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‘Black Christmas’ & ‘Silent Night, Bloody Night’ Make for the Perfect Creepy Christmas Double Feature

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Pictured: 'Black Christmas'

What do Black Christmas and Silent Night, Bloody Night have in common? 

Blurry first-person POV? Check. Mouth-breathing killer? Double check. Creepy phone calls? Triple Check. In both Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) and Theodore Gershuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), an unknown killer stalks their victims around the Christmas season, both striking terror and intrigue. Each entry succeeds to varying degrees in balancing cheer and fear; one becoming a holiday classic and the other a largely-forgotten gem. As a slasherific double feature, this holiday season brings a little goodwill and a whole lotta torture.

Gene Siskel once called Black Christmas a “routine shocker,” giving it a measly 1.5 out of 4 stars. That’s a paltry review for a tightly-wound and tense proto-slasher that helped catapult the slasher genre into the limelight. It might have come four years before Halloween, but it does many of the same things and in some ways, does it exceedingly better.

Unlike its descendant, the killer in Black Christmas lingers in the shadows, both literally and figuratively, for the entire runtime. Billy, as he’s known, stalks sorority girls on a college campus. We’re first introduced to his character within the first five minutes of the film, as he peeks into the windows of the sorority house and eventually climbs a trellis into the attic. There, he flails in anger – knocking over a lampshade, shoving a rocking horse, and then making the space his own makeshift funeral home.

Clark engrains Billy’s aggression towards women into the fabric of the film. From the vulgar phone calls (which include words like “cunt”) to the bursts of violence against the characters, Billy’s actions directly correlate to the treatment of women in society. At the time, a woman’s autonomy was only in its infancy.

It’s hard to imagine there wasn’t specific intent behind giving Jess (Olivia Hussey) a pro-abortion storyline. The film dropped one year after Roe v Wade in the States. While it’s a Canada-made film, it presents itself as a direct response to what was going on just across the border. As far as Canada goes, there was a famous abortion caravan that took place in 1970, a sojourn from Vancouver to Ottawa to liberate the abortion law. Jess and her resolve to have an abortion seems to parallel what was happening right outside her front door.

‘Black Christmas’

With Jess and her friends the target of malice, Black Christmas unravels a potent socio-political allegory about a woman’s right to choose, a willingness to stand up for what is right, and finding the gumption to confront toxic masculinity. Jess’ boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) represents the poison of machismo throbbing in society’s veins, as he makes his anger-filled emotional response Jess’ problem rather than a blinding demonstration of his own fragile ego. “You selfish bitch,” he seethes to her in one of the film’s most appropriately timely scenes. She’s just told him (again) that she plans to have an abortion, and despite his rage, she keeps an even temperament, a striking counterbalance to a society that dictates what she can and can’t do with her own body.

In the end, Jess mistakenly kills Peter, believing him to be the killer, but it’s also a symbolic gesture. It bookends her journey, from a meager sorority girl to a heroic fighter. She had every reason to believe Peter was the killer, his strange, aggressive behavior toward her an indication that something far more sinister simmered below the surface. Of course, Peter wasn’t the killer but his death signified the death of cultural pressures to uphold the patriarchy. “The calls are coming from inside the house” means more than just a plot point – it’s the notion that toxic masculinity is perpetuated by everyone in society, not just by men.

From a stylistic vantage point, Black Christmas utilizes first-person POV to give the film a great sense of foreboding. By sitting in the front seat of the killer’s perspective, the audience is made uncomfortable and downright terrified, in much the same way Peeping Tom (1960) did before it. There’s the suggestion that Billy, who uses different voices in the phone calls, could have a split personality – or at least is so deranged that he’s play-acting every one of his murderous fantasies. The calls pepper throughout the film; each time Jess answers the phone, they grow more peculiar and unsettling. “What are you doing?!” she asks, clearly rattled.

Cinematographer Reg Morris coats the film with a crackling static. Even when the first-person POV isn’t used, it’s as though we’re witnessing the events through an unknown party’s perspective. Even in its quieter moments, you begin to feel claw marks scraping over the images, evoking impending doom as the killer circles closer and closer. As the phone calls grew increasingly violent, and Jess’ friends are picked off one-by-one, Black Christmas does a wonderful job in forcing the viewer to confront the killer themselves. You begin to feel Billy’s words being whispered into your ears, and even feel his breath on the nape of your neck. Its a hair-raising film by all accounts. You can extract the socio-political elements, and it remains an effective little chiller. It does everything horror should do; all this to say, it’s my favorite horror film of all time.

