Black Christmas Review

Black Christmas review.

Before Halloween defined and popularized the slasher genre, there was Black Christmas. A movie that doesn’t know it’s supposed to play by any rules…because they hadn’t been established yet.

Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.

Black Christmas

Directed by Bob Clark

Written by A. Roy Moore

Starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder and John Saxon

Black Christmas Review

Black Christmas defies classification.  That’s why people are often reluctant to call it a slasher movie.  It would be far easier to just draw a line at John Carpenter’s Halloween as the first slasher film.  It is the movie that popularized the genre.  The term proto-slasher is sometimes thrown around for the movies that came before it that share similar DNA.  That’s always seemed like a fair deal.  Movies like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas all came out years before Halloween.  While they’re not doing exactly what Halloween is doing…pieces of them can be seen in slasher movies to this day. 

What makes Black Christmas so unique is that slasher isn’t the only category it doesn’t quite fit into.  It’s set at Christmas…and it’s in the title…but this isn’t really a holiday horror movie.  Christmas break is the narrative reason for the characters to be isolated within their sorority house.  There’s a Christmas party and carolers at the door…but there’s no killer Santa Claus or past holiday trauma driving the story as is the standard of the type.  It’s also a whodunnit that has no intention of telling you who has, in fact, dunnit.  A murder mystery without a resolution.

Black Christmas gives us an early take on the final girl in Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey).  Keeping with the theme that it doesn’t know the rules to the genre it wasn’t trying to invent…Jess is not only not the virginal archetype…she’s pregnant and wants to have an abortion.  In fact, the first sorority sister to die in the movie is the one that is called out for being a virgin.  It’s interesting to see a movie that predates slasher tropes oppose the main one so strongly.  Had it been made a decade later it would be lauded for upending conventions. 

This is the first movie to introduce the “call is coming from inside the house” trope, however.  It didn’t invent it.  It’s based on an urban legend about a babysitter.  Many movies have used this one.  Most famously five years later in When a Stranger Calls.  Scream would use the convenience of technological advancement 22 years later to expand it to the “calls can be coming from anywhere”.  Black Christmas makes a meal out of their reveal.  Viewers will have caught on to it long before the police do…but that doesn’t stop the film from painstakingly recreating the tracing of the call.

Our killer is named Billy.  That’s what we gather from his heavy breathed odd voices speaking on those phone calls anyway.  The calls are incredibly unsettling for the characters and for the viewers watching them.  We never get a good look at Billy…but we see an outline here and an eyeball there.  It’s an effective way of presenting the threat.  Especially when you foolishly assume he’s being hidden so that he can be revealed later.  Of course, that moment never comes.

The only strong suspect we are given is Jess’s boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea).  He certainly acts like he could be a psychopath.  He wants Jess to have the baby and marry him…both of which she is not amenable to.  That gives him some motivation.  The timeline of the whole thing doesn’t really work…but it doesn’t matter because he ends up dead at Jess’s hand when she assumes he’s the killer.

This makes the open-ended nature of Black Christmas truly crazy.  Jess is left alone in the house, the police assuming Peter was the killer, and all is safe.  We hear Billy still rousting about in the attic and the phone begins to ring again.  We have no idea if Jess survives the night.  If she survives, she will know that she killed her innocent boyfriend and must live with that.  We never find out who Billy is or why any of this is happening. 

Viewing Black Christmas through the eyes of the slasher phenomenon that would follow…it can be a wildly unsatisfying movie.  While it presents some fantastic characters with far more depth and agency than similar films would in the future…it breaks with convention in ways that just feel wrong.  That’s why it’s important to remember that those conventions didn’t exist in 1974.  Black Christmas doesn’t care about answering questions because it doesn’t know that it’s supposed to.  It doesn’t intentionally break with the norm because there was no normal. 

What Black Christmas succeeds at is being a very entertaining movie that would influence countless other films for years to come.  It presents deeper characters than the slasher genre generally offers.  It unsettles in ways that were unique at the time…and stand the test of time to this day.  Whether classified as a slasher, proto-slasher, or whatever bucket you want to put it in…it sits in a special spot in horror history.  It may not reach the very top of the pantheon where Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween live…but it firmly earns its place just below them.  An important film, an influential film…and a lasting film.

Scare Value

Black Christmas can be a kind of maddening experience in a post Halloween (and especially post Scream) world. It exists at a fascinating point in horror history. It’s not trying to set the standard for what slasher movies would become…but it’s retroactively hard to look at it through any other lens. A whodunnit without an answer. A slasher movie without rules. It’s one of a kind.

4.5/5

Black Christmas Links

Streaming on Peacock

Streaming on Shudder

Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu

Rent/Buy on VOD from Amazon

Buy on 4K/Blu-Ray from Amazon

Black Christmas Trailer

If you enjoyed this review of Black Christmas, please check out another classic Christmas horror review: Anna and the Apocalypse