Some spoilers below. These are kept sparse but proved helpful in putting this film in context for the
post-slasher audience.
Bob Clark's Ur slasher has had its profile raised since the '90s. DVD blew the film of dust from a wealth of retro titles and Black Christmas was rediscovered and heralded as a source point for the sub-genre. Clark had a couple of things on his side from the get go: he was very good at atmospherics and he had no idea he was inventing the teen slasher so had no rules to observe. It's that last one that really gets the new fans engaged because it makes this old movie feel fresher than any of the '80s copycats of Halloween. You won't see any masks or signature weapons here and there are no teen sex scenes to mistake a killer's morality for a movie's.
This can also work against it for a modern audience as it will feel a lot slower than expectations. The kills are there but not piled on. That the kill scenes are left undiscovered for considerable screen time and there is, at first, an unclear connection between the acts and the bizarre phone calls adds to the overall sense of dread in a slowburn rather than a crescendo of action. The citizen search party and what it finds blends into the dark winter atmosphere, itself thickened by the weariness of the scenes at the police station (John Saxon delivering a solid performance as a burdened sheriff). It's not a murder fest, more of a plagued house where youth has gone to be slaughtered.
The killer identifies himself as Billy (often whispering his name in the third person and often that in a voice like Mrs Bates from Psycho) but we see very little of him, unlike the gleefully visible baddies of Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels. He emerges from hiding places to kill with whatever is to hand, a plastic sheet, a glass figurine, a hook. Although you can piece one together from the phone calls, he appears without a backstory, he is just, in the old money, crazy and homicidal (remember, too, that not only slasher as a cinematic term had yet to be coined but "serial killer" wouldn't be in the common parlance for another decade) death bringer. His in-house phone usage (subject of some engaging practical exchange scenes) predates the big line from 1980's When a Stranger Calls and forms a terrifying plot development. The monster is in the house.
It was only in the last viewing for this blog that I realised where the brooding music came from. There's a kind of growling resonance to many of the scenes and at first it sounds electronic or at least electronically manipulated. The film itself tells you what it is in a scene in which Peter, after a tense and failed practical exam, attacks a grand piano with a stool. Every time he hits it the strings resonate with that very growl. Turn the volume down, remove the identifying transients (i.e. beginning of the notes) and bury it in reverb and you have an effect of atmosphere building that is both music and non-music. The only other music comes from the carol singers in the streets. There is no formal music score at all. As the forerunner of a genre that gloried in its effective music, this is a fascinating detail. Again, Clark had few rules to follow and worked, like his killer character, with what he found.
The cast of mostly young women are given an almost documentary naturalism to work with and it heightens the dread as they come across as real rather than eminently killable brats. The closest to that later stereotype is Margot Kidder's Barb, the sassy wisecracking drunk among the sorority who, alone, confronts the caller in an early scene, pranks the desk cop with a saucy alpha numeric phone number, and dies, unironically, in an ugly attack while sleeping. Mention must be made of Kier Dullea here. The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey plays Peter with an intensity rapidly burning out. He is so frighteningly convincing as the soon to be problematic ex that his role should come with a content warning. The final girl is the luminous Olivia Hussey, British, petite and happily sexually experienced to the point of getting pregnant and deciding against going to term. If there was ever a final girl who defied the stereotype it is she. Again, this was before the genre rules imposed by the Committee for Slasher Movies came into effect but it does illustrate something that I will again say in the words of podcaster Alex West (Faculty of Horror): the film is rad, it's the killer who's conservative!
Black Christmas joins Clark's best (along with Deathdream, Murder by Decree and A Christmas Story) in that it adds fresh features to established story types. It was not considered a slasher at the time but a dark and brooding murder mystery with a troublingly unhinged perp. Where precursors Peeping Tom's Mark and Psycho's Norman had the kind of definition that allowed them to be scary but kept that within bounds, Billy has nothing like that. The appearance of his eye seen in the gap between a door and its jamb strikes real fear: he might kill you just for looking.
While the film's legacy is complicated by the birth of the generic slasher a few years later with Halloween, so that when stories of similar setting like The House on Sorority Row and Slumber Party Massacre (and even later with Scream 2) they took more from their immediate genre-mates than this origin tale. Nevertheless, the wood panelling and natural fibre mise en scene that seems to recreate the ads from glossy magazines of the time containing such brutality works effectively in a way that has not been achieved by its descendants. It sits best as its own thing, something to reach for after all the things it engendered are finished with, as an innovation of opportunity.
Viewing notes: I most recently watched this on the Shout Factory 4K edition which presents the grainy old photography in sumptuous Dolby Vision splendour. There are no local physical media versions. However, it's free (with ads) on Tubi.
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