Black Christmas
Director: Bob Clark
Release year: 1974
In the days before the Christmas break, a killer breaks into a sorority house and begins to pick off the girls one by one. The girls are also being plagued by obscene phone calls from someone who calls himself Billy. When a concerned parent involves the police, can they find the killer before he kills again?
This film didn’t do well when it was released and was disparaged by critics, but has gone through a reappraisal in recent years as one of the first slashers, after the Italian giallo films of the early seventies but before Halloween. It is well acted with plenty of heart in how the girls are presented, and funny, knowing the younger audience it’s aiming at. The killer, Billy, is disturbing, the effect made almost entirely by voice as he talks to himself in the attic and to the girls on the house phone. His garbled obscenities got under my skin.
Jess, the girl who lasts to the final scenes, is pregnant by a manipulative boyfriend, Peter. She is clear she wants an abortion, and he won’t listen, the outcome of which leads to the semi-ambiguous ending. Billy speaks to Jess the most on the phone, talking about something terrible he once did to a baby, and one reading of the film is that Jess is being tormented by a patriarchal society for her decision to terminate the pregnancy.
It’s a richly layered film with plenty of political meat on its bones for what could have been a cheap thriller for teens.