Black Christmas vs Halloween
The decorations are up, the tree is trimmed, and the presents are all bought and wrapped. Offices have been gradually emptying over the past week as people drift away for the holiday period. Secret Santas and Christmas parties have come and gone. On Christmas Eve, the pubs in town fill with revellers, determined to make the last night out before the Big Day a large one.
A hush descends on the back streets and estates. There is hardly a soul about and lights glow softly through drawn curtains as people settle down for the long haul of repeats, movies, and Christmas specials on the telly. It’s all over bar the unwrapping and eating, so it is time to finally draw a breath, have a drink, and crack open that big tin of Quality Street. Despite all the mandatory merriness, however, some will feel a tinge of melancholy. Another year is almost over; memories of loved ones no longer with us; maybe a sense of sadness that Christmas doesn’t feel so special now the kids in the family are getting older.
This is the atmosphere captured at the beginning of Black Christmas, Bob Clark’s sombre Canadian shocker that pierces the plastic good cheer of the season and finds it not only hollow, but a dark place where murderous insanity may hide unseen and unchecked.
The film opens on a wintry night as the young women of a sorority house are having their boyfriends over for a Christmas party. A chill wind blows through the film from the start, and the fairy lights only just hold back the inky darkness of deepest winter. On the fringes of this fragile oasis of conviviality and warmth lurks a heavy-breathing man peering in at the girls. Clark wastes no time thrusting us into the Killer POV for which Black Christmas is most famous – the technique had appeared in movies before (such as The Spiral Staircase, 1946), but Clark’s film popularised it as a horror trope and set the benchmark for the entire slasher genre.
The unseen figure isn’t just a peeper, however. He scales a trellis and enters an open window into the attic, which will serve as his base of operations for the rest of the film. The effect was achieved by camera operator Bert Dunk jerry-rigging a harness so he could perform the climb himself – that’s his shadows and hands you see onscreen.
Now we’re inside the house, we head downstairs to meet the students in more detail. Chief among them are level-headed Jessica Bradford (Olivia Hussey), who has recently found out she is pregnant; Barb (Margot Kidder), a hard-nosed city girl who masks her vulnerability with drunken outrageousness; sensible and good-natured Phyl (Andrea Martin); and Clare (Lynn Griffin), a younger and somewhat more naive sorority sister.
The phone rings and it is “the Moaner,” an obscene caller who has evidently been harassing the girls. He sounds truly deranged, snorting, hollering, squealing like a pig, and spitting profanities. It took me by surprise when I first saw the film how quickly we get to the c-word, and it really slaps – I just wasn’t expecting it in a movie almost half a century old. As he rants and raves, the camera pans across the faces of the girls as they listen in. Their expressions are a mix of disgust and pity – the caller, who we later come to know as just Billy, is not only harassing the young women but demeaning himself with such a bestial display of vulgarity. Barb grabs the phone and gives him both barrels. With sudden clarity, his voice changes, threatening to kill them – and he wastes no time making good on his threat, suffocating Clare to death and dragging her corpse into his newfound lair in the attic.
We learn other disturbing details as the story unfolds and the death toll increases. Prior to the obscene call, we learn that another college student has been sexually assaulted and a 13-year-old girl has gone missing, later found murdered in a park. Once the girls realise that Clare hasn’t been picked up by her dad as planned, the police simply dismiss her disappearance. Then there is Jessica’s boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea), a highly-strung music student with a violent temper. He is vehemently against her getting an abortion so she can pursue her own dreams – could his erratic behaviour indicate he is the killer?
Black Christmas was written by Roy Moore and his screenplay mines the escalating terror as much for drama as its scare potential. As a result, we get to know and care for the characters – Moore and Clark treat the young women as real people. These students are smart, autonomous, and resourceful, rather than the over-sexed knife-fodder that would come to categorise the many inferior slashers of the ‘80s. The story feels classic, not only because Black Christmas is recognised as the first modern slasher film. Moore took his cue from the well-known urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs, which has been giving people chills since at least the early ‘60s.
