Warning: this essay that nobody asked for is far too long. Read at your own risk.
Preliminary Matters (Get Out While You Still Can)
If you’ve never seen Bob Clark’s classic holiday romp Black Christmas (1974), then you have my sympathy. I was once like you: naive, drifting aimlessly through life, barely able to see the point in getting out of bed in the morning. Then I watched Black Christmas (1974) and I can honestly say that things have improved drastically ever since. If you are remotely interested in dark comedies, thrillers, horror, and/or Christmas, I urge you to go and watch it (just make sure it is the original one ((Black Christmas (((1974))) and not either of the two((?!)) remakes). This Christmas hero has even put it up for free to watch on YouTube.
But even if you haven’t seen Black Christmas (1974), why not join me for a while as I talk about several things to do with it, especially its treatment of its main characters and villain, and why it has recently become one of my all-time favourites. Have a drink, pull up a chair, wrap some clingfilm around your head, and let’s begin.
How I learned to start being a snob and love horror movies
In the grand tradition of the slasher, I shall first provide some personal backstory. I wonder if you feel the same as I do, that in the course of my life so far, I think I’ve gone through several stages of being a Person Who Has Opinions About Art. These days, my feeling when it comes to almost any work of art (and of course, it isn’t easy to define what is or isn’t art in the first place) is that there is really no objective way to measure its quality, and you’re probably missing the point if you even try, tempting though it usually is. It seems to me that people love and hate the art they do for fundamentally personal and subjective reasons which others will never really fully understand. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy arguing with friends, family, and any stranger who’ll listen about our favourite films, books, music, or whatever – I just rarely take it too seriously these days. It also seems there’s just such a gigantic quantity and variety of art readily available to most people that the idea of being precious about your own tastes would be silly. Surely, the fact someone is reading/listening/watching/caring at all is enough?
But there was a time when I really didn’t think like that; it was one of my more primordial stages. As far as I can remember, my family were always art lovers. My parents raised me and my four siblings on their own favourite works, especially music and films; radios, tapes, CDs were playing constantly, and we were regular cinemagoers. At some point, though – I think when I was around 12 – I began to develop my own tastes. I started to really get into films, music, books, and TV in a way I never had before; these were things that only I liked, and if other people liked them too, well, it couldn’t have been as much as I did. This personalisation of my palate probably coincided with me getting my own iPod, more regular time on our home computer, and eventually, a laptop. The internet in general, and especially iMDB, was definitely a big player. Is iDMB that still a thing? Whatever the reason, suddenly I was getting all snobby about art. The things I loved just seemed to be inherently better. Often I genuinely struggled to understand why everyone didn’t love them as I did, and why they loved their stupid art instead.
It was around this time that I watched John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) for the first time, and loved it very much. I had never really been able to ‘do’ horror much before then; there were enough non-horror films to terrify me as a child that when it came to the proper stuff I was usually content with Googled plot details, glimpsed cover art in Blockbusters and HMV, maybe looking up the trailers on early YouTube (often settling for the 30 Second Bunny Theatre versions), and kid-friendly varieties like Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes.
But Halloween was different. While it did scare me (and some parts still do), what I really remember is being utterly mesmerised by the power of the filmmaking: the economy of the story, the archetypal nature of the characters, the awesome sense of tension and atmosphere, the music, the cinematography – the lighting is still my favourite in any film. It was all just so unlike anything I had seen before – or anything anyone I knew had seen before, for that matter – and to my mind, that made it the best. This was a hell of a discovery: I’d found the best horror film! How often do you get the chance to say you’ve really found the best of anything? I suppose the relatively low quality standards of the genre helped there too, but that was really the key: it was just unlike what I’d seen before.
And man, I hadn’t seen shit!
