This past week we lost a great actress, Margot Kidder, and so I will use this week’s column to pay tribute via a review of her 1974 film Black Christmas. This is often considered the first of the slasher film genre, although that is debatable considering Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Masssacre also have a claim to that title. That being said, Black Christmas did codify many of the genre tropes, even if it did not create them. Just because a film took an idea from an earlier film, does not mean that the later film cannot innovate on them. Black Christmas most certainly did blend ideas from other horror films, but the way it was done here did create the pattern and formula that all future slasher films would follow. Black Christmas did create one new idea in that it did not reveal the killer’s identity. This is one concept that has not been used in most slasher films since, and remains the film’s strongest point of identity.
Black Christmas was filmed on an extremely low budget and it shows, yet director Bob Clark managed to use the low budget nature to great effect in creating a proper atmosphere. The story would seem clichéd by now, but at the time it was still a new concept, only having been done in foreign horror films. The issues I have are with the acting, as these are not the best performances I have seen. Margot was surprisingly great in her role, as was Olivia Hussey whose performance set the mold for the final girl trope in this kind of movie. but many of the others did not get a chance to show off how good they could be. This is upsetting because the cast was a good one, containing actors and actresses such as Andrea Martin, yet they did not give the best performances that they could have,, Clark’s directing saves what could have been a forgettable early slasher film and instead created a classic.
Black Christmas, while not necessarily the most original film, was certainly one of the most influential. One fan of the film was John Carpenter, who would go on to make Halloween, which is essentially a pseudo follow-up with more of a budget. The slasher genre took its cues from these two films from then on, but mostly left out the idea of not revealing the killer’s identity. To me, that is the scariest part of Black Christmas. We don’t know what Billy looks like, we don’t know anything about him, he just is.
I don’t think this is the best film ever made but it is one that is very much worth watching, if only to see how it influenced later films for good and for bad. If you have time, I suggest giving it a watch and letting yourself wonder who Billy really is.