As if the horror of our daily lives isn’t petrifying enough, fate decides that today is the day to spit out ‘Christmas Horror Movies’ as the running theme of the next thirty-odd days. Cool.
Something I notice right off the bat is that there have been an insane amount of yuletide horror films. There must be something really powerful about the holiday season that really lends itself to creepy, blood-curdling movies about monsters, slashers and various other evil bastards that go ‘ho ho ho!’ in the night. A cursory look at some online articles on the subject indicate that there are many theories on why so many festive horror films exist.
Some seem pretty sure that these movies are so ubiquitous because successful horror actually preys on deep-seated fears that burrow themselves inside us. I mean, for all the comfort and joy and cosy fa la la la la las, the holiday season can also be a seriously horrific, stressful time. Christmas can be the main time of year when we can be left incredibly highly strung from pushing all that stockpiled stress deep down inside ourselves, in the dark hidden corners of our minds. Which is, according to one of my University lecturers, precisely where real horror lives and works its freaky magic on us. Plus, it’s really dark in December and Christmas, with its parties, decorations and religious aspects, is packed with loads of cool imagery just waiting to be chopped, slashed or completely bastardised by dark forces. It’s no accident that there is a heap of movies featuring heinous evil Santas freaking children out and ruining their dreams.
With so much emphasis on being naughty or nice during the holidays, perhaps it’s inevitable that the moviemakers would start to ponder just exactly what sort of punishment the mysterious forces of Christmas might choose to inflict on those who are naughty. Or focus on just how naughty people could be if they decided to just flip out.
Maybe setting bloody scenes of abject terror against the purity of Christmas is a cheap, but very deliberate offence against puritans who take their defence of the holiday’s imagery a little too seriously. Either way, festive fear-fests certainly can be a good laugh and a lot of fun. But how will I fare with a whole month of them?
First up is the genuinely creepy horror classic and one of the earliest examples of the glut of slasher films that petrified audiences of the late seventies and early eighties, 1974’s Black Christmas from director Bob Clark. I'm pleased to report that it’s a nightmare-inducing doozy, a low-budget horror that manages to build a haunting sense of dread while achieving some startling scares. This follows a group of sorority sisters during Winter break, as those who don’t go home for the holidays start to receive lewd, mysterious phone calls. After one of the girls goes missing, it becomes worryingly apparent that a killer is on the loose, though in the most hair-raising twist of all, they have no idea just how close the killer is. SPOILER: He’s in the ruddy attic the whole time!
It’s weird to think of this as being from the same director as A Christmas Story and forgettable family-friendly stuff like The Karate Dog, as it feels so dark and twisted and filled with so much eerie suspense. I consider myself pretty hard to scare, being part of that ‘80s generation weaned on stuff like Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Nightmare on Elm Street, but this one definitely gives me the willies. It’s not so much terrifying, as unnerving – we don’t learn much about the creep stalking these girls and his ambiguity is what makes him so chilling. He’s just a shadow, a voice on the end of the telephone, the best kind of boogeyman – just totally unknowable and bonkers.
Sound is such an important element here, with every creak of the floorboards making the hairs on my neck stand on end – and that’s before we get to the litany of insane voices that the killer makes over the phone. The calls the girls receive aren’t so much ‘prank’ calls as something far darker and more unsettling, lurching from vicious ‘C’ word diatribes to sounding like a crying child to almost sounding like a female. It's babbling, incoherent but very threatening and needs to be heard to be appreciated – it’s marvelously disturbing.
The film isn’t overly festive, with a few decorations here and there to remind us it’s Christmas, but does use the seasonal holiday setting very well as a smart set-up. The campus is mostly deserted, dark and foreboding, the perfect place for a murderer to move around and stash bodies undetected. That’s one of the more horrifically memorable things about this one – poor first victim Clare (Lynne Griffin) is suffocated early on and we know her corpse is up in the attic the entire time, while her pals go about their festive business just a few feet away, completely oblivious. Yikes.
It's a film full of red herrings and cunning misdirects, with plenty of suspects but no easy answers. Barb (Margot Kidder) is clearly an unreliable alcoholic, while housemate Jess (Olivia Hussey) is pregnant and having tense bust-ups with her weirdo concert pianist boyfriend about whether they should keep the baby. Elsewhere, Clare’s dad (James Edmond) is kicking about, trying to solve the mystery of his daughter’s disappearance, without much joy. The biggest kicker is (SPOILER!) we never actually find out who did it, making for a properly bleak ending.
Clark’s picture has frequently been bigged up as a major inspiration for John Carpenter’s Halloween and it’s easy to see why. There are some excellent bravura camera shots, particularly a stunning extended voyeuristic shot from the killer’s point-of-view as he scales then enters the house to set up his first kill. It’s incredibly well-done, very effective and oft-imitated.
It’s a real flesh-crawler of a film, but obviously really dated by today’s standards. There’s a whole lot of business about the cops trying to trace where the eerie phone calls are coming from, which wouldn’t be much of a problem these days, but does build up to a fantastic “oh shit, he's in the house!” moment. The more I think about it, I’m not sure it makes much sense for this loony to have his own phone line up in the attic, but it does lead to some great suspense.
It all makes for some freaky, fun viewing though if I’m being picky, I’d say that it could benefit from some more yuletide-themed kills. Nobody gets strangled by Christmas lights or maimeed by decorations or anything like that, but I guess I don’t mind too much. It’s an oldie, but most certainly a goodie.
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