As such, the twist will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody these days: Yes, the calls are coming from within the house, but our familiarity with that trope has an unexpected benefit. It heightens the tension when you know the dreadful proximity between the killer and his victims.
Clark assembled a strong cast to work with Moore’s robust script. Margot Kidder, four years before Superman made her an international star, is superbly salty as the tough but wounded Barb. Olivia Hussey, chosen for the role on the back of her international success in Franco Zeffirelli’s hit version of Romeo and Juliet, is very believable as Jessica, a strong-willed young woman who won’t be cowed by her bullying boyfriend or a maniac stalking her and her friends. Despite the glaring age difference, Hussey is paired well with Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey) – he is heroically repellent as a toxic cry-baby who is prone to tantrums when he doesn’t get his way.
Hussey’s performance is key to the entire film, and perhaps she is so convincing because she pretty much lived through it in her teens. After finding fame in Romeo and Juliet, she was just 17 years old when she got into an abusive relationship with actor Christopher Jones. In 1969, he allegedly sexually assaulted her while she was living in the home rented by Sharon Tate before her grisly murder by the Manson Family. She became pregnant from the attack and chose an abortion, mirroring her character’s dilemma in Black Christmas.
As for living in the Tate murder house, Hussey’s spiritual side helped her deal with that baggage, claiming she only felt Sharon’s warm presence while she lived there. Her psychic later convinced her to take the part in Clark’s film, telling her it would be a great success.
The cast might have had some bigger names involved. Clark sought Hollywood legend Bette Davis to play Mrs MacHenry, the kooky housemother with a closet drinking problem, but the two-time Oscar winner turned down the part. Clark managed to snag another Academy Award winner, veteran Edmond O’Brien, who had won the prize for his role in The Barefoot Contessa. O’Brien accepted the gig playing Lieutenant Fuller, but was sadly released by the producers when it became apparent that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Nevertheless, Marian Waldman stepped into the frowsy shoes of Mrs Mac and did an excellent job. Cult icon John Saxon, a year after co-starring opposite Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, is solid as the well-meaning cop always a few steps behind the danger.
The story plays out pretty much as you would expect with Jess eventually becoming the Final Girl. Despite the familiarity, Black Christmas is still incredibly effective. It’s a real slow-burner, with Clark gradually amping up the tension as the crazy calls and the killings escalate. He delivers a few jump scares but, crucially, much of the horror is left to our imagination, particularly the identity and motives of the murderer. We don’t see anything of Billy apart from his hands, a silhouette, and one eye peering through the crack in a door. We also get very little of a backstory beyond what we can infer from his insane rantings on the phone. His identity remains a mystery and – another spoiler alert – he is still at large when the credits roll, resulting in a haunting ending that stuck with me for a long time after.
Black Christmas was released in Canada three weeks before Halloween in 1974. It was a success in its home country, becoming the third-highest grossing Canadian film of all time. Warner Bros picked it up for distribution in the United States, slating it for the more seasonally-appropriate date of 20th December. Worried that the title might lead audiences to believe it was a blaxploitation flick, the name was changed to Silent Night, Deadly Night. The alteration didn’t make much difference as the film flopped in the States on its initial run, possibly due to competition from The Godfather Part II and The Man With The Golden Gun. Many American critics ruthlessly trashed it, but it gained one important fan: John Carpenter, coming off the back of his first feature, Dark Star.
In 1976, John Carpenter was working on a film called Prey, about three young women hiking in the Catskill Mountains who are terrorised by murderous hillbillies. Being a fan of Black Christmas, Carpenter suggested to Warners that they sign up Clark to direct. The two became friends and Carpenter asked Clark if he ever planned to make a Black Christmas sequel. Clark wasn’t interested, but he did have some ideas about what a sequel might look like, namely that Billy would break out of a psychiatric hospital and go on another killing spree at Halloween. To his credit, Clark never accused Carpenter of ripping off his idea – Indeed, he said in 2005:
The truth is John didn't copy Black Christmas, he wrote a script, directed the script, did the casting. Halloween is his movie and besides, the script came to him already titled anyway. He liked Black Christmas and may have been influenced by it, but in no way did John Carpenter copy the idea. Fifteen other people at that time had thought to do a movie called Halloween but the script came to John with that title on it.
