The Psychological Horror of Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974)

Needs a sexier title

THE PSYCHOSEXUAL, SELF-CONSCIOUS MISGOYNISTIC NIGHTMARE WORLD OF BOB CLARK [Black Christmas (1974) essay] I guess.

BOB CLARK RECONCILES WITH MISOGYNISTIC ANXIETIES. A PSYCHOSEXUAL UNCONSCIOUS PONTIFICATING NIGHTMARE OF CHRISTMAS TIME!

CW: Mentions of Sexual Violence/Harassment, Spoilers for Black Christmas (1974) and When a Stranger Calls (1979)

Black Christmas is my favourite slasher movie of all-time, honestly, but something that's so unusual about Black Christmas, as a slasher film, is that it is the film that codified so many tropes with the genre, yet at the same time it's also totally unique and distinctive and just so well-made from a technical perspective. Everything about this movie just works and it's a unique combination of a film that I feel really works in terms of its foreboding atmosphere and sneaking in something truly creepy underneath a would-be joyful holiday, but at the same time I also think Black Christmas works way more because of its subtext and it's lacerating intelligence that I feel truly differentiates it from other slasher films. In fact, I think it is probably the best slasher film, better than the likes of Halloween, Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street or even Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. I rank it that highly and I think it's just an example of everything that I would want out of a horror movie, and something that just seemed to improve over the years.

But it's also doing fucking donuts on me figuring out that this movie was by the same guy who did Porky's. This does kind of make sense when you consider some of the comic scenes. Like Margot Kidder tricking a police officer into accepting "Fellatio Drive" as an actual road and then the follow-through of it, does feel like a gag that would be in that film (only except Black Christmas is a whole lot funnier.). What's also strange though is that Black Christmas is often very self-conscious in terms of its themes of misogynistic imposition, often where it is so lacerating and often very sympathetic to the girls in this film. Meanwhile Porky's is a film that is pretty indulgent in it where so much of it does centre quite explicitly on this male point of view, often times where it can be quite smarmy. Black Christmas has voyeuristic gazes in it but then so does Porky's. In Black Christmas it's meant to be creepy and unnerving but Porky's does it for the sake of comedy, for that sort of sense of naughtiness like "What if there was a peep-hole where you saw naked girls?" etc.

"Don't mention it."

[Seriously, 1980s teen sex comedy films are fucking horror movies in their own right. They kind of vary in terms of how self-conscious they can be though. Revenge of the Nerds plays off rape and molestation as comedy while something like The Last American Virgin weirdly seems to exist as this devastating stealth-portrait of someone who simply can not stop imposing on this girl who shows very little interest in them anyway. They're very weird and I could do a write-up much later but you know.]

I guess it kind of makes a weird amount of sense though. Something that is so distinctive about how the misogyny in Black Christmas is depicted is how it is very self-conscious and where the whole movie feels like a process of reconciling with the fucked-up ramifications of it. Keir Duella's Peter, objectively, is an imposing creep who lashes out when his girlfriend decides on getting an abortion, has this very smarmy attitude where he seems to make decisions for girls instead of on their own accord, and we also do get the impression that his life is basically falling apart. During the piano audition he has, we get all these close-ups of his hands tapping away at the keys, his brow sweating, the chords he plays are almost always discordant, and the camera pans across to this panel who just stare at him, giving this impression that he very likely failed. Then he smashes the piano to bits with a podium. He can not take that rejection, which does seem so in line with the way that he treats other people as well. Only that he's also "never too awful" in terms of how imposing he is, just that there's something about him that seems so off.

"You can't make a decision like that, you haven't even asked me."

God, actually this movie does get down this issue so well. Literally his reaction to someone expressing bodily autonomy is to in some way indict them with psychotic "moral" reasoning eventually culminating in "you selfish bitch" etc., flipping it so that she's doing something heinous and selfish. Gets under your skin, lol.

