The Black Christmases
"Never be a pioneer", writes Saki through the voice of his immortal Reginald. "The first Christian gets the fattest lion." Black Christmas was one such pioneer, the first true slasher movie. This fact shouldn't be controversial, but it is, because horror fans in general and slasher movie fans in particular tend to be of the stupid sort and are remarkably ill-read in the literature and inexperienced with the genre they claim to love.
I got involved in a nasty and prolonged argument with the Joe Bob Brigs fanbase after Brigs -- whom I love and esteem -- said that Black Christmas isn't the first slasher movie. He used an older narrative that calls Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if not the original slasher movies, at least so influential to the genre that they're in the same family tree -- so to speak.
Sorry y'all, but this narrative -- is just fucking wrong.
Psycho is a crime thriller about a necrophile compelled by an unresolved Oedipal Complex to murder a woman he's attracted to. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is about a cannibal clan of slaughterhouse workers who happen upon a group of young adults and eat them. Those plots are only tangentially related to slasher movies, which are invariably about a masked killer, triggered by some past trauma, seeking projected revenge on a group of kids out partying at an isolated location.
Besides that, slasher movies -- the first wave, with which we're alone concerned -- are cynically calculated machines with but one goal: to make as much money from as many people as possible. To that end they mixed content from a variety of genres -- romantic comedies, raunchy comedies, police procedurals, whatever was making money at the time. As Richard Nowell, the authority on slasher movies, puts it: why would filmmakers use content from a movie made thirty years ago, or another that didn't begin to make a profit until well after the first slasher wave was dead?
Black Christmas (1974) is about a mysterious maniac who breaks into a sorority house on Christmas Eve and makes obscene phone calls and indulges in murderous attacks on the handful of sorority sisters inside. There is a political subplot about the heroine Jess, played by Oliva Hussey, who is pregnant and wants an abortion that her boyfriend is intently insistent that she should not. This is not the place, certainly not the time, to engage in the philosophical or the religious nuances of abortion. Black Christmas fared poorly at the American box office, and in light of that -- perhaps making a movie about abortion right on the heels of Roe vs. Wade was not such a great idea. Its theatrical run was cut short, terminated, ended prematurely,
It was aborted again when a TV spot was planned that coincided with Ted Bundy's Chi Omega rampage; showing it after that would have been as tasteless a thing as showing Blown Away after the Boston Marathon Bombing -- a tasteless thing that actually did happen.
Black Christmas was remade as a dark comedy in 2006 and an unintentional comedy in 2019, both of which I'll get to in their proper place. While the original isn't a bad movie, it suffers from a sense of self-importance and doesn't hold up well on repeated viewings. The central fault of Black Christmas is that is uses a red herring so retrospectively ridiculous that it makes the movie dumber each time you watch it.
Red herrings were a popular plot device in first-wave slasher movies. Perhaps the best use of one is in April Fool's Day, which has such an effective red herring it distracts the murders right out of the movie. Perhaps the worse use of one is in Happy Birthday to Me, which uses a red herring so far-fetched it makes the fantastic premise of Face Off look tame and reserved.
The red herring of Black Christmas is the boyfriend, Peter. Throughout the obscene calls and mostly bloodless murders we are led to think and ultimately believe that he is the killer. This stupid idea gets worse the more you think about it. The only motives Peter could have for killing the sorority sisters are psychotic ones or anger over Jess's abortion. I'll destroy each in turn.
Peter can't be psychotic -- despite the movie's pathetic attempts to make him seem so -- because Jess dated or at least fucked him one good time and it just seems implausible that a rational, perceptive woman like Jess would date, much less have unprotected sex, with a complete loon. The 2006 remake is smart enough to avoid this with its Peter replacement, Kyle -- whose worst sin is making a sex tape that his current sorority squeeze discovers, along with the unappetizing fact that he had been squeezing another sister and perhaps the whole sororal squad for some time before. The sex tape itself is one of the funnier things in that movie because Kyle actually breaks the fucking fourth wall a la Patrick Bateman and can't pretend afterward that the sister herself made the tape instead.
Black X-Mas: putting the X in toxic masculinity.
