Black Christmas (1974)

Dir: BOB CLARK
Country: CANADA

aka:
Silent Night, Evil Night

Stranger in the House

In a recent article entitled The Ten Most Overrated Horror Films of All Time I included Bob Clark’s 1974 Canadian proto-slasher film Black Christmas as a footnote. Several people who commented on the piece (and thanks to all those who did) were somewhat surprised by its inclusion. With this in mind I decided to re-watch Black Christmas (once I found a copy, it took me twenty minutes of searching) and see if there was anything worth re-evaluating. My memories were of a visually bland and increasingly hysterical film whose position of prominence came about simply because somebody somewhere remembered this was made before Halloween (1978). There is a temptation to value films that began a cycle, but of course Black Christmas did not begin a cycle. Once again we have a case of retrospective acclaim. At the time of its release it appeared with little fanfare and quickly vanished in the same way. Many of the plot elements of Clark’s film were assimilated into the slasher form, but there is a crucial difference between this and the film that popularised these formal qualities; Halloween. The difference lies in the direction, and even a cursory glance of the respective filmographies of Clark and Carpenter will illustrate that the latter is a better filmmaker. All the ingredients were there for Black Christmas to be the Halloween of 1974 - but it wasn’t. The reason is that it simply wasn’t good enough.



By the time Bob Clark came to direct and produce Black Christmas he was no stranger to the production and distribution imperatives forced on a filmmaker of limited means within the grindhouse/exploitation circuit. His promising debut film Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) was an effective (if somewhat amateurish) satire which used the tropes of the zombie film in order to explore the limitations of the counter-cultural dream. His second feature (and his best horror film in my view) was the underrated and under-seen Death Dream (1974). The zombie was once again utilised as a political metaphor - in this case to explore the anxieties of veterans returning from the Vietnam War. Black Christmas appeared in the same year, showing that Clark (and his frequent collaborator Allan Ormsby) were prolific and important talents in the genre. The direction Clark’s career took in the late 1970’s and beyond can only be considered a disappointment from the standpoint of genre fans.



As alluded too earlier the importance of Black Christmas lies in the number of formal conventions that were unwittingly established. The use of a seasonal holiday in the title became a characteristic of the subgenre. A reliance on POV shots in order to create subjectivity and red herrings, a cast made up of sexually precocious teenagers, the use of off screen space in order to create suspense and tension, and an enigmatic psychopath binding it all together. These are all aspects that are only interesting from an historical perspective, because they quickly became clichés of the form. But the film has some other important qualities that are worth noting. Firstly, rather bravely in my opinion, Clark opts to keep the killer hidden. The psychopath remains shrouded in mystery, an omnipotent, but unknowable presence that permeates every frame with a residue of perverse evil. We are given no motivation for the spate of murders that befall the unfortunate students of a sorority house. At the heart of the film is an enigma that remains to be unravelled.

The only clue to the personality of the psychopath is the obscene vitriol of nuisance telephone calls, or is this just another red herring? Unfortunately these questions and the pace of the film is damaged by a perfunctory and leaden police investigation. However, it is led by evergreen genre stalwart John Saxon, who always enhances any film he acts in. Unfortunately this is the only performance I enjoyed - Olivia Hussey is typically lifeless and bland, Keir Dullea has the animation of a bookcase, and Margot Kidder is her usual grotesque self. My views on the visual style of the film haven’t changed, this is a dismal and dreary looking picture. There is a retrospective case to be argued for this film as an important landmark in the horror genre, but it lacks the inspiration and brilliance required to herald a new cinematic form. It nevertheless deserved a lot better than the feeble remake that crawled up out of the cinematic sewer in 2006.

© Shaun Anderson 2010