After the success of Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter was approached by indie film producer Irwin Yablans to direct a new picture about a stalker targeting babysitters. Carpenter agreed on the condition that he would have full creative control over the project including writing, directing, and composing the score. Teaming up with his girlfriend Debra Hill (who was also a creative force with The Fog and Escape from New York) they knocked out a screenplay in just 10 days.
For his killer, Carpenter drew inspiration from an encounter with a schizophrenic patient on a psychiatric ward during a visit in his college years. That meeting informed the description that Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) gives of his time with Michael Myers, the bogeyman of the piece. Carpenter also took from the scary movies he loved as a kid, citing gimmick maestro William Castle and The House on Haunted Hill as an influence on the box-of-tricks approach he used to goose his audience in Halloween. Also notable later in the movie is a glimpse of the famous title card from The Thing From Another World, another classic horror from the ‘50s that Carpenter would later get his shot at remaking.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Halloween because it was one of the first proper grown-up horrors I saw when I was a kid. It scared the crap out of me at the time and it was also my introduction to John Carpenter’s films. As I got more into movies in my teens, I found out about Black Christmas thanks to my bible back then, VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics. That made me aware of its importance to the slasher genre, but I didn’t actually sit down to watch it until a few years ago.
Watching Carpenter’s film now, with full knowledge of his Black Christmas fandom and previous involvement with Bob Clark, is an interesting experience. It is impossible to think that Halloween wasn’t derived from Clark’s film and ideas for a follow-up, and it plays very much like a sequel – even though the location and names have changed.
Like Clark’s movie, Carpenter opens with a killer POV shot. It is Halloween Night 1963, and we’re in the shoes of an unseen person who brutally stabs a young woman to death with a carving knife. The twist? The killer is Michael Myers as a little boy, which makes the slaying even more upsetting. Skip forward 15 years and we’re on our way to a sanatorium on a rainy night with Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance), who mutters darkly to a nurse about Michael’s pure evil before the maniac steals his car and escapes.
The killer’s destination is the leafy town of Haddonfield where the locals are gearing themselves up for the spookiest night of the year. We meet Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her big screen debut. Carpenter establishes quickly that she’s a bookish goody-two-shoes while her friends and fellow babysitters Lynda (P.J. Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis) are more street smart and interested in boys. Here, Carpenter is laying the groundwork for what would become another standard slasher trope – sex equals death and the virginal Laurie becomes a more typical Final Girl than Jessica in Black Christmas.
For the role of “The Shape” (as Michael Myers is credited in the film) Carpenter enlisted two different actors. Nick Castle, one of his buddies from University, embodied the masked figure – Castle would go on to be a successful director with movies like The Last Starfighter - while Tony Moran played the brief glimpse we get of Michael’s face at the end. Notoriously, another more famous actor became the true “face” of Myers. Due to budget restrictions, production designer Tommy Lee Wallace was forced to improvise. He bought a William Shatner mask from a costume shop for $1.98 (what a bargain!), made the eye holes bigger, and sprayed it white. And just like that, he created one of the most iconic props in horror history.
Carpenter’s set-up is far more basic than Clark’s, reflecting his attitude towards the film. He once referred to Halloween as “true crass exploitation” and likened it to a funfair haunted house rigged with things that jump out and scare you. As such, he is more concerned with setting up the impending doom of Michael’s return and throwing in a few false scares during the opening act rather than building much in the way of character. Sure, Laurie and her friends are more well-developed than the cardboard teens in something like Friday the 13th, but they’re not particularly interesting people to hang out with.
Not that it matters once darkness falls and Michael goes on his killing spree. Working with regular cinematographer Dean Cundey for the first time, Carpenter displayed his mastery of suspense, expertly cranking the tension and leaving spaces in the frame where the ghostly white mask of the psycho might pop up. Also adding to the chills is Carpenter’s jangly score – sure, it rips off Mike Oldfield’s theme from The Exorcist, but it is extremely effective.
