There is no definitive answer as to what the first slasher movie really is. Many point to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom or even Psycho as the film that launched the genre. Others suggest it's Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (aka Twitch of the Death Nerve) that invented the slasher tropes. Some still say it's John Carpenter's original Halloween, a movie that, even if it is not the first slasher movie ever made, can still be called the most influential. It (and Bava’s Bay of Blood) is the movie that producer Sean Cunningham was ripping off when he made the original Friday the 13th, the copycat that launched a thousand more copycats. There has been a push in the last 10–15 years, though, to recognize Bob Clark's 1974 film Black Christmas (aka Silent Night, Evil Night) as the first “real” slasher, as a clear line can be drawn between it and Carpenter's classic. I tend to agree with the assessment.
It's Christmastime at a sorority house. An unseen killer sneaks in and has a look around (in a POV shot Carpenter would directly lift for the opening of Halloween), then proceeds to make a series of weird and unsettling phone calls to the women in the house. Over the course of the next few icy cold days, the sorority sisters—including Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, Curtains' Lynne Griffin, and Margot Kidder—are killed off one by one.
Unseen assailant murdering people one at a time? Check. Young women as victims? Check. A setting that cuts the characters off from the rest of the world? Check. One of director Bob Clark's masterstrokes in directing Black Christmas is just how cold he makes it feel outside, which goes a long way towards creating atmosphere and also contributes to the sense of isolation the movie engenders. The late, great Clark doesn't get enough credit for making some of the best horror movies of the 1970s (and in addition to more or less inventing the slasher genre, he also helped create the teen sex comedy of the ’80s with Porky's). Black Christmas truly is one of the best horror films of the decade—a movie that would be brilliant and important even if it wasn't so influential.
Consider the way that Clark stages the murder of (spoiler) Mrs. MacHenry (Marian Waldman), the house mother. She is alone in the house, or so she thinks. She calls out to the other girls again and again with no response (the only line of dialogue missing is, "This isn't funny..."). She climbs up into the attic and discovers the dead body of one of the girls, asphyxiated by a plastic bag on the head in the movie's most iconic image. Within seconds of registering what she is seeing, she is impaled through the neck on a hook; Clark cuts away just as the hook reaches Mrs. Mac and we hear her screaming off camera. Everything about the shot composition and editing in the scene creates the language of slasher murders for the next 10–15 years, with the only major difference being that later films wouldn't cut away from the hook going into the body, but instead make that moment the reason for the scene's existence—slasher films would eventually be more about the possibilities of makeup effects than about trying to scare us (end of spoiler).
Also established in Black Christmas: ineffectuality of the police and authority figures. They become involved almost from the beginning when the girls call the cops—led by none other than the great John Saxon—after getting the creepy calls. It does not matter. Try as they might, the cops are unable to learn the identity of the killer or stop him before he wipes out almost all of the girls in the house. This is a trope that would carry through many of the most popular slashers that followed, including Carpenter's Halloween (and that's his own daughter that Charles Cypher's Sheriff Brackett can't save), the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (John Saxon again), Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI… the list goes on. The inability of the police to successfully intervene requires Jessica (Hussey) to take matters into her own hands and bring down the killer herself; while it may not have invented the Final Girl, Black Christmas provides us with one of the early examples of a convention that is inextricable from the slasher genre.
The key component of subsequent slashers not codified in Black Christmas is the "gimmick" of the killer; he makes creepy phone calls, sure, leading girls to dub him "The Moaner," but (spoiler) his identity is never learned (end of spoiler). We don't see his face—at least, not that we know of (despite what those who complained about Scream Factory’s original artwork might think, it has since been darkened so as not to reveal the killer’s “identity”). This is something Carpenter would change in creating Michael Myers in Halloween, and something that would influence almost every slasher to follow. Memorable masks and/or weapons became the only way that slashers cranked out during the early ’80s boom could distinguish themselves. Would anyone remember anything about Slaughter High if it wasn't for the jester mask? For all the ways that the original Friday the 13th rips off Halloween, the “whodunit” aspect is one element that comes closer to Black Christmas.
Previously available in a couple of different versions on Blu-ray, Scream Factory’s new two-disc Collector's Edition release of Black Christmas puts past releases to shame with its AV aspects and the number of bonus features included. The feature is presented in a brand new 2K 1080p scan on the first disc in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1; this caused a bit of controversy on the internet when it was first announced (because everything causes controversy on the internet), with many fans declaring that 1.78:1 is the true aspect ratio and Scream Factory’s new transfer would bastardize a classic. The company has addressed these concerns by providing the 1.78:1-framed version on a second disc also in 1080p HD, though without the 2K cleanup… and it shows. If you want to appreciate just how good the new scan looks, check out the untouched HD transfer. Though grain is still visible throughout, the 2K scan offers much more solid color reproduction, better dark sequences, and removes any scratches or debris. It’s beautiful. Disc one contains three commentary tracks: one with director Bob Clark, one with actors John Saxon and Keir Dullea, and one with Nick Mancuso, who provides the phone voice of Billy. There’s also an audio interview with Clark, a filmmaker who I could listen to for hours and who I miss every day.
In addition to the alternate transfer of the feature, the second disc contains a boatload of interviews and featurettes—many of them carried over from past releases, but a few of them new and produced exclusively for this Scream Factory release. Stars Art Hindle and Lynne Griffin appear in most of the bonus features, making them the unofficial ambassadors of Black Christmas: each is interviewed separately in new featurettes, and both appear in the “Black Christmas Legacy” retrospective piece that originally appeared on the “Seasons Grievings” edition from a few years back. Other featurettes included—and there is some overlap, seeing as how these interviews are with many of the same people and appeared on various incarnations of the film’s home video release—are “On Screen! Black Christmas,” “Black Christmas Revisited,” and “12 Days of Black Christmas.” There is footage from a 40th anniversary panel held in 2014, as well as video shot during a midnight revival screening of the movie that Bob Clark attended for a special Q&A. Rounding out the exhaustive bonus features on disc two are archival interviews with Clark, Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, and Art Hindle, plus the usual collection of stills, trailers, TV and radio spots, an alternate title sequence, and two deleted scenes with a restored audio track.
I love Black Christmas. It's partly because it's the rare horror movie that I actually find kind of scary—those phone calls are legitimately creepy, as we can hear a lot of weird voices and screaming but can't really understand what's being said. It's partly because it's a really well-made movie from a director whose output through the ’80s and ’90s served to undermine the great work he was doing in the ’70s for most of the critical community, and it's partly because it helped birth the slasher genre, a sub-genre of horror I'm on record as loving despite the fact that there are so few actual good slashers.
I know there are movies predating this one that paved the way for slashers; perhaps Clark's greatest achievement in Black Christmas is synthesizing those elements that came before into something that most closely resembles the slasher as we would come to know it. I don't think that's it, though. I truly think Bob Clark was on to something, and the popularity of the genre he had such a large hand in shaping over the next 15 years bears that out. Even if Black Christmas isn't technically the first slasher movie, it remains one of the best.
Movie Score: 4.5/5, Disc Score: 4.5/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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