For years afterwards, I went around making everyone watch Halloween (1978), telling them all about how it was the best horror film ever and how it had invented a whole genre and massively influenced whatever famous modern filmmaker they preferred. Of course I also watched (and loved) a great many other horror films too – but no one was ever quite so sleek, so flawless, so focused on what it set out to do as my favourite. Through my mildly obsessive research, I was dimly aware the film had some connection to Black Christmas (1974) – a film about which I knew almost nothing, except that I thought it had a stupid title which was not as good as Halloween’s title. Somehow, I got it in my head that Halloween (1978) had come first, and that Black Christmas must therefore have been just another of the many holiday-themed horror rip-offs that followed it.
It wasn’t until about a year ago that I discovered I’d had that little tidbit the wrong way round all these years. According to Google, 1974 actually occurred 4 years before 1978! And Google also told me that Black Christmas had been quite an influence on John Carpenter, who directed Halloween, and that his film had actually first come into this world as an idea for a possible sequel to Black Christmas! Imagine my consternation. So, one day, I ate my humble pie and decided to finally watch it.
Black Christmas is way better than Halloween
If you’re still reading this, and also still have not watched Black Christmas (1974), let me just say that you sicken me. But nevertheless, just for you, I will offer a brief summary of the film.
We open on an extended, single-take shot of a large sorority house, framed from the direct point of view of a mysterious man who is breathing very heavily. On my first viewing (not two seconds into the film), it was this moment that I realised I had fucked up when I’d told all those people Halloween was breaking new ground when it started its famous opening sequence in almost the exact same way. Suffice it to say my attention was grabbed. We watch as the man breaks into the house and takes up residence in the attic, spying on its inhabitants, who are in the middle of party to celebrate the start of the Christmas break. Before too long, the man decides to sneak out of the attic, hide in one of the girls’ rooms, and commence a spree of murders. At the same time, the girls are being harassed by an obscene phone caller, who we eventually learn is calling from inside the house. Here is a neat compilation of some of the calls.
And that’s pretty much it. The man hides, he calls, he stalks, he kills, he hides again. As this plays out, we learn more about the lives of the girls in the sorority and the inhabitants of the town at large – just enough to make us care when their time comes to meet the man in the attic. There are many wonderful things about Black Christmas: again, the cinematography is really creative, the story is paced extremely well, there are many memorable characters who are actually given distinct personalities and depth, there’s an infectious sense of humour in the air, there’s a pro-choice storyline that is handled shockingly well (just a year after the Roe v. Wade ruling), and a generally strong feminist theme to the whole thing that neither of the modern remakes managed to do anything with – a point I will come back to later.
But the character of the killer is easily its most unique feature. This character – this thing – Billy, he is called – never actually appears on screen. Instead, he is presented entirely through his POV sequences and those demented phone calls; we experience him so intimately, yet at such a distance. The most we ever get in terms of a visual is a few fleeting glimpses of his leering eyeball, and when we do, it feels like we are seeing something incredibly taboo. Billy is not meant to be seen. I don’t even like calling him Billy; in the script, he’s The Caller, or The Moaner – just a voice, and barely even that, just a bunch of horrific sounds: the horrific shrieks, snorts, shouts, fractured raving and rambling provided by multiple different actors, including the film’s director. This character exists almost purely as noise and action, but somehow, he is all the richer for it.
You see, this is far from a ‘shark from Jaws’ kind of game, where the filmmakers are teasing out information in ever-less-subtle bursts in order to build up our curiosity for a big reveal later. There is absolutely nothing subtle about Billy. In the spirit of all prank callers, he wants attention most of all, controlling the focus of the entire film with an iron fist, demanding, begging to be noticed. He even throws a childlike tantrum in one scene when a character set up to be his next victim just gets into a cab and leaves instead, as if not knowing this is Billy’s movie. The screenplay’s original title was Stop Me! after a quote from one of his calls in which he seems to ask desperately for help, giving the impression of the whole story being one big plea (or a challenge) from him to us. Crucially, as the film moves there is also no significant buildup of information on its killer; all the concrete facts we will ever receive about Billy are delivered in the movie’s very first two scenes, i.e. that he is angry, dangerous, and hiding in the attic. There are perhaps clues in some of his more decipherable lines of dialogue, but these provide no answers, only more questions; he rants about a baby named Agnes, a mother and father, rabbits, pigs, and most of all, himself (we assume).
