Coming home for the horrifying holidays
House that had an imposing character all its own helped inspire the slasher-flick genre
Unnoticed by passersby and often unmarked by plaques, numerous Toronto addresses with big parts to play in cultural history sit mostly uncelebrated. In our series Local Legends, we tell you about them and put them on your mental map.
In the early 1970s, actor Lynne Griffin was in her early 20s and establishing herself as an ingenue type on Toronto and Stratford stages, in the early days of Canadian theatre. After coming off the world premiere of David French’s family drama Leaving Home — now famously known as part of French’s Mercer Trilogy — at Tarragon Theatre, Griffin’s next project introduced her to a new group of sisters in a stately home not far from the Tarragon, in the neighbourhood of St. Clair Ave. and Avenue Rd.
“I remember it as a very, very friendly place. That was one of the fun things about working on a project over a number of weeks, you really get to feel like those people were part of your family. Especially when you’re going to a house every day, it really starts to feel like your family home,” Griffin told the Star.
Griffin’s new family included Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin and more, as well as the film director Bob Clark. Before the successes of A Christmas Story and Porky’s, Clark had recently moved to Toronto from the United States and was making his first Canadian feature film. Griffin remembers enjoying the opening party scene, which was largely unscripted and unfolded much like a real sorority-house yuletide soirée, including her first onscreen kiss with actor Art Hindle, who played her character’s boyfriend.
Of course, anyone familiar with Clark’s 1974 seminal Canadian horror film Black Christmas knows that wintertime cheer doesn’t last long in this sorority house. Disturbing calls harass the sisters and get increasingly unhinged, until the young women start disappearing one by one — attacked by an unknown man who hides in the home’s attic, placing phone calls from within the house itself. Griffin plays Claire, the film’s first victim, whose grisly death by plastic bag has since become the poster image of Black Christmas and an unforgettable moment in horrorfilm history.
“I think I got the part because I was a good swimmer and I could hold my breath for a long time,” Griffin said, laughing. Besides that opening party scene, her work was done in the attic, where Claire’s body is infamously kept sitting in a rocking chair in front of a small circular window that looks out onto the home’s front yard on Clarendon Cres.
“We filmed entirely in the house. It was so cool the way it was laid out; it had every kind of wonderful potential for a horror movie,” Griffin said.
“It’s very big, it’s on a very private street, the architecture and style of the house matches the other University of Toronto locations that (Clark) was shooting. It does seem kind of the perfect house to use for his setting,” said Paul Corupe, editor of Canuxploitation.com.
The dark polished wood and its contrast to its Christmas lights decorating the banisters, the large staircase, the trellis on the side of the house that the killer climbs to enter it, the square wooden crawl space to access the attic: all of these elements are now signature to Black Christmas, a modestly budgeted Canadian film that inspired the slasher genre.
“Previously, a lot of the things we associate with slasher horror — the guy in the mask with the knife, hiding in the house, killing off teens one by one — they were percolating in different areas at the time. But Black Christmas was one of the first films to actually coalesce these elements into what eventually became the slasher formula,” Corupe said.
He further noted that a conversation between Clark and John Carpenter is said to have inspired Halloween, when Clark said if he ever did do a sequel to Black Christmas, which he didn’t plan on doing, it would be set with the same killer returning to the same house on that holiday.
“I don’t think we’d have final girls the way we do now without Black Christmas,” said Alex West, a horror film critic and co-host of the podcast The Faculty of Horror, referring to Hussey’s character Jess, the film’s main character, whose pro-choice opinions and independence were a noteworthy portrayal of young womanhood in a 1970s slasher film.
“There’s a claustrophobic, gothic sense to it. It’s not at summer camp or that suburban cul-de-sac, it feels like a very tactile place where these young modern women are trying to figure out their lives for the first time. They’re surrounded by this Victorian manor, which dominates them with all of these dark corners and crevices where people can hide,” she said. “There is a really distinct contrast between the characters’ values and the esthetic quality of the house.”
The quality of the film and its portrayal of womanhood is partly why Black Christmas has recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among younger horror fans in the last decade.
“Once Facebook came around, people started to rediscover the film and fans started to rediscover the people who were in Black Christmas,” said Griffin, who now attends two to three conventions a year to meet fans of the film (sometimes posing with a plastic bag, striking the iconic pose).
“I don’t know if there was that huge a market for horror movies at the time — these films were very much under the radar. They were new. People were used to watching (Disney) every Sunday night.”
Though it had moderate box-office success, Black Christmas is a cult favourite, playing at the Royal Cinema every December as a holiday tradition. That’s something that the current owners of 6 Clarendon Cres., may not appreciate, given the privacy of the street the house resides on and the pristine neighbourhood it dwells within.
But it still draws a few ardent fans to view the house for itself.
“It’s just a house in the middle of the street; it’s not a house on a hill, it’s in a community,” West said.
“When you look at the house, it’s this big beautiful home I could only really ever dream of affording — but there’s just still an eerie quality. You could definitely still pick it out. But that might be because I associate it with the film so strongly.”
Corupe, on the other hand, prefers to leave the filmed version untarnished in his memory.
“Sometimes you visit those movie locations and they don’t seem quite so ominous as you imagined. Seeing it in broad daylight in July might not produce the same effect.”
Griffin has only visited the house once since wrapping the film, in a walk-through with Hindle for the 25th-anniversary DVD release. But she still has only fond memories of the experience.
“Maybe it’s time for another visit,” she said.
“Not to go up to the attic, though.”