BLACK CHRISTMAS: Giving Your Audience the Creeps By Giving them Almost Everything the Need to Know
It’s our first dive into full throttle spooky season. It is now societally appropriate to spend one’s evenings curled up in blankets watching people die violently on screen while running the gambit of emotions between deep discomfort to sheer disgust and panic. I am not particularly well-versed in the world of horror movies. I’m what most people would call a yellow-bellied chicken on a good day and a blubbering baby on a bad day. I don’t like being scared. Never have. Some choice interactions with iconic films in the horror movie world have cemented that in me. So I asked for some help. A friend of mine, who also is one of the founding members and producers of Human Pincushion Productions (here’s their YouTube channel, They’ve been making really dope short horror films), set me up with a list of four movies that “no one talks about as much” but they deemed as good horror movies to watch throughout the eras. I said thank you, and proceeded to procrastinate for the next month. I really REALLY did not want to do this; but, I promised spooky season content to readers, and well, a little to myself as well. So, here we go.
The first movie on the list was Black Christmas (you can watch it here for free with ads) a movie from 1974, set in a sorority house in what appears to be any New England or Upper Midwest college town in the US. The setting, and a few other aspects of the story are very nondescript; but it’s that very blandness that sets up an incredibly tense and uncomfortable watch.
From the get go, the audience knows exactly where the killer is and exactly how much danger the girls in the house are because of his location. The audience is helpless as it watches these characters continue to mill about in this house, consumed with their own yuletide woes and personal problems. All the while, there’s an unknown and much more sinister danger under their own roof only to be reminded of it when the killer calls the house. It is one of the most incredible uses of the horror trope of the audience going “Don’t go in there!” “Why are you doing that?” “What makes you think that’s a good idea?” I’ve ever seen. Because the audience knows there’s a problem, and the characters don’t, it immediately brings the viewer to the edge of their seat. This great use of this idea is however something that hinders the movie in an aspect I wasn’t expecting.
I had some severe pacing problems with this movie. Me and the folks I watched it with, and I am the most patient of that duo, were both just always waiting for the next kill, the next gratification of the knowledge we’d had since the beginning of the movie. We knew the characters were in imminent danger. We fully grasped that concept, and the tension mounting and giving of some information occasionally conflicts each other. It’s frustrating. Especially if one goes into Black Christmas as blind as I did. I was expecting, granted, with my limited knowledge I probably shouldn’t have been expecting anything, and this could possibly be a deal breaker for some people who are thinking of giving this a try. Before you decide against it however, I need to talk about when it does, actually get gruesome.
This seems paradoxical to mention immediately after expressing pacing problems with the movie, but the gruesome scenes, the deaths, where you get exactly what you’re expecting, are spectacular. Those scenes (specifically one involving a center piece from Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie) are almost worth the wait but if you get easily bored, it may fall a little flat.
It’s really my only gripe. I think the camera work, specifically with the killer entering the house and a couple other key moments are fantastic, and definitely give an audience member looking to get scared the stomach drop they want.
Is Black Christmas a perfect slasher? No. I certainly didn’t think so. However, after discussing it with my friend who suggested it, we discussed its pacing issues, and they mentioned pretty casually it’s more of an ‘uncomfortable mood piece’. And THAT, THAT is exactly what Black Christmas gives its viewers. I’m not hyperbolizing when I say I was uncomfortable the entire film. There are parts where that discomfort shifted to apprehension, to downright fear, but the whole baseline feeling from the very first shot, a house decorated beautifully for Christmas with an eerie crew of carolers and a whistling wind that sounds exactly like one would imagine from a Poe story.
So even with the imperfections I found with it (which, these are subjective I’d give it a watch if you have differing views on movie pacing than me), it was a great pick for starting this spooky season. I’m sure the others that are planned will all have their own baseline emotion, and I’m excited to find out what they are.