It's also never too didactic and I think what really works is the way in which human behaviour pops up. Sometimes we get the sense that men are protective, other times we get the sense that they're callous or just not caring about what people go through, just not considering the ramifications of it all. Other times we get the sense of men being protective merely just as a means of imposing on people, like the impression that we get with Peter. Something that's also quite interesting was, at the time, some of the reviews seem to take this as though the kills in it were done purely for exploitation purposes, that it's obscene. Gene Siskel, in particular, hated this film, stating that it was a "routine shocker... notable only for indicate the kind of junk roles that talented actresses are forced to play in the movies." and so forth. Retrospective reviews seem to highlight this movie as though the film is heavily feminist in what it says, and as Clark puts it that "it is probably one of the least misogynistic slasher films out there." Because the killer is not the focus of the story, but the unseen element, and the main focus tends towards the after-effects and the anxiety surrounding all the killings. Deaths are not taken lightly in this film, for sure. What's so fascinating about Black Christmas is how it puts you really into the headspaces of these girls, and there is a lot of clear empathy towards them, despite not being a world that Clark necessarily inhabits.

Bob Clark's career in general is so strange, honestly. He started off with SHE-MAN: A STORY OF FIXTATION (1967) [THE ONE MOVIE THEY DIDN'T WANT YOU TO SEE! WHAT IF THERE WAS SOMEONE WHO WAS FORCE-FEMMED AGAINST THEIR WILL!!! MOVIE THAT ASKS SERIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WORLD TODAY...

...seriously watch she-man, it will change your life. see appendix for more about she-man and my speculation on clark's career in general].

Okay, actually, Bob Clark got his start in horror movies in 1972 with Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things which is one of those subversive comedy-horror films that is kind of slow and doesn't really work. It was co-written by Alan Ormsby who would later do the perverse 1974 Ed Gein inspired horror movie Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile, and would later collaborate with Clark on another 1974 film called Deathdream [aka. Dead of Night] about a Vietnam veteran who is killed in combat and comes home as a blood-sucking zombie, basically just as a husk of his former self, no longer the same person. Deathdream is quite good I might add, makes up for its low-budget with a nightmarish atmosphere and this central thrust of watching someone deteriorate before your eyes and this imposed image of someone as something they're not, weirdly it kind of works as this horrifying portrait of grief, and can be very evocative and downright creepy at points.

Posters for Clark's two previous horror films Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972) and Dead of Night (1974)

[Also interesting is the casting of John Marley and Lynn Carlin as this married couple who deal with their son returning from the dead. They also played a married couple in John Cassavetes's 1968 film Faces, which is kind of a weird overlap. Two films are totally unrelated though.]

But Black Christmas is where Bob Clark's horror stylings really come into play, and I find it very interesting just how so much of this movie is ultimately a lacerating portrait of paranoia and being dependent upon systems that will not protect you. I think later slasher films tend to have it so that the killer is front-and-centre, but here the killer is way more obscured, where you only really get a sense of his arms, eyes and his voice, that may or may not be distorted. The killer in this is just... there isn't really any sort of motivation behind what he does, and I think what's so distinctive about this film is that he just kind of is there. A lot of what he actually says is just nonsensical, often where it contradicts itself and hints towards vague traumas that may or may not be something that he just mentions for the sake of shock value, which does become a bit of an important plot-point in terms of what he figures out about Jess. There's an utter perplexity to it that I think really stands out, but what's more is that I feel it emphasises the people that he's harassing and about to kill more than anything else, where they're the centre of the film instead.

A lot can be said about the shot composition with the phone call scenes but this sequence is probably my favourite out of the bunch. But yeah, in general, shot composition tends to be quite specific with the emotions that they're capturing.

Black Christmas is definitely a violent film but what stands out to me is the fact that it's not particularly gory, but way more something that is mainly about the violence with regards to having your defences being stripped away by persistent harassment and unanswered, unreconciled anxieties. It's sort of like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in the sense where you really do get this distinct impression of violence, even when so much of it is obfuscated, and much of it really has to do with the tone and the atmosphere that the movie is going for. Texas Chainsaw, for that matter, is also way more psychological than gory in my view, but it's also something where it really does put you into this perplexed mindset of insanity, which can be so visceral in that film. Black Christmas does have a similar sort of tone to it and I think what this film is so good at is just highlighting anxious and perplexed reactions and how they wind up spiralling and escalating. Heck, at the beginning of the movie, the girls just outright treat the sexually harassing phone calls as a running joke, then it becomes way more threatening and annoying, before outright becoming deadly seriously and eventually fatal.

