Black Christmas (1974) is a Cosy Christmas Classic (with Murder and C-Bombs)

Home Alone just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I get zilch from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Nada from Elf. The old reliable Christmas films of my youth, annual stalwarts of festive spirit, now drained of feeling. I’ve started looking elsewhere for Christmas cheer, that nostalgic warm feeling remaining elusive. Christmas in Connecticut? Meet Me in St. Louis? Nothing. I’d think I was dead inside if it wasn’t for one film that still works for me, a ritual I’ve stuck to over the last handful of years that has yet to wear itself out: Bob Clark’s 1974 slasher film Black Christmas.

At first it may not seem like an ideal distributor of warm fuzzy feelings. It’s a horror film where a deranged killer murders his way through a sorority house one Christmas, taking breaks from stabbing only to make obscene phone calls. It might not be family friendly viewing, but that depends on the family. I’m sure the Sawyer Family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre make it a traditional Christmas Eve watch. But as I get older I realise that light and fluffy Christmas films don’t capture the actual vibe of the holiday. Christmas is cosy only because it’s cold and dark outside. Black Christmas is fittingly cold and dark.

A horror tale is an old Christmas tradition. It’s the time for a Victorian ghost story. Black Christmas fits that style, an urban myth told around a fire on a dark winter night, while showcasing the Christmas of the 1970s. This is a Christmas of film grain, bad haircuts, and split diopters. Like those Dickensian tales, the film has aged incredibly well. The scares remain as strong as they once were while the seventies style only adds to the nostalgic old school cosiness, back when films had real texture.

Rather than the gaudy, commercialised Christmas that has dominated since, Black Christmas presents more of an old school version of the holiday. There’s no nauseating Christmas songs on the soundtrack like the lame remakes. Instead carols are sung. The decorations are classic deep reds and dark greens. The Christmas lights can be bright up close but do little to penetrate the darkness of the old house. The aesthetic is perfectly creepy yet cosy. Or “Yule-ish. Very yule-ish” as the character Barb puts it. There’s an old fashioned clunk and heft to everything that makes for satisfying viewing, from the rotary phones to the huge room of whirring phone lines used to trace the calls.

Maybe the fact that the film was made in Canada makes me, as a Brit, relate to it a little more than most American Christmas films. The old house, the stone building of the University, the real snow with the right level of mud and slush ring true. This wasn’t filmed in a Hollywood backlot over the summer. This is real cold. Real visible breath and ruddy cheeks and red ears and runny noses. It makes the interior scenes, with the wind constantly howling in the background, all the more snug and inviting, with conversations lit by firelight and characters donning their comfiest jumpers. It’s a film I just want to sink into.

But, of course, there’s a killer on the loose and the film is genuinely scary. It’s a fantastic concept, stolen and reworked many times since. The killer being in the house with the girls the whole time, the disturbing phone calls coming from inside the house, and even the bodies of the missing girls they are searching for being stashed in the attic, a few feet above their heads. The warm respite from the weather being anything but sanctuary. Most famously the film ‘inspired’ Halloween, which takes the concept and moves it to a different holiday.

Black Christmas’s opening shot was directly copied in John Carpenter’s much more famous film four years later, following the killer’s POV approach and then enter the house, stalking his prey. Bob Clark’s direction is outstanding. Just from the opening, the geography of the house is perfectly conveyed to the viewer, something the modern remakes failed to do. I watched the rubbish 2019 version for the first time this year and there was one sequence with multiple characters walking around an empty house and I didn’t even realise which of the several houses we had seen in the film it was supposed to be taking please in, let alone where the characters were in relation to each other. And there’s an amazing shot during the first phone call which pans over all the girls’ reactions, a real tight close up racking focus the entire time.

Black Christmas might have the best cast of characters of any slasher film ever. It’s the gold standard in a genre which usually has paper thin forgettable characters. The girls are fun, bold, and subversive, making them seem more modern and memorable than those in either remake. They naturally and unapologetically swear, screw, give alcohol to kids, and get abortions, with Margot Kidder’s hilarious Barb being the highlight. John Saxon adds another example of why he’s one of cinema’s best onscreen cops, and Nick Mancuso is great as the killer Billy, never fully seen but definitely heard, going from manic and incomprehensible deranged threats to a completely serious and calm “I’m going to kill you” in an instant. Although best to ignore the in-character audio commentary Mancuso does on the Blu-ray; it’s interminable.

So, the film is scary. The kill scenes chillingly effective while relying on minimal gore; there are some terrifically creepy images, like Billy’s eye visible through a slit in a door; and some very effective edits around noise, like a scream becoming a ringing telephone or Barb’s murder being intercut with carol singers. Yet, making the film even more of a Christmas classic, it’s also really funny. Black Christmas is Bob Clark’s last horror film before turning to comedy films like Porky’s and A Christmas Story, and that sensibility is already on display. The film manages to walk the fine line of the cops being competent in an emergency and also very funny, and house mother Mrs Mac deserves a prequel spin-off, having to deal with all the girls and their parents while trying to sneak swigs of alcohol from hidden bottles stashed around the house. Every minor character has real personality.

Thank God for Black Christmas. A film I’ve watched the last few Decembers and each time has been a fulfilling experience, both as a horror film and genuinely as a Christmas film, too. I don’t like the extended, commercialised runup to Christmas, how the decorations come out and the songs and adverts start playing immediately after Halloween, but I admit I get the urge to watch Black Christmas earlier and earlier each year because I know it’s that rare container of real festive feeling, despite the brutal murders and the c-word laden obscene phone calls. If you’re not in the spirit this year, give it a watch. Schedule a family viewing on Christmas morning and while you’re eating Christmas dinner, with the kids and Grandma, you can argue over whether Billy was saying “pretty pig cunt” on the phone or “pretty pink cunt,” before rewatching with the subtitles afterwards to determine the winner. Merry Christmas.