A LOCAL FAVOURITE
More than horror, Black Christmas is the quintessential Canadian story Justine Smith
In 1972, Margaret Atwood published Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, a thesis on survival as the unifying theme in Canadian literature. Two years later, Canadian slasher film Black Christmas exemplified its ideas by portraying young women in a sorority house surviving against an invisible threat.
The film opens with a howling wind that pushes the characters inside, but what happens when the threat also is coming from inside the house? As the sorority girls are discussing holiday plans, a grunting and unfocused first-person camera is drawn inside by an open door. Shortly thereafter, we get the first of many obscene phone calls. A mouth-breather calls out for Billy, grunting and slobbering on the other end. The girls are shaken, but brush it off. The violence against them escalates, however, when one of the sisters goes missing. They go to the police to report it, but are met with jokes and sneers. The bleakness of Black Christmas ultimately is rooted in the failures of the police force to legitimize the real and escalating concerns of these women, putting them in further danger.
Released before movies such as Halloween, Black Christmas negates the notyet-established tropes of the dumb slasher victims by featuring young women who are bright and vivacious. They are fallen not by bad morality or poor decisions, but rather, seemingly random cruelty and sustained police mishandling. Even as the characters do everything “right,” the system fails them repeatedly.
The creeping sense of dread from these failings further escalates as the men in the film become increasingly untrustworthy. After Jess tells her boyfriend she is pregnant and going to have an abortion, he is infuriated. He becomes a threat equal to the howling wind and the crude mouth-breather. To survive Black Christmas, the sorority girls don’t just have to avoid a monstrous killer, they must navigate a broken social system that would rather police women’s bodies than keep them safe.
Almost the whole soundtrack is filled with the overbearing sound of wind. The sorority house, while lit with warm tones of brown and amber, is never made to feel welcoming or safe. More a prison than a respite from the cold, it’s a cavernous enclosed space that acts as a Canadian version of a gilded cage. In fact, the danger is locked in with the symbolically enclosed women rather than made to be kept out.
While Atwood was writing about Canadian literature, when she wrote her essay about survival, her ideas apply, too, to Black Christmas: “Surely the central Canadian experience is death and the central mystery is ‘what goes on in the coffin.’” More than the cold and the broad Ontario accents of the supporting cast, the film’s true horror is revealed as a larger pattern of unending dread and impossible survival. It is the uncertainty that is unveiled in the final moments before the credits roll that makes Black Christmas a quintessentially Canadian masterpiece.