‘Silent Night, Bloody Night’

While Silent Night, Bloody Night has no deep social or political messages, the film does make for a nice pairing with its bolder counterpart. From the tone and feel, it exacts an altogether eerie story about escaped mental patients and revenge, doused in blurry first-person POV and equally chill-inducing phone calls, which aren’t nearly as creepy and unhinged as Billy’s but still do the trick. The film’s edges are frayed, as one might expect in an early ‘70s slasher (shout-out to cinematographer Adam Giffard), and the layers by which Gershuny varnishes the film make for a fascination and gripping watch.

The story is quite simple. Jeffrey (James Patterson) desires to sell the family’s estate, much to the dismay of the town itself. The home harbors dark, terrible secrets – it was the site of a tragic fire incident which killed its original owner and Jeffrey’s grandfather Wilfred – and the townsfolk refuse to allow it to fall into anyone else’s hands. They offer $50,000 in cash for the house, and the exchange is expected to follow through the next morning, courtesy of Jeffrey’s lawyer Carter (Patrick O’Neal). But an unknown killer pops out of the shadows, first slaughtering Carter and his mistress and then many of the townspeople.

One young woman named Diane (Mary Woronov) befriends Jeffrey and finds herself in the center of the killer’s diabolical scheme. As Jeffrey and Diane draw closer to finding out the truth, they must fight for their lives if they have any hope of surviving until morning. Silent Night, Bloody Night (not to be confused with Silent Night, Deadly Night) is as straight-laced and serious as Black Christmas, nary a whiff of camp about it. Despite some wooden acting, the story is compelling enough to keep the viewer hooked until the very end.

As the pieces come unglued, the flawed narrator becomes the viewer. We’ve been given bits and pieces throughout the film, with only our deductive reasoning an avenue by which to solve the mystery. As it turns out, Wilfred is very much alive and has been living in a nearby asylum for 20-odd years. Much like Billy, we rarely get a significant glimpse of the killer. It’s only until the very end when he reveals himself that his visage comes into crystal-clear view, lasting only a few moments before Diane guns him down in the final showdown. 

‘Silent Night, Bloody Night’

With its brisk runtime, clocking in at 83 minutes (including credits), Silent Night, Bloody Night tightens the screws in a way that make you frozen to the core. Given its stylistic similarities to Black Christmas, you wonder if Bob Clark took some inspiration from this film. It would be easy to see why; distilling the unknown killer, the phone calls, and the first-person POV would be a genius move. Even if that is untrue, it’s difficult to untangle each film from one another.

Black Christmas and Silent Night, Bloody Night is the sort of double feature that’ll make your skin crawl. If it doesn’t, that just means your skin is on too tight, as the BC poster art promises. Together, the two films carry both the wonder of Christmas and the fright of never knowing if the killer could very well be standing behind you. We don’t answer phone calls quite like we used to, but the implication of what that could mean is as frightening today as it was 50+ years ago.

Black Christmas & Silent Night, Bloody Night are now streaming on SCREAMBOX.


Double Trouble is a recurring column that pairs up two horror films, past or present, based on theme, style, or story.

Editorials

‘Ju-On: The Curse’ – The Original Movies That Spawned ‘The Grudge’ Franchise

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In a world where over-polished corporate products dominate the media landscape while the ever-growing threat of AI-generated “art” haunts the horizon, I can’t help but remember a story about how Wes Anderson insisted on using real fur on the stop-motion puppets of his animated opus, Fantastic Mr. Fox. When the animators complained that using fur would result in obvious thumbprints and erratic hair movement that would ruin the “illusion” of lifelike movement, the filmmaker explained that these imperfections were the point.

Why am I bringing this up on a horror website? Well, I’ve always been of the opinion that low production value is simply part of the appeal of independent cinema, and nowhere is this more evident than in the horror genre. Rubber monster suits and watery blood effects are a big part of what make even the cheapest scary movies so endearing, and horror fans are uniquely predisposed to look beyond technical limitations in order to appreciate a good story.

One of my favorite examples of this is a certain micro-budget duology that kicked off one of the scariest film series of all time despite some undeniably janky presentation. And as a lifelong fan of low-budget scares, I’d like to invite you to join me down a J-Horror rabbit hole as we explore the criminally underrated origins of the Ju-On/The Grudge franchise.

While most of you are likely already familiar with 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge, the film that helped to kick off the J-Horror craze and established Takashi Shimizu as a master of the craft, a lot of folks don’t realize that this was actually the filmmaker’s third attempt at telling the Saeki family story. In fact, the very first appearance of Kayako and her ghostly son occurred in a couple of 1998 short films made by Shimizu while he was still in film school.