I love how this movie uses the phone as a key plot device in this movie, and there's something very distinctive about the old-fashioned 1970s-era rotary phones as a visual device, and I like how, even though they are definitely antiquated by today's standards, we do get fed in on precisely how they work. It becomes such a persistent device that, logically, we have a telephone lineman who pops up, taps the phone, and we're introduced to this entire warehouse filled with these racks of devices used to connect all these calls, where everything is very technical and intricate. What's more is that I think what's so creepy about the telephone is how it exists as a means of obfuscating someone, and where exactly they're coming from, but then it winds up becoming way too overly intrusive for its own good. Those push-in shots of Jess on the phone, hesitantly asking "Who are you? Why are you doing this?" are very creepy, but in one such instance she literally just walks into the house and then she receives this harassing phone call that utters death threats to her. Although this film has such a fascinating command of space as well, even down to how the scenes with the phone calls are shot, alternating quite drastically between medium and close shots, depending on how claustrophobic it makes us want to feel. Little details like that really pop up, especially with its inventive use of POV and tracking shots which I feel like I can only really describe as having a "creeping" quality to it, for instance, where Clare hesitantly walks into the closet to search for her missing cat.

Literally just plastic wrap over a camera lens and suddenly you know what's going to happen.

But the whole motif with the phone calls works so well. A bunch of other slasher films seem to use this device as well, notably with When a Stranger Calls (1979) which borrows this movie's twist and has the repeated line "Have you checked the children?" coming from the babysitter stalking killer. 1996's Scream opens with a phone call scene where it starts off with horror movie trivia, reveals itself to be more threatening, and escalates into a double homicide. Scream 2 has it so that the events of the first movie become this sensationalistic Hollywood movie, the "What's your favourite scary movie?" turns into a cheap joke, and also updates the time so that caller ID exists so that the methods of harassment wind up becoming ineffective. That's interesting but I think it's also due to technology and how people interact with it, whether they're familiar with it or not, and how people adapt to it, and in effect find new ways to obfuscate themselves. I suppose there could be a movie that employs cell-phones, smart-phones and social media as a device like this, but it has to exist as something other than a flashy gimmick to show how "new" the movie is. Black Christmas was made in the mid 1970s and it still holds up because of how it really gets at the underlying features with phone calls and keeps us very much in the loop about it all.

Seriously, this film has great lighting. Nervous phone-call scene and a fireplace crackling in the background, contrasted with this darkness surrounding the edges of the frame.

That, and I think what really does work about it is how it juxtaposes Christmas as this joyous holiday with this total perversity. What really does work about this movie is the visual style of it and I feel that the whole texture of the film can be sort of described as "very cold with a tinge of warmth to it" - for example, a scene which is solely illuminated by a yule log fireplace, or how the colours brown, green and red/pink become quite pervasive throughout. Most of this movie is in-doors yet all of the out-door scenes have this constant reminder of snow, ice, mostly pitch-black darkness when the sun isn't up and so forth, yet it's also never too pervasive. Likewise I also never got the impression from any scene that this wasn't at least set during Winter, yet at the same time this contrast is used very pervasively with regards to the horror elements of it. Even then, a bunch of the characters also seem to treat Christmas with a sort of flippant attitude, for example, when the character Patrick is dressed as Santa Claus, hates it, and starts saying "Ho, ho, ho, shit." and you can just tell in his eyes that he's not enjoying it at all. Barb knows about this and starts teasing him. Christmas is the overarching backdrop of this movie yet it's more-or-less just kind of there.

I also think the film is surprisingly funny at points which forms a compelling juxtaposition with the horror elements. It's weird how it works and I think a lot of mileage comes from Margot Kidder's performance as this foul-mouthed, heavily sardonic Barb, who spends a lot of the movie taking the piss out of people. In one scene she chastises an inept detective by pointing to him and saying "You know, for a public servant, I think your attitude really sucks." But then something about this film that is so creepy is how it shows characters who are left out of the dark with what's happening. These scenes emphasise that key component so much. Clare's murder at the beginning of the movie is very shocking, shot in this close-up POV shot where we see her being suffocated by this plastic coat bag, then it just cuts to this scene of the girls forcing the housemother to try on this tacky dress. Clare's body remains in the attic for the rest of the movie, often serving as this foreboding presence. Repeated camera shots either lean on the window from outside the house, or inside the house where it shows people entering and exiting the premises. It's never too forceful or dissonant though in the way that, say, The Last House on the Left (1972) does it, where it seems to juxtapose brutal rape and torture and eventual murder with outright slapstick comedy.