One of my favourite lines in the film comes during the first call, when Clare, listening, asks “Can that be one person?” – and we are just as uncertain as the girls are. Indeed, the questions of who Billy is, what he has done, and what he will do recur throughout the film as pure red herrings, keeping us guessing all the way up to the end credits. Perhaps you think he has a sexual motive? Nope; aside from that first, very explicit call, he never again makes any references to sex, and acts mainly like a small child. Perhaps he kills Clare because he seeks to prey on innocent young women? Nope; his next victim is the two-faced, middle-aged, alcoholic Mrs. Mac. Was he the one responsible for the little girl’s body discovered in the park around the movie’s midpoint? Ask again later. Was he actually Jessica’s overly possessive boyfriend Peter all along? Well, there is plenty to suggest as much, but by the story’s end, Peter is dead but someone is still calling. Just how can he do all those voices? Where do they all come from? What’s the story with Agnes? What did he do that to make mommy and daddy so mad? Why in God’s name is he here? Can that really be one person?
Like detectives, we are given plenty of evidence, an abundance, even, but it is all too chaotic and disparate to form a clear picture. The horror comes less from a lack of information relating to the character, but the difficulty of interpreting the information that’s there. We are left completely uncertain of his nature, his motives, his intelligence, his identity, and even which actions he is or is not guilty of. In this way Billy is so totally unlike a standard fictional character that the audience is simply confounded. He becomes an unknown quantity, and therefore endlessly intriguing, as well as totally unpredictable on a plot level. The viewer is left in precisely the same situation as the other characters are – another of his victims, in a way – only we know he’s in the house, right upstairs, just watching, and waiting. Again, a more conventional film would have had the big reveal at the climax, when Jess finally discovers his presence in the house and tries to get away. Instead, Billy just does exactly what he always does: bellows nonsense at the top of his lungs while the camera points at everything else around him. In this moment, we finally realise that there is no reveal; there is nothing else for us to see, only pure, hysterical, male aggression.
This all adds up to a kind of characterisation that could be described as breadth over depth, an approach which serves two purposes in the film’s favour. Firstly, there is the pure aesthetic creepiness inherent to the POV shots and the sound design of the phone calls (maybe the most upsetting of its kind in any horror film) being all we see; these aspects are just flat-out thrilling in and of themselves. I got to see the film in the cinema recently, and every time Billy was doing anything, the theatre was completely silent. It’s just good, clean horror, and uniquely memorable in its minimalism.
But I’d argue there’s a much more significant effect at play too. Billy’s characterisation is a work of abstraction, not only in the sense that it is not trying to realistically represent an actual kind of person (in real life, the vast majority of dangerous and malevolent people are not ultra-stealthy, raving, nonsense-spouting lunatics) but in the sense that any fictional character can be said to actively represent specific ideas and themes within a text. Apart from being disturbing on a visceral level, the presentation of a male serial killer of women as primarily a disembodied telephone voice with no backstory, identity, or personality and an abundance of rage, despair, and aggression actually serves to make a point about the kind of real-world violent misogyny the character and story are symbolising. Just like Billy, real-world violent misogyny is hidden, yet ever-present; it is noisy, yet incoherent; it is immature, childish even, yet deeply corrupt; it is all too often enabled by the distancing of modern technology, like phones and computers; it creeps into our most intimate spaces, sometimes without us even realising; and although we know it intimately, perhaps even through our very own POV shots, we are terrified that, ultimately, we cannot ever possibly hope to rationally explain it.
Incidentally, the work of Billy’s primary voice actor, Nick Mancuso, here reminds me of some of the excesses of certain performances by actors in David Lynch films. Villains in Lynch’s work are often characterised by what you could call hamminess: copious yelling, screaming, laughing, and cursing in extremely over-the-top and campy ways to the point that their absurdity becomes frightening. In fact, Frank Booth in Blue Velvet also hates women, and speaks in multiple voices, including a ‘baby’ voice, just like Billy. Note to self: start telling everyone Blue Velvet is a rip-off of Black Christmas.
