|Finn Odum|
John Carpenter’s Halloween is a cornerstone of the slasher genre. It’s one of the most influential and well known horror franchises, inspiring countless sequels and knock-offs. It’s everywhere in horror culture: The hockey-mask wearing Jason of Friday the 13th is based on Michael Meyers. Halloween appears in Wes Craven’s meta-slasher Scream, when Randy Meeks (Jaime Kennedy) uses it to illustrate the “rules” of slasher movies. Then there’s Trick ‘r Treat, a Halloween-themed anthology featuring a masked killer and plenty of gory imagery. Halloween is an important film in the history of slashers. But it wasn’t the first. We only have Halloween because of a little Canadian movie called Black Christmas, starring a faceless killer stalking sorority sisters just days before they leave for winter break.
Black Christmas helped construct the slasher formula in a manner that hadn’t been seen in the early 1970s. Back then, the only other film close to its format was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was released earlier that year. Though Tobe Hooper’s seminal cannibal flick contributed to what we now know as the slasher genre, Black Christmas was the inception of the serial killer’s home invasion on film. Drawing from “the babysitter” urban legend, Black Christmas’s killer is hidden within the house from the start of the film. He terrorizes the sisters in their place of comfort. There’s something different and terrifying about being stalked in your own home as opposed to outside in the elements. If you can’t feel safe in your house, how can you ever hope to stand your ground against a murderous psychopath out in the world?
Yet, there’s more to the slasher formula than just the home invasion. Similar to the many movies that came after it, Black Christmas’s killer remained unseen for most of the film. Point of view shots establish his gaze and force the audience to watch as he kills his victims in increasingly gruesome ways. This pattern repeats in subsequent slasher films, where the audience becomes a witness to the violence through the eyes of the perpetrator. Black Christmas also includes the prototype for the “final girl” in the character of Jess (Olivia Hussey), whose fate is left up to the audience at the end of the film. The last of her sorority sisters to survive, Jess spends the film running around and beating her ex-boyfriend with a fire poker. Her presence is enough, though, to establish a pattern: the shapeless, faceless killer almost always leaves one victim alive.
Black Christmas was met with mixed reviews upon release, with some criticizing the pointless violence and others lauding the “killer inside the house” twist. Despite its relative cult status, director Bob Clark never went through with making a sequel, despite having an idea or two on how to develop it. In a conversation with John Carpenter, Clark said the sequel would follow the killer as he escaped from an insane asylum and stalked the residents of his former town. Like the original, this movie would take place on another beloved holiday: Halloween.
Even though we’ve circled back to Halloween, that’s not where the Black Christmas influence ends. Point-of-view shots are now a slasher staple; the opening shots of Friday the 13th and Halloween are filmed from the killer’s perspective. The murderers are given little backstory, if any at all, a slasher trope that is often ruined by unneeded sequels or remakes. And who could forget the long string of final girls left behind by faceless killers in countless films. We can thank Bob Clark for Halloween’s Laurie Strode, who inspired the likes of Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Sidney Prescott (Scream), and Valerie Bates (Slumber Party Massacre).
Taking a step away from the vaguely Halloween related influences, Black Christmas started another slasher trend: holiday killers. The genre began with movies like Christmas Evil, To All a Goodnight, and Silent Night, Deadly Night. To All a Goodnight is the closest to the Black Christmas format, while the other two follow killers obsessed with becoming Santa Claus avengers. Branching even further away from Christmas was the Canadian film My Bloody Valentine, a personal favorite that tells the story of a psychotic miner who terrorizes a small town on Valentine’s Day, as the title suggests.
You can trace the influence of Black Christmas beyond early ’80s slasher movies and holiday horrors. Friday the 13th took influence from Halloween while also inspiring the killer campground trend, leading to Sleepaway Camp and, to a larger extent, Evil Dead. Without Evil Dead we wouldn’t have the 2012 meta-horror Cabin in the Woods, one of the best horror movies of the last ten years. For a visual representation, check out the map below.
Compared to Halloween, Black Christmas doesn’t get the credit it deserves. The genre’s formal techniques and conventions owe a lot to this movie’s silent slasher narrative and its point-of -view shots. And let’s not forget that Black Christmas is the movie that reminded audiences that even their homes aren’t safe. There’s always some place you haven’t looked: an attic, a basement, or a closet. When’s the last time you checked your crawl space?
Edited by Michelle Baroody
Black Christmas screens at the Trylon from Friday, December 13 to Sunday, December 15. Purchase advance tickets and learn more about this film and our “Yuletide Horror” series here.