The 2019 remake abstracts its red herring by using its political content, not to distract you from the real killer, but from how bad the movie is. This is a movie that wants to be evaluated politically, that indeed begs to be argued with, but doesn't contain one political argument to take issue with. There simply isn't a statement or thesis or anything resembling a theme: there's an insufferable rape-themed rendition of "Up on the Housetop", and a barrage of Twitter mantras hash-tagged in dialogue, but no argument. Even the killer's motives are obscure and abstruse: the villain is a fraternity headed by Carey Elwes that wants -- to put women in their place? a return to the Patriarchy that is already in full operational swing? A Patriarchy so omnipotent indeed that the entire plot of the movie couldn't happen without it, which creates a paradox because the villains are motivated by a lack of Patriarchy, so therefore the movie operates in two mutually exclusive planes of existence: one where the Patriarchy exists and doesn't believe women and won't cancel Elwes and his white supremacist classics class, and one in which that same man is pissed about sitting on the sidelines and threatened with losing his career and reputation by a sorority girl. And all this mixed with incessant, incoherent activist rhetoric without a dash of self-awareness that it's coming from a member of a sorority, an institution as elitist and exclusive as any classics curriculum at a university that is itself elitist and exclusive.
The original movie doesn't make Peter hate women; in fact, he loves Jess enough to want to marry her. A true misogynist would high tale it to the hills at the mere first syllable of "pregnant". But could the abortion itself motivate him to murder?
That idea is even more stupid than the psychotic motive. The first victim, Clare, is murdered well before Peter knows Jess is pregnant, and the obscene calls had been going on long before too. Did Peter murder Clare because he had a premonition that Jess was pregnant and would want an abortion? Why would he make the phone calls?
The abortion motive is made still more stupid as the movie runs on. If a mere premonition caused Peter to murder Clare, why doesn't he explode into a mass murdering rampage after he knows about the abortion? If he was dangerous enough to kill Clare, he wouldn't have stalked the sisters for a prolonged time, all while making pointless prank calls, after -- by the way-- going far afield to murder a teenage girl for no reason, all murders that have no bearing on the abortion and would only make Jess paranoid and anxious. If he murdered Clare before he knew about the abortion, a fortiori, he would have murdered the other sisters swiftly and with manic overkill -- hallmarks of the crimes of passion we are supposed to believe Peter is the author of. But the actual killer just sits up in the attic, taking his sweet lunatic time, rocking Clare's dead body in the rocking chair and occasionally throwing a Tommy Wiseau grade fit.
The murders and the obscene phone calls, before and after the abortion comes into play, make no sense whatever. No one would make nasty calls for no reason and murder his girlfriend's friends over her projected abortion. No one -- unless he was using some darkly elaborate dating strategy.
Unless--
Unless Peter was using the DENNIS system.
Ah -- now it all makes sense. Peter was making the obscene phone calls and killing off Jess's friends so he could nurture Jess's dependence. Indeed, he probably had no intention of marrying her anyway; he wanted her to have the baby only to add further dependence just before he inspired hope and ultimately slinked off into the night, never to be seen again.
Poor Jess. If she had only let Peter go on with his funny games he would have left her on his own accord. But the movie ends with Jess killing him under the sudden, stupid inference that he's the killer, an inference that John Saxon, the detective trying to catch the killer, also believes. A belief that, in the end, leaves Jess completely vulnerable to the real killer and probably dead before the credits finish rolling.
Despite this fault, the 1974 Black Christmas isn't terrible -- it just suffers from the lack of focus and refined structure all prototypes do. The 2006 remake is generally reviled by critics who find its cartoonish gore distasteful. But oh do they love the hilariously bad 2019 remake, which will age about as well as a fermented turd.
The ending of that movie involves a spiel from Elwes that has to be heard to be believed. A bust of the founder of the University, who is hilariously quoted at the beginning of the credits, is taken down because he was a racist, etc... etc... so on and so forth. It now resides at a frat house where -- and I am not fucking kidding -- it oozes black blood or semen or some such bodily fluid that the frat boys dip their fingers into and draw the Greek letters of their frat on their heads so as to gain toxic masculinity powers and take back the power from women, starting with all the sororities and, presumably, thereafter the world. Then Imogen Poots picks up the bust and smashes it, causing the frat boys to lose their powers and lose the concluding fight with the sorority sisters that they were already losing, toxic masculinity powers notwithstanding.
And so Black Christmas evolves from a flawed original, then into a dark comedy, and finally into an unintentional comedy -- thus representing in a microcosm the evolution of the very genre it created. Slasher movies are at their best with a heavy dose of dark comedy and goofy gore, which is present in all the great ones and replaced in all the bad ones with pungent politics and in-movie referrals to conventions the better movies never used. Horror movies in general have been pretty bad these last decades, but with movies like X showing that dark comedy can still be done well, there is perhaps reason enough to suppose the genre isn't completely exhausted.