Why can’t they all be like this?
All of which serves to make Billy, to my mind, a perfectly executed character, an undeniably strong antagonist, and a highly distinct one, especially when compared with the typical slasher movie killer, who is almost his exact opposite: silent, devoid of emotion, and lush with backstory. Most slasher films (and horror stories in general) tend to be largely plotted around the mystery of the villain’s origin, identity, and/or rationale. That trend probably began mostly for the purposes of story economy – we came here to see the bad guy kill people, so that ought to be the focus – but it has had the perhaps unintentional result of making the villain often the most interesting and developed character in the film. One proof of this is that horror sequels are almost always about the return of the original film’s villain, and usually have a whole new cast of protagonists; the inverse of the regular sequel formula.
I’m not sure exactly why that type of villain became the standard for slasher movies. I guess there is a visceral thrill to the silent, unknown intruder standing in the corner of the room. In terms of having an antagonist that is more of a quiet, creeping aggressor than a fully fledged person – a largely visual, or physical antagonist, you could say – you can draw a line all the way from silent horror like Nosferatu (1922) through Universal monster movies like Frankenstein (1931) to sci-fi horror like The Thing From Another World (1951) up to big-budget creature features like Jaws (1975) before finally landing on Jason Voorhees and all his 80s ilk. Even Freddy Krueger was a quieter, largely visual presence in his first outing before he became a hilarious, wise-cracking bad boy. From a filmmaking perspective, too, this approach also means that you only need to hire a big stuntman, put a mask on him, and not write him any dialogue instead of coming up with an actual character or dramatic performance.
(I would be remiss not to also mention The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ((1974)), which was actually released in theatres on the very same day as Black Christmas((!)), and whose Leatherface was clearly a pioneer of the speechless, masked thug archetype I’m talking about. However, I would argue he is a somewhat exceptional case, in that that film actually has a collective group of villains – the cannibalistic Sawyer family – of which Leatherface is simply the most iconic member. In terms of his role in the story, I see him as being more the equivalent of, say, the T-Rex from Jurassic Park than a Jason or a Freddy – though the sequels and remakes definitely pushed him more into the usual slasher villain mold.)
With all that said, though, I’m sure most would agree that the true daddy of the slasher movie killer, the one who birthed the archetype that came to dominate the entire genre, is, of course, Halloween’s Michael Aloysius Myers (middle name speculative).
Everybody Loves Michael
I do wonder whether John Carpenter, if he was indeed influenced by Black Christmas, consciously decided to make Myers an almost perfect inversion of Billy. It sure seems like it to me. Billy’s backstory is a mystery; Myers’s is a well-known case study, a minor tabloid legend. Billy is so very, very noisy; Myers is ghostly silent. Billy has an excess of emotion, personality, and voice; Myers has none. Billy is invisible; all Michael Myers does is make himself visible to us. Practically every single scare in Halloween comes from the camera alerting us to Myers’s presence before the characters themselves have noticed it. The horror is in his inevitable presence, the certain doom he represents; his dreadful predictability.
I know Dr. Loomis’ whole spiel is that Myers is just pure evil and has no explanation, but I personally consider that to be one part of the film which doesn’t quite land, partly because Loomis himself comes off as pretty unhinged and obsessive, which I am not sure was intentional, but also because, whether intentional or not, the film’s opening POV shot does serve as an explanation of Myers; explanation enough, anyway, and a lot more than Billy ever gets. For one thing, it tells us he is obviously motivated by some kind of compulsive obsession with his sister, which remains clear throughout the film. Most significant, though, is the fact that when the POV sequence ends, and we close up on that little boy’s face, his face is explicitly not cold and empty. Carpenter could have easily directed it that way, but he didn’t; it’s the face of a child, confused and upset, like any child would be in such circumstances. In that moment, we have to sympathise with Myers; I think Carpenter wants us to. Maybe this was just to keep us guessing as to the extent of his evil, and the specifics of his reasons for returning to Haddonfield – but nevertheless, for the rest of the film, the image of that scared little boy hangs over the character’s every scene and informs his every move.