Inept Canadian police officer being told off by queen Margot Kidder.

But what's so fascinating about the film is how it's so character-focused and we definitely know what happened to Clare, only that all the other characters are operating on purely speculative knowledge. Maybe she's fine, maybe's something unspeakably horrifying to her, maybe she left because she was alienated from the household. Nobody ever truly knows, but then so many of these little details just do not add up about why she's gone. Clare's concerned father first gets involved in this then they go to the police. They're not taken seriously but then Clare's boyfriend Chris gets involved in the situation and suddenly they do take it quite seriously, hence where I feel that a lot of the speculative paranoia comes in. It juxtaposes the fact that nobody takes it seriously, so drastic and often wrong conclusions often follow-through from that, but even then stupid decisions are never made gratuitously, rather that we get the sense that they come from incomplete information a lot of the time. Indeed, the girls for the most part are smart and resourceful and when they aren't, we see precisely why that's the case. Barb goes into paranoid ramblings about Clare seemingly acting like she's indicted, but at the same time it makes sense that she would do that.

Another thing is that I actually do think that this movie weirdly works as just showing how people come to these wrong conclusions with things, as is the nature of paranoia. Like there has to be some sort of explanation that fills in the inexplicable, and what's so fucking interesting about this movie, to me, is how it totally stops you short on that regard. Ultimately there are no answers in the ending, and the one answer we do get, it's revealed, that it just completely falls flat on its face. Even Bob Clark himself was disappointed in this ending, but I dunno, I think it genuinely stands up as one of the scariest endings in a horror movie. Unlike Psycho, which ends with this elaborate psychological explanation into Norman Bate's behaviour, in this film the killer isn't even revealed and really there is no explanation to his behaviour. I think that it just leaves you cold but that's what's really unsettling about it. I dunno, I kind of want an explanation but at the same time I really don't think it leaves me with the same sort of sense of terror than if there was one.

Appendix - Bob Clark's Later Career, Speculative Theories as to maybe why, and Radical Feminism

(aka. largely might be bullshit, but it will seem true if you repeat this to yourself enough times.)

Something that's brought up a whole bunch with Bob Clark is just the career trajectory after Black Christmas. Black Christmas is a horror masterpiece but then Clark wound up following this film up with thrillers such as Breaking Point (1976) and the Sherlock Holmes vehicle Murder by Decree (1979), before then settling into doing comedy films starting with Tribute (1980) and most infamously with the 1981 teen sex comedy film Porky's. Then Porky's II: The Next Day (1983) which he basically did under obligation to get studio funding for 1983's A Christmas Story. That's what Clark is probably most well known for, which a lot of people tend to bring up to juxtapose with Black Christmas, although A Christmas Story definitely does have kind of an underlying mean-streak to it as well.

Literally his most profitable film. 90% of the gags in Porky's are like people just laughing at their own jokes, but literally is so perplexing that it came from the guy who did Black Christmas.

His career is just so fascinating because I really do think that it peaked with Black Christmas, and I kind of wish he did more films like that. After A Christmas Story, he did films such as Rhinestone (1984), Turk 182 (1985), Loose Cannons (1990), and ended his career with family films such as first two Baby Geniuses films and The Karate Dog (2004). Loose Cannons (1990), in particular, was such a flop and fell into such obscurity that in May 2013, a person discovered an obscure still photo from this film and genuinely mistook it for a photograph of an actual murder. Dan Aykroyd, who starred in the film and was pictured in the photo, has stated that "The movie should have been left in the landfill where it belongs." Although personally I have not seen that much of Clark's other films so it's hard to really comment on them other than just "some of his later films have an infamous status of being absolutely terrible, utter-garbage comedy films." which I find kind of fascinating. Porky's, even though I found it kind of entertaining, is also a fucking stupid, stupid movie, honestly. 

