Detour into the Dark—Black Christmas (1974)

Agnes…it’s me..Billy.

A disturbed individual, with a past that could link itself to a sorority house, secretly inhabits this place, in the attic, and proceeds to persistently call the female students who live within its walls, using events from the past to torment them.

I just love the way directors used to shoot buildings of importance from ground level upward. Clark uses the camera as others have, the “voyeur” perspective of the maniac, peeping on the house he once lived, the sorority sisters inside congregating, looking for the attic, his eyes gazing from where he stands, finding it, climbing to that room, a place he will hide until the time comes when he’s compelled to kill.

 Not only that.

 We see his shadow. We see his hands used to climb, follow him, and hear him breathe. He is nicknamed by the girls as “the moaner”; speaking in different voices, using a mixture of vulgarities and horrors from the past, blurting them out in a blitzkrieg towards the girls, Billy is obviously more than a bit troubled. My favorite scene—or one of them—has Clark’s camera up tight into the faces of the girls, as they listen intently, repulsed yet held in a silent pause, as Billy unleashes upon them the evils from his darkened, sickened soul. The fact that a drunk, unimpressed Barb gives right back to him, makes the scene—for me, anyway—all the more special. What I think adds to the power of the scene in when Billy, done with his outburst, calmly tells her he’ll kill her. It is after the wave, in a still voice, that the intent is all too real.

Darling, you can’t rape a townie.

What I find eerie about this movie—and I think is its greatest success—is how a lot of plot is going on between the girls, and in the same building, right under their noses, a psychopath is in the midst. An early scene has the girls celebrating a hideous dress they bought for their already-liquored-up housemother. No clue whatsoever that right upstairs the killer is carrying the body of one of their sisters, Clair, after suffocating her with a dress bag to the attic. Something gives me the chills—you are conducting life as usual, enjoying the holidays, and attending to the joys and drama that comes at you during young college life, and infiltrating the place you currently reside is a madman. He’s made himself at home.

B…for..booze.

I have often read how Halloween was inspired/influenced by Black Christmas. I’ve seen “rip off” thrown around. There are some fascinating instances in Black Christmas that parallel to Halloween, where Billy hides away, his shadow, a slight silhouette, lots of spying on the girls from his warped perspective (again, the fish eye lens does the trick..); the music, while sparse, can indicate his presence but isn’t too overbearing, just enough to stir up the chills.

 I just love how Black Christmas utilizes space. Carpenter’s Halloween does the same exact thing. You get plenty of close-ups—with the beauty of Olivia Hussey and handsome face of John Saxon why wouldn’t you  shoot her/him up close as much as possible?—but Clark makes damn sure we know that the sorority house gives the killer lots of room to roam, to sneak around, to move about. The police station house is also shot in a wide variety of angles and positions; just Saxon’s office itself is the object of Clark’s artistic passion. To me, Clark is never satisfied with one particular method of shooting the sorority house..but why should he? Why wouldn’t a director of Clark’s talent not exploit the surroundings and alert us to the fact that the psychopath could be anywhere; looking at characters in the house (Hussey, Andrea Martin) from afar, the voices in his head soon erupting when on the phone with the very ones he can see at a distance. Halloween basically does the same thing. The house where Nancy is babysitting Lindsey (and Lynda and her beau later screw) is used the same way with Michael all over the place. 

Janice, the little girl of a local woman, is murdered and left in a park, her body later found by the search party. I have always been curious as to who was responsible for her death. You kind of think possibly Billy. He seems like the viable option. The girls who seem to provoke his mania resemble Agnes; could Janice have done the same thing?

Peter is an interesting character to me. In fact, his rather unusual relationship with Jess is given quite a bit of importance in the film. He’s the garden variety red herring, though. Billy’s shape is reminiscent of Peter; I think when Billy goes to grab Jess, his shirt sleeve was as green a color as Peter’s. When Peter demolishes the piano, insists that Jess not abort their baby or she’ll “be sorry”, weeps across the phone in a pitiable plea for her not to take their child, and at two different times before and after his emotional outbursts seems perfectly normal. I think Jess described him to detective Lt. Fuller as “high strung”, like a lot of “artistic types”. I like that even though he couldn’t have been the one responsible for the phone calls or capable of killing the girls in the house due to his activities away from the location that Peter is always established as unstable and practically bi-polar. Jess singlehandedly sabotages—however, inadvertently—Peter’s piano recital in front of some important people because of the pregnancy/abortion news. When he declares his love and option for marriage to her, such devotion rejected because she wants to pursue a career even if he’s given up on being a concert pianist, Peter’s reaction indicates an unpredictable outcome in the relationship. When he tells her he loves him, early in the film, and she just says, “I know,” it is a sign that this is going nowhere because both do not harbor the same feelings. It’s an intriguing dynamic to me.

I was mentioning the parallels between Halloween and Black Christmas; the ending, for me, is perhaps the most striking similarity. While Carpenter (using the heavy breathing of Michael as background noise) shows several spots Michael once occupied in the house he nearly got Laurie Strode, Clark uses a methodical seemingly uninterrupted take from the unconscious body of Jess, lying on a bed unawares, moving to different rooms where Billy has been, ending at the attic, inside, and then, in an incredible exterior shot, pulling away from the window (Clair’s face still frozen in suffocation, the plastic bag still imprinted into her face) and holding in place as the credits role. The doc said Jess would be out for four hours, and that crime scene investigators would arrive in an hour. We’re left with a killer still in the attic, two bodies still unaccounted for, a father still unsure of his daughter’s whereabouts, and Jess asleep, vulnerable, easy prey. There’s definitely an outcry against ending this open and left unanswered; but, it works for me because it leaves us with this unease and mystery. 

The movie just opens with Billy appearing, climbing into the house, and terrorizing. It ends with Billy still there, still able to terrorize, the phone ringing, a cop outside hearing it while taking a smoke. This would be Clark’s last horror film.