And even if we weren’t ever shown his backstory, the entire movie serves to make us empathise with Myers – empathy not being the same thing as sympathy. I would actually argue that he is Halloween’s real protagonist. We follow him around, witness his stalking of the girls, and see him slowly orchestrate his murders, all from his point of view. It is his goals and rationale that the film is concerned with, his perspective that we take, and in a way, doesn’t his silent, faceless anonymity ironically make him more relatable? He’s like the Master Chief from Halo, or any other number of blank slate-style protagonists who the audience is invited to project themselves onto. What’s more is that there aren’t really any other strong candidates for the role. Laurie is a likable character, but she literally just sits around until the climax. That still works in terms of her story, because it makes her successful escape and survival even more of a powerful contrast, but she just doesn’t do much for the first 75% or so of the runtime. Loomis, meanwhile, after a very strong start, ultimately spends the majority of the story’s action hiding in a bush.
The reason this all works anyway is precisley because it is Michael’s story. His strength as a protagonist in that first film is likely the key cause of his enduring popularity, and his unique position among slasher villains of having basically maintained his status as a serious threat over the decades. Unlike most of his contemporaries, with Myers there is a sense that, although the films became sillier over time, the character never did – and although I was not personally very impressed with it, the 2018 Halloween is literally the sole example of a genuinely successful slasher reboot. Even the Rob Zombie remakes were more successful than, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) or Child’s Play (2019). Audiences just really like Michael Myers, even if they don’t ‘like’ him in a sympathetic sense, and I think it all comes down to the empathy afforded to him by his first story.
Which brings me, finally, to what I nowadays consider to be a pretty serious issue with Halloween (1978), which has, for this once-proud fan at least, ultimately proven to be a pedestal-destroying flaw: doesn’t Myers’s general dominance and strength as a character sort of contradict the core point the story is trying to make?
Halloween Schmalloween
To the extent that this movie means anything – and I think it does – Halloween seems to want to be a straightforward morality tale: the boogeyman versus the babysitter. Everything I’ve read of Carpenter’s thoughts on the character reflect this narrative, that is he is pure evil, a force of nature, a near-supernatural monster with no soul, and so on. This feels most true in the climax of the film, when Laurie finally does turn into the protagonist, and Myers turns into an unkillable phantom who is able to disappear and appear at will. It is a thrilling and iconic ending, but when you think about it, it just doesn’t square with Myers’s treatment throughout the rest of the movie. Because we know he isn’t really a boogeyman. We know he’s just a really resourceful and patient human, because we see him carry out all his plans and manipulations; we even see where he gets his clothes, his mask, his weapon from. We see the effort he goes to in stalking his victims, rather than teleporting like a ghost. In fact we even know that, beneath it all, he is a disturbed and confused little boy; it is the very first thing we are shown, and quite unforgettable. So is he an abstract monster or a fundamentally human protagonist? Perhaps Carpenter just wanted to have his cake and eat it too. I think you just can’t have a protagonist who is nothing but pure destructive force; imagine if Jaws was about the shark in the same way that Halloween is about Michael Myers. It would be shit! What would we have to latch onto?
See, I think I was always a little too enchanted by the brilliant, more technical aspects of Halloween’s filmmaking to pay enough attention to the issues with its story and characters (something also likely facilitated by the fact that, for one reason or another, I probably already knew the basic story beats of the film before I first watched it). But for more casual viewers, especially those not very interested in filmmaking or very invested in horror, these can present real obstacles to their engagement with the film.