"Never be a pioneer", writes Saki through the voice of his immortal Reginald. "The first Christian gets the fattest lion." Black Christmas was one such pioneer, the first true slasher movie. This fact shouldn't be controversial, but it is, because horror fans in general and slasher movie fans in particular tend to be of the stupid sort and are remarkably ill-read in the literature and inexperienced with the genre they claim to love.
I got involved in a nasty and prolonged argument with the Joe Bob Brigs fanbase after Brigs -- whom I love and esteem -- said that Black Christmas isn't the first slasher movie. He used an older narrative that calls Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if not the original slasher movies, at least so influential to the genre that they're in the same family tree -- so to speak.
Sorry y'all, but this narrative -- is just fucking wrong.
Psycho is a crime thriller about a necrophile compelled by an unresolved Oedipal Complex to murder a woman he's attracted to. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is about a cannibal clan of slaughterhouse workers who happen upon a group of young adults and eat them. Those plots are only tangentially related to slasher movies, which are invariably about a masked killer, triggered by some past trauma, seeking projected revenge on a group of kids out partying at an isolated location.
Besides that, slasher movies -- the first wave, with which we're alone concerned -- are cynically calculated machines with but one goal: to make as much money from as many people as possible. To that end they mixed content from a variety of genres -- romantic comedies, raunchy comedies, police procedurals, whatever was making money at the time. As Richard Nowell, the authority on slasher movies, puts it: why would filmmakers use content from a movie made thirty years ago, or another that didn't begin to make a profit until well after the first slasher wave was dead?
Black Christmas (1974) is about a mysterious maniac who breaks into a sorority house on Christmas Eve and makes obscene phone calls and indulges in murderous attacks on the handful of sorority sisters inside. There is a political subplot about the heroine Jess, played by Oliva Hussey, who is pregnant and wants an abortion that her boyfriend is intently insistent that she should not. This is not the place, certainly not the time, to engage in the philosophical or the religious nuances of abortion. Black Christmas fared poorly at the American box office, and in light of that -- perhaps making a movie about abortion right on the heels of Roe vs. Wade was not such a great idea. Its theatrical run was cut short, terminated, ended prematurely,
It was aborted again when a TV spot was planned that coincided with Ted Bundy's Chi Omega rampage; showing it after that would have been as tasteless a thing as showing Blown Away after the Boston Marathon Bombing -- a tasteless thing that actually did happen.
Black Christmas was remade as a dark comedy in 2006 and an unintentional comedy in 2019, both of which I'll get to in their proper place. While the original isn't a bad movie, it suffers from a sense of self-importance and doesn't hold up well on repeated viewings. The central fault of Black Christmas is that is uses a red herring so retrospectively ridiculous that it makes the movie dumber each time you watch it.
Red herrings were a popular plot device in first-wave slasher movies. Perhaps the best use of one is in April Fool's Day, which has such an effective red herring it distracts the murders right out of the movie. Perhaps the worse use of one is in Happy Birthday to Me, which uses a red herring so far-fetched it makes the fantastic premise of Face Off look tame and reserved.
The red herring of Black Christmas is the boyfriend, Peter. Throughout the obscene calls and mostly bloodless murders we are led to think and ultimately believe that he is the killer. This stupid idea gets worse the more you think about it. The only motives Peter could have for killing the sorority sisters are psychotic ones or anger over Jess's abortion. I'll destroy each in turn.
Peter can't be psychotic -- despite the movie's pathetic attempts to make him seem so -- because Jess dated or at least fucked him one good time and it just seems implausible that a rational, perceptive woman like Jess would date, much less have unprotected sex, with a complete loon. The 2006 remake is smart enough to avoid this with its Peter replacement, Kyle -- whose worst sin is making a sex tape that his current sorority squeeze discovers, along with the unappetizing fact that he had been squeezing another sister and perhaps the whole sororal squad for some time before. The sex tape itself is one of the funnier things in that movie because Kyle actually breaks the fucking fourth wall a la Patrick Bateman and can't pretend afterward that the sister herself made the tape instead.
Black X-Mas: putting the X in toxic masculinity.
