Post by The Human Being on Dec 14, 2013 13:24:09 GMT -6
2013 CZ Advent Calendar - December 11th
Black Christmas
by Stingo the Bandana Origami Pro
Black Christmas
by Stingo the Bandana Origami Pro
Okay, I'm going to get this out of the way right up front: Black Christmas is a Christmas movie in the same way In Bruges [edited to prevent glaz having an aneurysm] or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang are Christmas movies. The Christmas setting is more adjacent (to borrow a term) to the story rather than a driving force behind it. No lessons are learned, no hearts warmed-- in fact, I'm not even entirely sure there's ever a Christmas tree in a shot. There's a brief opening of presents, but the gift is mainly a joke. Oh yeah, and also people are gruesomely murdered.
It might be accurate, though, to call Black Christmas a winter movie. The cold and the darkness of the season play an important part in the atmosphere of the film. You see, there's a killer loose in a small college town. The sorority house around which nearly all of the action centers has been receiving disturbing phone calls from a man who first just moans and grunts into the receiver, but then escalates into screaming in multiple voices while calling the women of the sorority various names. This is why it's key that the movie is set in the dead of winter-- the juxtaposition of the warm, well-lit house with the snowy, overcast, dark outdoors makes the shattering of the peace and safety of the house all the more unsettling.
And there's no getting around it: this is one unsettling movie. The creepiness begins right away, with a pseudo-first-person camera shot of a man sneaking his way around the house, peering in windows at the party going on inside. It's similar camerawork to what John Carpenter would use four years later in Halloween; however, the man here is no silent, emotionless Personification of Evil. He's horribly, disturbingly human, which is made clear almost immediately. We see his shadow, we hear his short, rasping breaths, backed at times by an even-more-disturbing mucuous-y sound, we see his hands as he climbs a lattice to infiltrate the house. These noticeably human attributes don't in any way make him less of a threatening figure, though, as the movie uses this extended shot to indicate. He's the darkness that encroaches upon the light.
Speaking of darkness, one of the really stand-out parts of the movie is the use of shadows and framing to create tension. You never once get a real look at the killer-- in fact, the most of him you ever see clearly is one single eye. This is where Bob Clark's direction really makes an impression, with the well-lit lower floor of the house making the somewhat darker upper floor seem foreboding even before the bodies start dropping.
Despite (or, more likely, because of) being one of the first slasher movies, Black Christmas gives in to very few of the cliches that typically drag entries in the genre down. The young women here are all recognizable individuals, not just interchangeable roles like The Nerd, The Hot One, The Virgin, ex chethera. None of the characters do things that leave you yelling "Don't do that!" at them. There's one dumb, obstinate cop, but he's the whipping boy of the police station that is otherwise composed of competent officers (including the Dennis Quaid of his time, John Saxon).
Many of the descendants of this movie have missed the forest for the trees, assuming that what makes the movie great are the killings, and not the moments in between the killings, when the characters talk to each other and seem like real people; and, yes, also when those phone calls, those disturbing phone calls, come. For me, those are the moments of real horror in the movie: the sound of an insane man babbling just coherently enough for a listener to put together bits and awful pieces of his reasons for terrorizing these young women, but never enough that there's a true explanation for his actions. Like the Shape in Halloween, the killer's motivations are left largely unclear, because-- and again, this is something that too many movies forget-- the unknown is so much scarier than the known could ever be.
And then, just when you think it's all over, there's that one final, horrible moment...
Stray Observations
- Gotta point out a couple of great set design choices here: 1) the painting of the flower behind Clare looks suspiciously like an eye-- and what do you know, she's being watched by the killer during that scene; and 2) the skull in Barbara's bedroom watching over her as she's stabbed to death
- Bob Clark also directed A Christmas Story. How's that for a double feature?
- I like that they didn't even bother trying to hide Olivia Hussey's accent
- Yeah, pretty sure this is the (film) origin of the "the calls are coming from inside the house!" twist