For me, Michael Myers is still the greatest classic slasher icon. Freddy Krueger is fun, but his chattiness makes him less scary. Jason Vorhees has a similar thing going on to Michael, but the directors of the Friday the 13th movies were never bothered with building up much tension before he butchers another victim. Myers is still scary to me because he is a total blank, something to project your own fears onto, with no indication whether there are any human thoughts or emotions still alive behind those black eyeholes. He is also slow-moving and relentless – it seems like common sense that his victims should be able to outrun him easily, but the film works with similar nightmare logic to that of traditional zombie movies. No matter how fast you run or how well you hide, the horror will always catch up with you.
Halloween opened five days before its namesake celebration in 1978. Critics were mixed, with Pauline Kael particularly scathing, suggesting that every idea in a Carpenter movie could be traced to an earlier director – she wasn’t exactly wrong in this case, and Carpenter would develop a more distinct voice in his later films. As usual, reviews didn’t make much difference and the film built a strong word-of-mouth on its way to a sensational return of $70 million versus a budget of around $300,000, making it one of the most successful indie movies of all time.
The open ending, concluding with Michael’s body vanishing after Dr. Loomis blows him away, made a sequel inevitable. Halloween II followed in 1981, retaining the services of Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance but losing Carpenter (replaced by Rick Rosenthal) and, correspondingly, all the suspense.
In between came Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). All three franchises would spawn multiple sequels during the ‘80s and ‘90s, and there were many more slashers that followed in Michael’s plodding footsteps: The Burning, Child’s Play, My Bloody Valentine, The House on Sorority Row, Sleepaway Camp, Maniac Cop, Prom Night, and The Slumber Party Massacre, to name just a few.
The enormous success and influence of Halloween left Black Christmas somewhat in its wake. I didn’t catch up with it for so long because I had the misguided impression it was a curiosity for slasher horror completists who wanted to see where it all began. How wrong I was, and I’m glad that it has really gained a strong reputation as one of the genre’s best in recent years.
As much as I appreciate Halloween, Black Christmas is a far more interesting film. Carpenter’s movie is still effective for its age but it is a little tedious between the scary bits once you know how it plays out. Clark’s film, on the other hand, treats the character moments with just as much importance as the horror. It was way ahead of its time in how it tackled subjects that are still touchy today. It’s rare for a modern film – let alone a horror – to deal with the subject of abortion in such a frank manner, and also from a positive stance for the woman involved, yet Moore and Clark did it just a year after the landmark Roe vs. Wade case in the United States.
There is little denying that the slasher genre has misogynistic tendencies, taking a titillating approach to lining up young attractive women to be stalked, stripped, terrified, abused, tortured, and murdered for our viewing pleasure. There are strong female characters along the way, such as Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) in the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but few are as well-rounded as the characters Moore and Clark brought to the screen.
Black Christmas was also progressive in how it portrayed toxic masculinity decades before the term fully entered mainstream conversation. Peter is a terrific example of a passive-aggressive guy who puts his own ambitions before Jessica’s in the assumption she will be happy to sit at home with the baby while her own goals go on hold.
Furthermore, the film shows how sexual violence towards women is often not taken seriously – something that is still sadly pertinent 50 years later. The cops in the film write off Jess and Barb’s concerns about Clare’s sudden disappearance, assuming she has just shacked up somewhere with a boyfriend. Even at the end, their approach is still incompetent and slapdash. It might be stretching credibility that the cops wouldn’t fully search the house, including the attic, after a string of murders within its walls. But it does seem completely believable that Jess would be left alone, sedated and defenceless, within a few hours of her ordeal.
That is the difference between the two films: Halloween is essentially a funfair ride, just as Carpenter intended, but Black Christmas rewards a revisit thanks to its strong characters and themes. And its scares linger longer after the credits have rolled. The cops’ incompetence treats us to one of the most haunting endings ever as the body of Clare, lonely and undiscovered, gazes blankly from the attic window. The camera pulls back from the house, the wind blows, a dog barks, and the house phone rings and rings. Billy likes to chat after he has committed a murder – has he made sure our final girl doesn’t make it through the blackest of Christmases?
So there you have it, our retrospective on two landmark seasonal horror movies. Which is your favourite? Let us know!