One example is the characters of Annie and Lynda. These characters are, frankly, terrible. They each have a couple of endearing moments, but are basically your cardboard-cutout, stereotypical, vapid teenage girls. They talk to each other almost exclusively about boys, and are generally like, totally not very well-written or acted. And unlike Laurie or Loomis, they haven’t the slightest personal connection to Myers. So, for those casual viewers not busy geeking out over the blocking, the lighting, the iconicness and prestige of it all, that big chunk in the middle of the film where Myers is stalking and murdering Annie and Lynda (comprising about ⅓ of the runtime) is actually quite boring. In terms of where our sympathies, attention, and interests lie, we are just rooting for Myers to kill them already, precisely due to how his character is presented. But in the internal moral logic of the story, we aren’t actually meant to be rooting for him; he is meant to be pure evil, and Loomis and Laurie are our heroes. In this sense, there isn’t a lot of thematic coherence to this section of the film at all, which is to say the audience is being told one thing and made to feel another.
Some might argue the presentation of those characters is intended to be ironic or satirical, like some kind of comment on the youth of 1978 being superficial or amoral, but I don’t think so. There’s an edge of comic relief to Lynda especially, but it doesn’t seem to go deeper than that. It really does just embody that cliche impression that people often have of slasher films, and often rightfully, as consisting entirely of meaningless, yet highly gendered violence being inflicted upon paper-thin characters. The film is shot beautifully, feels very suspenseful, has a strong and memorable character in Michael Myers, and at the end of the day, it very much achieves its primary goal of being spooky. But can you really blame a viewer who finds themselves asking, as I have recently, and particularly after viewing Black Christmas (1974)… what exactly is the point of this?
When showing the film to others over the years, these were always some of the most common critcisms. For a long time, I didn’t get it. But…
Black Christmas cares about you. It cares about everybody
It is my professional opinion that Black Christmas (1974) avoids each and every one of the problems Halloween falls prey to through its characterisation of both Billy and his victims. With Billy, I hope I have already demonstrated his unique effectiveness as an antagonist. Now we can talk about the film’s other characters, particularly Jessica, Clare, Barb, and Mrs. Mac.
I just cannot overstate how much these guys blow Lynda, Annie, whatever Lynda’s boyfriend’s name is, and even Laurie Strode out of the water. Again, I really do urge you to watch the film if you think I’m being at all blasphemous, or watch it again if you’ve seen it already. Right from their introductions, we are can see the film is going to take even its most minor characters seriously and treat them as actual people. We learn that each girl not only has their own dynamic within the wider sorority group, but also an internal complexity that is distinct from their social role – and by the way, what a great idea to set the action all in one house for maximum efficiency! Barb is snarky and brash, but also funny and fearless, and the others clearly admire her for it; yet she also seems to be masking a certain unhappiness, maybe even a budding drinking problem. Clare’s first appearance has her passionately kissing her hot stud of a boyfriend goodbye, yet right afterwards we see that around the others she is mousey, and cautious; we even get some dramatic irony when Barb calls her a “professional virgin”. This contrast is emphasised again later when we see her room is decorated with hilarious and raunchy countercultural posters which surprise her (adorable) conservative father. Mrs. Mac, meanwhile, appears at first to be every bit the jovial sorority housemother, maternal and beloved by her girls, but she soon reveals herself to be barely hiding a her alcoholism and coarse, embittered nature.
I’m not saying these are the greatest characters in cinema history, but by utilising simple contrasts like these, some delivered in the space of just a few seconds, the filmmakers do an excellent job of creating the impression of depth. Real human beings are bundles of contradiction; each of us is so much more than meets the eye, and the best fictional characters work the same way. It only takes a couple of tiny details to make these people feel like they are real, that they matter, and in a horror film this is absolutely vital, becasue what is the point in killing off a character who never seemed alive in the first place? The movie even takes the time to deepen Peter, probably its least sympathetic character aside from Billy; when he is distraught over Jess wanting to have an abortion, we are not just told it through dialogue, we actually see him nervously mess up his crucial piano recital; we take in the sweat on his brow, every incorrect note, every scolding look from his examiners. No character is purely one-dimensional, and that makes the horror so much more severe.
