Jess answers to discover it is an obscene phone call from a person who has called before known as “The Moaner”. Jess calls the other sorority girls and they listen as the caller rants, moans, and screams in strange voices. The girls are initially startled by the caller, but a drunken Barb insults the caller; after a moment of bickering, the caller threatens to kill them in sudden low tone.
A younger student, Clare Harrison, suggests that the caller could be a rapist before returning to her bedroom to pack her suitcase. Right when she leaves, Mrs. MacHenry, the housemother arrives and is immediately given a negligee by the girls. As Clare packs her things upstairs, she fails to notice the intruder hiding behind a plastic dress bag; Clare eventually hears the cat meowing from the closet and slowly approaches it, only to be suffocated with a plastic dress bag. As the party wraps up, Clare’s body is carried into the attic and placed into a rocking chair by the attic window.
The following morning, Mr. Harrison arrives to pick up his daughter, but she fails to show. Mrs. MacHenry assumes Clare went to the fraternity house for a party, and helps Mr. Harrison look for her. Later that day, Jess goes to a conservatory her boyfriend, known as Peter, is at and explains to him that she is pregnant and planning to get an abortion. This angers Peter, and he forces her to continue this discussion later that night.
In town, Mr. Harrison, Barb, and Phyl attempt to report Clare as missing to Sergeant Nash, who doesn’t take them seriously. At the police station, they learn that a high school girl, known as Janice Quaife, has also vanished.
After putting a drunken Barb to bed, Mr. Harrison, Chris, Jess, and Phyl help search for the missing girl. Meanwhile, the housemother, Mrs. MacHenry, discovers Clare’s body and the killer throws a crane hook into her face, hanging and killing her. In the park, the missing girl’s disfigured body is found by the police.
Jess answers another obscene phone call and decides to file a report with the police, only for Peter to surprise her. He attempts to persuade her into marriage, but she refuses and reaffirms her decision to have an abortion. Peter leaves angrily while Lieutenant Fuller arrives with a telephone lineman to bug the phone.
Jess stays up to pick up the phone, but leaves when she hears Barb having an asthma attack; Barb claims that she had a nightmare where she saw a man walk into her room. After calming her down, Jess hears Christmas Carolers at the front door and leaves Barb unattended. The killer walks into Barb’s room and stabs her to death with a glass unicorn figurine; her cries for help are drowned out by the caroling.
Jess experiences another unnerving phone call, in which the caller restates her argument with Peter. Lieutenant Fuller calls her to say the attempt to trace the call failed, and theorizes that Peter could be responsible, but Jess doubts this. After Jess and Phyl are spooked by a couple of search party members, they set out and lock up every door and window in the house. Phyl sees Barb’s door close, and goes to check in on her, only for the door to close and to be killed off-screen.
Jess gets one final phone call in which the killer alludes to some sort of transgression between two children named Agnes and Billy. The call is long enough to be traced, and Sergeant Nash instructs Jess to leave the house immediately, as the calls are coming from within the house.
Concerned for Barb and Phyl, she ventures upstairs, where she discovers Barb’s and Phyl’s bodies. Jess sees the killer’s eye through a door crack as he slowly begins to close it on her; she slams the door in his face and runs downstairs. When she discovers the front door is jammed and won’t open, she, terrified, runs away, only for the killer to yank her by the hair and make her fall on the floor. Jess flees into the basement and locks it shut as the killer bangs on it, once she hears footsteps walking away and (presumably) the front door opening, she walks down into the basement.
After exploring for a bit, Jess sees Peter peek through a window and call her name; he breaks a window and enters the basement as he calls her name worriedly. Once Peter finds her, he begins to approach her as she backs away and clutches the fire poker.
The police arrive and hear Jess screaming; they discover her barely conscious in the basement with Peter’s bloody body next to her. Believing that Peter was the killer, they put Jess to bed in her room and leave her alone in the house, with a cop standing outside. The killer’s voice is heard from the attic, implying that he is still alive.
The still-undiscovered bodies of Clare and Mrs. MacHenry are seen through the attic window before the house’s telephone begins to ring, leaving Jess’ fate ambiguous.
