#105: Black Christmas
Release Date: December 20th, 1974
Format: Streaming (Tubi)
Written by: Roy Moore
Directed by: Bob Clark
3 Stars
Black Christmas is prescient, but also of its time. It is innovative, but kind of dumb. It’s cinematic, but full of flat characters. It’s good, but not great.
Arguably the first slasher movie ever (if you’re willing to discount the likes of Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre), there are some things that I really liked about Black Christmas. Director Bob Clark (yes, the same Bob Clark who directed A Christmas Story) is clearly inspired here. He employs some beautiful camera movements and creates an excellent sense of space within the house for the viewer.
There are also some tremendous cross-cutting sequences in the film. I loved the scene that cuts between Christmas carolers on the front porch and the killer stabbing Barb to death in the upstairs bedroom, her screams drowned out by the singing. I also loved the scene that cuts between the police at the phone company trying to trace the killer’s location and our main protagonist, Jess, trying to keep the killer on the line long enough to be traced. It’s my favorite scene in the movie. The camera dollying between huge stacks of phone equipment is gorgeous, and juxtaposes nicely with close ups of Jess having to listen to the ravings of a psycho killer on the phone line.
But man, there are some clunky performances in this thing. I typically put that on casting and/or the director, rarely on the performer. Sure, the actors are the ones delivering the performances, but they aren’t the ones behind the camera to see if it’s working or not. And if it’s not working, that’s on the casting director for hiring an actor that’s wrong for the part, or the director who is not effectively communicating and eliciting an effective performance. To put it bluntly, Marian Waldman and Margot Kidder play a couple of drunks (who I believe are intended to be comic relief in the film) and their characters simply don’t work. Their exaggerated performances play against the somewhat gritty realism of the rest of the movie. I understand the need to have some supporting characters in a thriller that bring in some tonal variety and comic relief, but this ain’t it.
On the topic of characters, Black Christmas also lacks a fully realized antagonist. Sure, our faceless killer is creepy on the phone, but he’s just not as entertaining as a Michael or Jason. This is probably the main reason horror lovers return to the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises over and over again, and Black Christmas is more of a one-and-done affair.
So what we have with Black Christmas is a bit of a mixed bag, all the way to the very last scene, which I found both cinematically fun and implausibly dumb.
I think the film’s legacy will always have more to do with its innovative qualities than its actual overall quality as a film. But if your innovative qualities involve the possible creation of an entire film sub-genre, that’s not a bad legacy to have.
