Sign in Subscribe
Horror

This is a Sorority House, Not a Convent

On Puritans, Bombs Under Tables, and Slashers

Tom Humberstone

• 5 min read
This is a Sorority House, Not a Convent

Black Christmas (1974) Dir. Bob Clark

Just before winter break, a house of sorority sisters find themselves stalked by a killer who keeps calling them.

“Could that really be just one person?” - Clare

“No, Clare, it's the Mormon Tabernacle Choir making their annual obscene phone call.” - Barb

Happy Friday the 13th to all who celebrate!

In keeping with the date, I thought it would be a good day to talk slashers. Black Christmas being one of my absolute favourites.

Slashers are an odd, ever-evolving beast in horror. Largely a sub-genre that grew out of the Italian giallos of the sixties and seventies, the modern slasher has morphed into a way for horror to cross-pollinate with high-concept sci-fi like Back to the Future, Groundhog Day and Freaky Friday (Totally Killer, Happy Death Day and Freaky respectively). Before that, we had the meta-horror of Scream and the Nineties Teen Horror Cycle. 

But before all that, we had to have the seventies and eighties slashers which established “the rules”.

“The rules” are something we all inherently understand now, with Scream (and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and There’s Nothing Out There before it) codifying it on screen. But it was Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws that first really highlighted and critiqued these familiar tropes.

What are they? Well, there are two major ones:

  1. There needs to be a “final girl” who dispatches the killer with the phallic weapon he’s been using to kill with.
  2. There need to be a bunch of bloody, dead teenagers who have been punished for a variety of sins that don’t conform to a conservative, puritanical worldview. 

I think, because I’ve internalised this about some of the older “classic” slashers, I’ve always been a bit reluctant to go back and watch a lot of them. As such, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I finally sat down to watch Black Christmas, braced for a bit of regressive, puritanical horror. 

How wrong I was.

Because Black Christmas is not that. Those rules above are not present. There’s no gratuitious nudity, no leering camera. That it came out before Halloween (which unintentionally - and regretfully - set the conservative blueprint for all slashers to come) is important here I think. Although you can point to giallos and films like Peeping Tom and Psycho, Black Christmas was still being made without slashers being a sub-genre with conventions. 

What becomes very clear when watching Black Christmas, is that everything that it inspired clearly took the wrong lessons from it. Our “final girl” - Jess - has not only had sex, but she’s pregnant and planning on an abortion. She never wavers from that conviction either. It shouldn’t, but this in itself feels like a refreshing choice in a film. Even now. Maybe especially now.

All of the women at the sorority house feel like actual, lived-in characters and not just archetypes being herded into a pen for slaughter. You find yourself caring about each of them. The very first to die, Clare, who has the least screen time, becomes represented by her father who has come to collect her for the holidays. Her absence is felt. The tragedy clear on his face when the reality of her fate becomes unavoidable. 

“Oh, why don't you go find a wall socket and stick your tongue in it? That'll give you a charge.” - Barb

Which brings me to Margot Kidder and Barb. Possibly the best character in horror of all time. A lush with misdirected rage issues and someone who will happily feed whiskey to an underage child in the background of a scene. Or discuss how turtles mate for three days in an entirely inappropriate moment. She’s completely unhelpful in this scenario of course, and arguably makes everyone’s lives harder by making a blowjob joke to a cop. But Kidder plays her with such a gleeful, sardonic edge that it’s hard not to want the entire film to be about her. There’s so much backstory hinted at here, she feels like a real, three dimensional person. Someone who is difficult, imperfect, but likeable. 

All the men in the film, bar John Saxon, are generally useless, or dangerous. Mr. Harrison spends most of his time judging the women and they treat him with the thinly veiled contempt he deserves. Peter, Jess’ controlling boyfriend, is just a walking red flag. Manipulative, entitled and completely vile. Without the presence of Saxon, the police are not just unhelpful but tend to make situations worse. I think the film is good at subtly pointing out sexism in the police station scenes: with the police not paying any attention to the women until one of their boyfriends makes an appearance to lend their worries “legitimacy”. 

And the film is creepy. The final moments as the credits roll are genuinely unsettling and because all the characters feel real, there’s a palpable tension throughout the film. That’s largely because this is the origin of the “call was coming from inside the house” trope (or at least, the first on screen version of the urban legend). I don’t think that’s a big spoiler because we, as the audience, know this very early on in the film. And that’s where all the tension comes from. We know what the characters don’t. The bomb is under the table.

I’ve barely scratched the surface. I could write an entirely separate essay just on some of the directing choices. The use of split diopter lenses, the use of colour, the way the film feels like a gothic horror… But I’m trying to keep these relatively short.

Black Christmas is so good and I’m looking forward to making it a regular fixture of my Christmas film line-up every December.

My partner and I also still find ourselves doing an over-the-top Olivia Hussey RP accent whenever we say “Hello? HeLLoooo?” but that could just be us. Wait, I just Googled this and no, it’s not just us.

Where can I watch it in the UK?

You can stream it for free on Shout or rent it for £1.99 from Amazon/Apple.

Pairs well with

Keeping it all slasher, no filler, I’d recommend Blood and Black Lace (1966, dir. Mario Bava, available to stream for free on FreeVee or Arrow). It’s a giallo, so another slasher before conventions get formalised. It’s beautiful to look at too. Somehow Bava gets colours to pop on screen in ways you don’t see anywhere else. If you can get past the Beautiful Dead Girls sexism and male gaze of the giallos, I think this is one of the better ones.

Further Reading
Other Recommendations
  • This is fun: A screening of the 1922 classic Nosferatu with a live score. It’s at Leith Depot in Edinburgh. Apologies to anyone who doesn’t live in Edinburgh for all these local recommendations I keep doing.
  • There’s a cat in Black Christmas called Claude and I think this might be a good time to talk about the website: Does The Dog Die. It’s a good way to find trigger warnings for most films. Spoiler: Claude survives.