Overall, Black Christmas is perhaps the only slasher film that actually seems concerned with the long-term consequences of its violence on its characters’ world. When Clare goes missing, her father and boyfriend spend the rest of the film trying to find out what happened to her. The townsfolk even band together to search the park, and when they instead find the body of a murdered little girl, we linger on their horrified reactions. Later, volunteer search parties patrol the neighbourhood looking for the killer, just like actual people would. Relevant too is the unusually extensive focus the film places on the police investigation, their efforts to tap the phone lines, and so on. And the girls in the house are always shown to love and take care of one another, even when they disagree or don’t get along.
Compare all this to Halloween, where so many similar opportunities to create moments of depth are missed. As a setting, Haddonfield feels almost empty aside from the main characters. Sheriff Brackett is introduced early on as Annie’s father, only for it to never end up mattering at all. He never even seems to find out she’s dead! Black Christmas manages to fit in an entire subplot about Clare’s father dealing with her disappearance, and far from being a distraction or deviation from the slasher material we came to see, it actually complements and enhances it.
Apart from helping the film’s setting feel more immersive and lived in, this attention to detail and worldbuilding additionally serves as a kind of added characterisation for Billy in a couple of ways too. Firstly, the very fact that the world feels so grounded and warm emphasises our sense that he is a trespasser within it, a surreal, wrong presence in the house and the film itself. But even more importantly, it provides him with so much more power in the story, because the audience actually values what he threatens to destroy. All those shots of Clare’s body in the attic window would be so much less disturbing if nobody seemed to care she was gone. The fact that the police pursue the case so diligently makes it all the more tragic when, in the end, they all fail to realise they have got the wrong man – and likewise for the concerned townsfolk. The fact the story ultimately concludes in almost exactly the same place that it begins comes as such an incredible gut punch precisely because we have come to invest so much in someone, anyone stopping the killer, understanding him, unmasking him, only to realise that in the end, none of it mattered. He’s still up there. He’s still calling. He won’t ever stop.
Looking at the symbolism, this is, again, perfect: Billy is undying, unknowable potential; the constant threat of male violence. This contributes to the film’s themes of sexism and sexual revolution, which are expertly woven throughout other plot and character moments in a display of efficiency and economy that I find postively gorgeous. In my book, no scene, shot, or line of dialogue should ever be doing only one thing if it could be doing do two things, or three things, or four things at once. Clare’s father for example is not only a concerned parent for us to sympathise with and hammer home the weight of the violence, but also a stuffy old man type who can clash against the sexually liberated sorority culture (especially Barb) and highlight those themes. The incompetent, condescending police officer Nash indirectly causes several deaths with his dismissive attitudes towards the girls, again playing into the themes of sexism – but he also provides necessary comic relief at times, and his character is crucial to the plot’s climax. There’s the random doctor at the end who decides that Jess needs a massive sedative for some reason, indirectly sealing her fate so that she ends up (probably) literally killed due to the sexism of an ignorant male authority figure, a neat bit of thematic and semiotic coherence if there ever was one. And I have already mentioned how the characterisation of Barb, Clare, and Mrs. Mac all work by upending our first impressions and subverting classic female stereotypes.
It doesn’t matter, incidentally, how you feel about the social politics of these themes. The fact is, the film has themes, and it expresses those themes in a highly efficient, focused, and artful way, as a direct result of the choices made in its approach to characterisation and presentation. I just don’t think the same can be said for Halloween.
The themes seen in Black Christmas are also the reason why Jess is such a perfect protagonist for the story. She has to deal with two problems: an unwanted pregnancy with her clingy boyfriend (who insists she keep it and marry him) and an obscene phone caller/murderer who is secretly hiding in her attic. Similarly to Laurie Strode, her deserving status as the main protagonist sort of creeps up on you; she initially receives probably the least explicit characterisation of all the girls, but as both of her parallel stories progress, we gradually learn from her actions that she is extremely decisive, courageous, and sure of herself, as well as being a caring and devoted friend. In the pregnancy story, we understand she is at a crossroads in her life; she knows she wants more, while Peter only wants to confine and control her. In response, she is reasonable, patient, and gentle with him, but he gives back nothing but petulance and disrespect. So, she rejects him without looking back.