Part of a made-for-TV anthology showcasing the work of up-and-coming Japanese filmmakers (Gakkô no Kaidan G), the shorts attempted to update classic Japanese folk tales for a new generation by incorporating modern elements like helpless high-schoolers and cellphones into old-fashioned ghost stories.

The original Toshio!

Despite some cheap camerawork and drama class make-up effects, Shimizu’s Katasumi and 4444444444 (so titled because the Japanese pronunciation of the number 4 is similar to that of death) were the clear highlights of the spooky collection despite being much shorter than the other segments. That’s why it was only natural that the director’s next project would be a feature-length expansion of these ideas produced for the direct-to-video market.

Coming up with an extensive mythology surrounding his murderous ghosts and realizing that he had a potential hit on his hands, Shimizu ended up making the risky decision to split his original two-hour story into two smaller films shot back-to-back. And while the sequel would suffer from this decision, the focus on serialized storytelling is what would ultimately turn this indie experiment into a global phenomenon.

Released in 2000, the first entry in this duology, simply titled Ju-On: The Curse, weaves an interconnected web of paranormal incidents surrounding a cursed house and the ill-fated families that inhabit it. While the film would actually reference the events of Shimizu’s shorts, it’s here that audiences were first introduced to the iconic opening text explaining how a violent death may spawn an infectious curse that self-perpetuates by causing even more deaths in a never-ending cycle of violence.

At first glance, The Curse feels a lot like an anthology meant to repurpose Shimizu’s existing ideas for ghostly short films into a feature format, but narrative details eventually add up as worried teachers, unsuspecting teenagers and psychic realtors unravel bits and pieces of the Saeki family history in a tragic tapestry of death. Curiously, this attempt at crafting a complex narrative puzzle would become a staple of the franchise as future entries (and even the video game) used non-linear storytelling to breathe new life into familiar yarns.

Of course, it’s really the scares that put this franchise on the map, and that’s why you’ll find plenty of expertly orchestrated frights here. Sure, the pale makeup effects and stock sound design aren’t that much better than what we saw in Gakkô no Kaidan G, but the suspenseful execution of moments like Toshio’s slow undead reveal and Kayako’s first contortionist crawl down the stairs – not to mention the incredibly disturbing sequence with a baby inside of a trash bag – are the stuff of horror legend regardless of budget.

I’d even argue that the low production value actually adds to the experience by making everything feel that much more down to earth. The Saeki house isn’t a stylish haunted manor from the Vincent Price era, it’s just a regular Japanese home inhabited by regular people, making it easier to believe that this modern urban legend could also happen to you. Hell, I even think Toshio is scarier when he can pass as a living kid even if the screaming cat effects aren’t as good as the sequels.

Cheap can still be scary.

Unfortunately, quality scares can’t solve everything, and that’s where Ju-On: The Curse 2 comes in. Released the same year as its predecessor, this bizarre sequel only features about 45 minutes of new footage, with the rest being recycled segments from the first film meant to pad out the runtime. While this is a surprisingly dishonest move on Shimizu’s part, with the decision likely resulting in confused viewers thinking that there was something wrong with their rented videotapes, it’s still pretty hard to call this a bad movie.

That’s why I’ve come to respect the flick as a rare instance of a cinematic expansion pack, as the first film didn’t really need to be any longer, but the new segments still do a great job of adding to the existing mythology. This time around, we learn that you don’t even have to come into direct contact with the haunted house in order to be affected by the curse, with characters only tangentially connected to the Saeki tragedy still meeting terrible fates.

That final shot featuring multiple Kayakos is also one of the most incredibly chilling moments in the entire franchise, with the amount of care put into these scenes suggesting that this was probably all meant to have been included in the first film before Shimizu decided otherwise. Either way, I’d still recommend watching this one immediately after Part I in a condensed double-feature – so long as you skip the first thirty minutes.

Despite their humble origins, these low-budget scare-fests would go on to inspire a ghostly media empire, with Shimizu eventually being given the chance to bring his creations to the big screen with one of the best J-Horror flicks of all time. And while I won’t argue that these direct-to-video precursors are necessarily better than 2002’s Ju-On: The Grudge (or even the American duology which was also helmed by Shimizu), I still think that something special was lost each time the series was tasked with pleasing a wider audience, as the story slowly became glossier and less real.

That’s why I’d urge hardcore horror fans to seek out Shimizu’s early experiments, as his creative fingerprints are the duct-tape that keeps this janky collection of horrific vignettes together. It may not always be pretty, but I’ll take the grimy actors caked in cheap blood and white clown makeup over corporate-approved movie monsters any day of the week.

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