The 2019 remake abstracts its red herring by using its political content, not to distract you from the real killer, but from how bad the movie is. This is a movie that wants to be evaluated politically, that indeed begs to be argued with, but doesn't contain one political argument to take issue with. There simply isn't a statement or thesis or anything resembling a theme: there's an insufferable rape-themed rendition of "Up on the Housetop", and a barrage of Twitter mantras hash-tagged in dialogue, but no argument. Even the killer's motives are obscure and abstruse: the villain is a fraternity headed by Carey Elwes that wants -- to put women in their place? a return to the Patriarchy that is already in full operational swing? A Patriarchy so omnipotent indeed that the entire plot of the movie couldn't happen without it, which creates a paradox because the villains are motivated by a lack of Patriarchy, so therefore the movie operates in two mutually exclusive planes of existence: one where the Patriarchy exists and doesn't believe women and won't cancel Elwes and his white supremacist classics class, and one in which that same man is pissed about sitting on the sidelines and threatened with losing his career and reputation by a sorority girl. And all this mixed with incessant, incoherent activist rhetoric without a dash of self-awareness that it's coming from a member of a sorority, an institution as elitist and exclusive as any classics curriculum at a university that is itself elitist and exclusive.
The original movie doesn't make Peter hate women; in fact, he loves Jess enough to want to marry her. A true misogynist would high tale it to the hills at the mere first syllable of "pregnant". But could the abortion itself motivate him to murder?
That idea is even more stupid than the psychotic motive. The first victim, Clare, is murdered well before Peter knows Jess is pregnant, and the obscene calls had been going on long before too. Did Peter murder Clare because he had a premonition that Jess was pregnant and would want an abortion? Why would he make the phone calls?
The abortion motive is made still more stupid as the movie runs on. If a mere premonition caused Peter to murder Clare, why doesn't he explode into a mass murdering rampage after he knows about the abortion? If he was dangerous enough to kill Clare, he wouldn't have stalked the sisters for a prolonged time, all while making pointless prank calls, after -- by the way-- going far afield to murder a teenage girl for no reason, all murders that have no bearing on the abortion and would only make Jess paranoid and anxious. If he murdered Clare before he knew about the abortion, a fortiori, he would have murdered the other sisters swiftly and with manic overkill -- hallmarks of the crimes of passion we are supposed to believe Peter is the author of. But the actual killer just sits up in the attic, taking his sweet lunatic time, rocking Clare's dead body in the rocking chair and occasionally throwing a Tommy Wiseau grade fit.
The murders and the obscene phone calls, before and after the abortion comes into play, make no sense whatever. No one would make nasty calls for no reason and murder his girlfriend's friends over her projected abortion. No one -- unless he was using some darkly elaborate dating strategy.
Unless--
Unless Peter was using the DENNIS system.
Ah -- now it all makes sense. Peter was making the obscene phone calls and killing off Jess's friends so he could nurture Jess's dependence. Indeed, he probably had no intention of marrying her anyway; he wanted her to have the baby only to add further dependence just before he inspired hope and ultimately slinked off into the night, never to be seen again.
Poor Jess. If she had only let Peter go on with his funny games he would have left her on his own accord. But the movie ends with Jess killing him under the sudden, stupid inference that he's the killer, an inference that John Saxon, the detective trying to catch the killer, also believes. A belief that, in the end, leaves Jess completely vulnerable to the real killer and probably dead before the credits finish rolling.
Despite this fault, the 1974 Black Christmas isn't terrible -- it just suffers from the lack of focus and refined structure all prototypes do. The 2006 remake is generally reviled by critics who find its cartoonish gore distasteful. But oh do they love the hilariously bad 2019 remake, which will age about as well as a fermented turd.
The ending of that movie involves a spiel from Elwes that has to be heard to be believed. A bust of the founder of the University, who is hilariously quoted at the beginning of the credits, is taken down because he was a racist, etc... etc... so on and so forth. It now resides at a frat house where -- and I am not fucking kidding -- it oozes black blood or semen or some such bodily fluid that the frat boys dip their fingers into and draw the Greek letters of their frat on their heads so as to gain toxic masculinity powers and take back the power from women, starting with all the sororities and, presumably, thereafter the world. Then Imogen Poots picks up the bust and smashes it, causing the frat boys to lose their powers and lose the concluding fight with the sorority sisters that they were already losing, toxic masculinity powers notwithstanding.
And so Black Christmas evolves from a flawed original, then into a dark comedy, and finally into an unintentional comedy -- thus representing in a microcosm the evolution of the very genre it created. Slasher movies are at their best with a heavy dose of dark comedy and goofy gore, which is present in all the great ones and replaced in all the bad ones with pungent politics and in-movie referrals to conventions the better movies never used. Horror movies in general have been pretty bad these last decades, but with movies like X showing that dark comedy can still be done well, there is perhaps reason enough to suppose the genre isn't completely exhausted.