But yeah, no, Clark's career was pretty wild. I mentioned before that he also did the 1967 film She-Man: A Story of Fixation, which a Youtube upload of the film states as being "amazingly, somewhat progressive" which is probably a good summary of that film. I've stated that it's "sympathetic to trans people in exactly the muddled, bizarre way you'd expect out of a 1960s exploitation movie titled 'She-Man: A Story of Fixation'" which I think kind of sums it up. I honestly think it's on-par with something like Glen or Glenda in terms of vintage trans movies and like I dunno, but I get kind of a kick out of seeing something that's both heavily archaic but at the same time also weirdly sympathetic in what it does, attempting to reconcile with its subject matter in contrast with imposing norms that existed at the time, but where the attempt to do so is quite genuine. For some reason though I think that is the final piece of the puzzle of who Bob Clark was and I think he was just someone who dabbled in a bunch of different genres, I feel.

But it all started here (the one thing they didn't want you to know about!)

(Also I find it weird that movies like Glen or Glenda and She-Man are considered "some of the worst movies ever" when I find them so fascinating. Glen or Glenda is actually inventive in terms of its film-making and literally has moments like "transsexuality may not be natural, but then so is flying, yet human beings built planes to do that instead." and explicitly showed transsexuality in terms of how "human beings have advanced." I guess they were just too weird for people, maybe.)

What I find really strange is just how good of a horror film director Clark was but then Black Christmas was just a small horror film that eventually gained cult status, meanwhile Porky's was a massively successful sex comedy that made $150 million in its day, and A Christmas Story was a relative success before eventually being hugely successful during the mid 1980s and the 1990s - where it played on TV constantly, even 24 hour channels which repeated the movie over and over again. Sort of like how It's a Wonderful Life wasn't popular in its day but became hugely popular in the 1970s when the film fell into the public domain and was just something people broadcasted over and over again on TV. Both Porky's and A Christmas Story honestly seem to have intersecting themes where it represents various points in Clark's life that he could remember, being a child in the 1940s and a teenager during the 1950s. Porky's was weirdly a very personal project for Clark as well as it was just kind of a highlight of his youthful experiences as well. But Black Christmas is kind of rare because it's a movie that ultimately is about deeply probing and considering the perspectives of people that aren't personal to Clark, yet it works so well regardless.

So I guess that's why Clark was just kind of known as being a "comedy film director" but it's also kind of strange how someone as talented as Clark kind of became a director-for-hire with a lot of things. Ironically, Black Christmas is where his style really shined and only sort of followed it up with the semi-horror film Murder By Decree five years after the fact. Yeah, ultimately I don't know how it all works and how much of it is what Clark decided to do and studio machinations and what not. Clark really seemed like one of those directors who did a few really good, well-accomplished pieces of work, mixed in with a lot of films that were mediocre or just downright bad in terms of what they did. Very strange. I think that's kind of what makes his great movies even more fascinating, in my view. Someone did Clark dirty somewhere down the line.

His best film, however? She-Man: A Story of Fixation! Now, Black Christmas might reconcile a lot with regards to themes of misogyny but She-Man goes the extra-step into reconciling with themes of transphobia and just about imposed gender norms in general, therefore the two movies are interlinked with each other and have more in common than people would like to admit. TERFs love aggrandising themselves in very singular, cisgendered terms, and reading stuff like Andrea Dworkin's work, but will not mention that in her 1974 book 'Woman Hating' there is a section called 'Androgyny' that shows that human beings can, in fact, change sex, if they so wanted to, that is. What's weird is how people see transgender people as something they don't vibe with as a concept, seeing themselves as "archaic" when really it's mainly because they didn't pay attention at the time, then all of a sudden they're confronted with the notion. On closer inspection, much deeper problems come from not recognising and reconciling with more underlying aspects of the patriarchy and the pernicious aspects of them, and in-effect, self-consciously replicating these aspects elsewhere. Much like the abortion subplot in Black Christmas, She-Man takes on a similar sort of subplot with bodily autonomy, which is gender transitioning. This is why She-Man is essential viewing, especially with regards to understanding the deeper subtext with regards to the themes of imposition and paranoia behind Black Christmas.