Meanwhile, she voluntarily indulges Billy’s nightmarish phone calls in order to help the investigators track him down and try to get justice for her friends. Incidentally, it is at this point in the story that Billy really starts to lay it on thick with the references to baby Agnes, with whom he clearly did something terrible, and brings the two stories together when he directly mocks Jess’s decision to get an abortion, using the same words Peter used in their argument: “Just like having a wart removed!”. At the climax, the two coalesce fully in the chilling image of Peter searching the house for Jess, his appearance and voice distorted to resemble Billy’s behind the glass of the basement window, and in this awful, clarifying moment, we realise that they really are one and the same. There truly is no difference between the psychotic, hiding stranger and the patronising, possessive boyfriend, no difference between story A and story B. It’s the same story; the story the film is really telling. And the point of Black Christmas, because it does have a point, a very definite point which every single part of the film is working towards, becomes vibrantly clear.
Yeah but why even horror at all though?
Horror films are expressions of our fears and anxieties. They are cultural signposts and emotional outlets. That is a good thing. I mentioned earlier that slashers in particular infamously tend to have a heavily gendered element to them, wherein young, sexually active women are preyed on by a male killer. On one level, that is very obviously a product of institutional sexism, restrictive cultural attitudes towards women’s sexuality, and the deeply rooted hypocrisy involved in both (as well as a litany of other reasons that I have neither the space nor the expertise to get into further). I’ve liked horror films for a long time, particularly in my adolescence and young adulthood, but until relatively recently I had never really questioned that trope before. Part of that is because I’m a man, who almost never directly experiences sexism or sexual violence. I was also born in 1996, in a thoroughly post-slasher world, the same year that Scream deconstructed and revitalised the whole genre; it was already all so normal, so canonised and entrenched by the time I showed up.
But the fact is, that trope, I really hate it. It’s so bad. It’s so stupid, ugly, and wrong on every level, not the least of which is that it produces art that is at best pointless, and at worst, an active obstacle to the fight against sexual inequality and all its many, many associated injustices. Really, I think it needs to stop. I think you can make fun, thrilling, memorable, even deeply meaningful slasher films without leaning on that trope; Black Christmas proved that in 1974 before the genre even truly existed. And it manages to do it while also being extremely well-acted, well-directed, and all the rest. And it was made in 1974. Maybe its relative progressiveness has got something to do with the fact it was a Canadian production, made outside of the Hollywood machine and the whole Los Angeles scene which we all know is rife with sexism, abuse, and corruption. But I don’t know. It was probably just some minor miracle. At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to empathy, for both your characters and your audience. Often, they are really the same thing.
And on a personal note, becoming cognizant of the ways in which my beloved Halloween indulges in that trope has certainly made me think twice before recommending it without qualification to everyone I can. It has also contributed to my present belief that no film will ever be ‘the best’, and that my tastes are just that: mine, constantly developing, and necessarily a product of the time, place, and perspective I inhabit. The same is true for everyone. It would have been so easy for me to have just stopped at Halloween. At one point, I was perfectly content to do so, because I thought I’d found something perfect. I still love many things about that movie; there’s something to love about every film, and every work of art. But the idea of never having experienced what I see as a genuine masterpiece like Black Christmas because of one stupid assumption from a Wikipedia article misread years earlier fills me with despair. I hope that I never again run the risk of missing out on a new piece of art to love and learn from because of my own nonsensical notions of what is and isn’t worthy of attention.
And so I learnt a lot when I first watched Black Christmas – the first viewing of many. I’ll probably make it an annual event for the foreseeable, and I suggest you do the same. If you stuck with me through this whole thing, then you have my most sincere thanks, appreciation, and a mild sense of concern for your priorities in life. I hope that at the very least it made you want to watch the movie. And now, in return, I grant you your freedom. Go. Go outside. Go for a walk. Go talk to a human. Tell them about what happened here. And most of all, tell them to watch Black Christmas (1974)!!!
~ GDH
