Black Christmas  (DVD - 1974)
Director: Bob Clark
Starring: Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Keir Dullea, and Andrea Martin
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"What your mother and I must know is...where did you put the baby? Where did you put Agnes, Billy?"

It is a week before Christmas and the snow on the ground outside is reflecting the green and red of the Christmas lights strung around the window frame and on the eave. I am lying in bed. I just watched Black Christmas. Outside my bedroom door, up on the ceiling, is an entrance to some unexplored attic. I can't take my eyes off of it. Suddenly, the phone rings. I jump. This can't be happening, I think. Then I vow to put the pillow over my face and suffocate myself if I pick up the phone and hear the insane ramblings of someone named Billy.

Well, it turns out that I do indeed have to listen to the insane ramblings of someone named Billy. But it's not the Black Christmas Billy. It is my father, Bill. I've never been so relieved to accept a call from my dad. So I tell him that I just finished watching Black Christmas. "The scariest movie I have ever seen," he tells me. "I had to change my underwear." So I pick his brain for a bit. After all, it takes my mind off the attic door, it ties up the line, and it is useful research for a movie made some years before I even begin changing my own underwear.

Black Christmas was released in 1974 and shot in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Oddly enough, the film was released in October and its title was quickly changed to Stranger In The House, and then again to Silent Night, Evil Night after a re-release. The feeling was that the title Black Christmas would be somewhat analogous with the scores of blaxploitation films of the time. Now, if Shaft or Supafly were hiding out in the attic then a whole other genre of cult films would have been borne, but instead the psycho is white, the sorority girls are white, and, for the most part, the Christmas is white. And this film, directed by Bob Clark (Porky's I and II; A Christmas Story), doesn't star a Melvin Van Peebles, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown, or Pam Grier. It stars the already famous Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet) and Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey) and the soon-to-be-famous Margot Kidder (Superman) and Andrea Martin (SCTV).

Hussey, Kidder, and Martin are sorority sisters - Jess, Barb and Phyl, respectively - of the Phi Kappa Sig in the town of Bedford. They are getting ready to go away skiing for the holiday season when a fellow sister and Mrs. Mac, the housemother, go missing, upsetting the girls' plans and setting everyone in a panic. Except the insolent Barb, of course, who cares more about drinking beer and making off-handed comments to whoever will listen. And during the to-do of the holiday season, missing persons, and Jess's strained relationship with her boyfriend Peter (Dullea) over an unplanned-for pregnancy, the sorority house is victimized by a series of threatening and terrifying phone calls from someone. The phone calls become more frequent and bizarre, not unlike Peter's behavior, and soon enough the police are involved and the suspense builds to a fevered pitch.

Perhaps the one thing that makes this movie so great is the fact that it has stood the test of time. If you haven't seen it then I guarantee you know of it. The first of the seasonal horror films, Black Christmas took a peaceful and loving holiday and turned it into a hellish nightmare using techniques and a storyline that became horror film staples and stuff urban legends were built upon. It doesn't employ any of the kitschy, horror film gore that just seems funny, more than anything else, a decade later. Instead, this film is unique as a stylish thriller, a cult classic, which is one of the first of its kind to utilize point of view camera shots creating a horrifying look into the killer's world. It also mixes intensity, shock, and humor into a delightfully scary formula.

And watching this movie almost 30 years after it was made has its advantages. You get to see just how timeless the horror genre is and just how original and trend setting Black Christmas really is. And I never thought I would say this, but the absence of nudity in this film is a good thing. I thought for sure that with a setting such as a sorority house there would be the odd pillow fight in the pink here or a good ol' fashioned panty raid perhaps (flashbacks of Revenge of the Nerds come flooding back), but really, that would have been to clichéd and out of place. Clark keeps the focus on the horror in this movie without getting bogged down in the sex-for-sex's sake absurdity found in many horror films made in the subsequent years. 

Now, it might be the movie's great open ending that has me sleeping with one eye open, affixed on the attic door, or the fingernails-on-the-chalkboard voice of Billy that I can't get out of my head, but this film will stay with you for a few days after its conclusion, like the way you were scared to take a shower after watching Psycho. But things are good for now. Only 10 more months until the Christmas lights go up again. But the phone could ring at any time.

"Agnes, it's me...Billy."

-Jeff Warren