BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

 

Horror movies come with a lot of baggage for women, and the slasher subgenre in particular tends to abide by a formula that consists of sexual(ized) violence and voyeurism as much as it does masked killers wielding oxidized knives. Still, even in such compromised forms, stories of women who endure terror, pain, and bodily harm often resonate with women spectators, as we find catharsis in exaggerated, externalized depictions of the abuse that so many of us endure. Because their relationship to women and marginalized people in general is so often fraught, slasher movies are constantly being reread, reclaimed, and reconsidered, examined for potential nuggets of feminist insight or empowerment.

The beauty of Bob Clarke’s 1974 Black Christmas, unlike so many other unseemly genre movies of its day, is that it doesn’t need to be reinterpreted, because what it offers at face value remains so bone-chillingly accurate: a look at the all-too-real rage of men who desire to control women’s bodies. After Jess (Olivia Hussey) defies her boyfriend, Peter (Keir Dullea), by deciding to have an abortion, she and her sorority sisters are terrorized and slaughtered by an unknown killer. That Black Christmas came only a year after the Roe v. Wade ruling, and that the protections ensuring a woman’s legal right to an abortion are still a heated point of national debate, makes the film all the more potent.

Considered, alongside The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as a forerunner of a soon-to-be-mass-market subgenre, Black Christmas has a radicality and self-awareness that sets it apart. It certainly introduces many of the devices that would become central to the slasher by assuming the perspective of a sickening killer and depicting a group of young college girls jolted by a ringing telephone and preyed upon in an isolated location. But at the same time it’s surprisingly cognizant of the issues that would become endemic to the genre. The menace is not supernatural or fantastical, a psychotic Santa or killer Christmas creature—as it is in other holiday-themed horror movies, like Silent Night, Deadly Night or Krampus—but the force of misogyny exerted by multiple characters. Given the Christian notions of family and patriarchy that so heavily inform the holiday season, the backdrop of snowflakes and mistletoe only lends more resonance to a film that is ultimately about the normalization of violence against women.

Black Christmas is aware of the loaded nature of cinematic perspective, of the unease that comes from knowing you’re an object of surveillance. Later slasher movies set within sorority houses use the location to conveniently gather—that is, sexualize and brutalize—as many women’s bodies as possible for maximum audience titillation. But in Black Christmas, there’s something almost tragic about the sorority house, a place designed specifically for women that’s invaded by a man who yearns to also invade their bodies.

The opening holiday party sequence presents a dichotomy that is central to the film’s depiction of womanhood. We observe a scene of sisterhood as the girls exchange gifts, dress up, and get drunk, enjoying themselves freely in an environment seemingly sealed off from the aggression and cruelty of the outside world. But this place is not truly secure; these women—eventual victims—are being spied upon as the camera aligns with the first-person perspective of the killer. As a woman, and particularly as a trans woman, I find it difficult to exist in the world without feeling like I am constantly being observed. Even in places where I go for refuge, I worry that any sense of safety I achieve might be shattered, that any attempts to feel carefree might be weaponized against me, like the sparkling glass unicorn in the movie that’s used to pierce a girl’s body.

In this sense, Black Christmas is as much a Pakula-esque thriller as it is a horror show, obsessed as it is with communication technologies, telephones, and call-tracing. Unlike many subsequent slasher films that reduced the dynamics of voyeurism to a mere gimmick or MacGuffin, Black Christmas palpably feels like the product of an era in which so many new ways of watching and being watched were emerging. This was the age of Watergate, televised warfare, and the proliferation of home security systems and closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces. More than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Conversation (1974) or an early film by Brian De Palma might be the perfect double-bill partner for Black Christmas.

Yet coexisting with the film’s evocation of perpetual unease is a strange beauty: the falling of snow, the almost Sirkian twinkling of Christmas lights, the ironic crosscutting between the stabbing of human flesh and the singing of a children’s carol. In many ways, these visual contradictions encapsulate my lived experience of womanhood and femininity: moments of fear and helplessness, punctuated by joy, grace, and light.

Courtesy:  Nadine Smith a writer, DJ, and cohost of the podcast Hotbox the Cinema.