Black Christmas (1974) | Haddonfield Movie Club
Do you hate scary movies but are tempted by their allure? Are you curious about why the horror genre remains as popular as ever? Or do you need an excuse to rewatch the creepy classics?
Haddonfield Movie Club is a monthly Least Important Things article series focused on the foundational movies in the horror genre. So, whether you're a scaredy cat or a hardened veteran, together, we'll dissect the history, impact, and throughlines of the genre. So grab a pillow to hide behind and pop a fresh bag of popcorn. It's time to get scared.
I used to live in a 19th-century house with creaking walls and an elaborate floor plan.
The Victorian-style gargantuan was divided into three living units of shoddily organized kitchenettes and angled bathrooms. I lived in the top unit, where the attic had been converted into a vaulted ceiling bedroom surrounded by square wood framed windows that provided Rear Window sightlines 270 degrees around the corner city lot it was leaning on.
The place I most avoided in the house was the damp and dusty basement where decades of old renter artifacts were stacked upon each other like Hogwarts room of requirement.
Unfortunately, being in my twenties, I was required to do laundry myself. The trick was getting to the basement. My top unit didn’t have access to the bottom half of the house. So, I was forced to walk down two flights of bending stairs, then around the house and the side yard, sidestepping the piles of snow and slick sidewalks to a side door that I had to force open with the heft of my shoulder like I was blocking an inside linebacker.
Inside, I stretched my hands in the blackness, grasping for hope–the light switch. Once flicked, one bulb ignited, illuminating the washer and dryer while the rest of the basement was shrouded in darkness.
I became very efficient at sorting my whites and colors.
While watching Black Christmas for the first time, the proto-slasher brought me back to that ancient homestead, specifically the basement.
The final sequence of Jess slowly being enveloped by the forgotten dressers, lamps, and tchotchkes of sorority sisters past put me right back into the emotionally dreaded task of doing my laundry.
But I guess if I lived in the attic unit of the house, in this analogy, am I the killer? Oh no!
Yes, this movie scared me. And not just because of the dirty laundry I have piling up in the room next to where I’m writing this.
The Story
A group of sorority sisters is counting down the days before the semester ends for winter break when an unknown man sneaks into the attic of their house and begins picking them off one by one.
Why You Should Watch
The Vintage Wares
If only Peter and Jess knew how much the clothes on their backs would be worth in an urban vintage shop 50 years later, it might have quelled their relational conflicts. The collection of turtlenecks, neck scarves, and 70s denim in Black Christmas is a feast for the eyes of any style hound seeking inspiration for an outfit to impress at a gallery opening.
A screenshot from Black Christmas OR a 2022 Brooklyn couple debating whether to go to the gallery opening tonight?
The Ending
Rarely do you find a slasher ending this haunting. The realism makes you want to turn all the lights on in your house after the title credits roll. Or in my case, I needed to pause the movie and check my closets ten minutes before the final act.
Telephone Tension
There’s nothing quite like the terror of landline telephones.
In modern cinema, smartphones can pull you out of a film by either the absurdness of its influence (i.e., tracking capabilities in action movies) or the plot’s inability to remove itself from the technology (i.e., 3D graphics showing a text conversation).
That’s why someone losing their phone or dropping it in the water is an overused trope in contemporary film. Most movies are trying to remove themselves from the anti-tension of smartphones and the internet.
Well, my friends, you don’t have to worry about any of that with the analog glory of Black Christmas. It’s got everything:
Dials
Taking down a message on paper
Pastel colored phones
Prank callers
Switchboards
Police traces
Meeting someone at a place and time they called previously to meet you, but they don’t show up, and you can’t call them because there’s no payphone, so you have to ask a stranger to help you.
There’s nothing like landline tension.
Luxury Cast
Horror movies in the following decade after Black Christmas’ release became breeding ground for young and upcoming actors like Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Kevin Bacon (Friday the 13th), and Johnny Depp (The Nightmare on Elm Street).
Although the holiday horror flick was filmed in the chill of Toronto, Canada, with a modest $620,000 (estimated) budget, the cast was surprisingly noteworthy. The gravitas of the individual performances makes Black Christmas stand the test of time after the hundreds of slashers (holiday themed and not) that followed it. Here are enchanting resumes of the cast of Black Christmas.
Keir Dullea (Peter) was just five years removed from playing Dr. Dave Bowman in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. His intensity brings validity to the now overused “boyfriend is the bad guy” trope that we wouldn’t see as effectively portrayed until Skeet Ulrich’s Billy Loomis in Scream (1996).
Margot Kidder (Barb) was primarily a TV actor before showing up on the set. Kidder steals the show so much in the first third of the movie that it tricks the audience into thinking she’s the main protagonist. But she’ll get her leading lady opportunity four years later, falling into the arms of Christopher Reeve as Lois Lane.
Did journeyman actor John Saxon seem familiar as small-town police lieutenant Ken Fuller? That’s because he played a similar lieutenant in another iconic horror movie ten years later. In that installment, the killer lived in the attic of the victims’ heads.
You know Andrea Martin (Phyl) as the eccentric Aunt Voula in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. She also returned for the reboot in 2006.
Olivia Hussey (Jess) is none other than the actress who played Juliet in the Romeo and Juliet movie you were forced to watch in high school English class.
Scare-O-Meter = 4
1 = Watching a creepy Disney cartoon from the 60s and wondering how they got away with that.
5 = You can't finish the movie because you're so scared.
As already stated, I had a personal fear associated with watching Black Christmas that has more to do with architecture than jump scares. Yet, the mysterious whodunit element of the plot, paired with dissonant phone calls from the killer and visceral production quality, make Black Christmas a film that can still build tension to the bitter end.
Homework: The Thing (1982)
Nothing says “snowed in” more than John Carpenter’s The Thing. Cabin fever and the January blues will be hitting hard, but you’ll take solace in the fact that you’re not stuck in the Arctic Circle doing research with a bunch of scruffy men.
Where can you stream The Thing (1982)?
Unfortunately, the film is off streaming platforms (previously on Peacock), but it can be rented on YouTube TV, Prime Video, Vudu, Apple TV, and more.
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