You Love to See It: Black Christmas

John Carpenter’s Halloween typically receives the nod as the first proper slasher, but Black Christmas — Bob Clark  and A. Roy Moore’s spare, mean-spirited tale of a sorority house falling prey to a disturbed killer — beat it to the punch by just under four years and heavily influenced its aesthetics and themes. Where Carpenter plunges into violence against women through silence and facelessness, though, Clark and Moore opt instead for obscene whispers, for glimpses of a giddy, twisted face caught through knotholes and doors left ajar. The result — voiced by three men and portrayed onscreen by two more — is both more frightening and more insightful than Carpenter’s iconic killer, a figure at once crass and disturbing, infantile and unstoppable.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies the unnerving power of Black Christmas’s half-seen killer better than his refrain of “Agnes, it’s me, Billy,” a nervous, childish giggle connected to his one previous piece of possible backstory, a dirty phone call during which he alludes to some kind of transgression against a child named Agnes. Just as “Billy’s” body remains partially obscured, so does his earlier life and psyche. What happened between those two children, or to them? The details are unimportant. The point, to quote The Young Pope’s David Tanistone, is the horror. Whatever sucking cesspit of trauma and abuse Billy crawled out of, he carries it with him now, reenacting childish suffering and cruelty with a frantic, giddy need soaked through with fragmentary adult lusts.

The brutal simplicity of Billy’s unexplained motives coupled with the few fleeting glimpses of his psyche the film provides creates a murderer more sordid, more tangible, and more frightening than even empty-eyed, unkillable Michael Myers. Billy, like Michael, is a phantom, unknown and unseen, but unlike Michael the violence with which his voice and presence are freighted is not merely sexualized but sexual in and of itself. He is fascinated and compelled by the bodies of his victims, discussing their penetration over the phone, keeping them close after their deaths. Where Michael’s violence is impersonal, Billy’s is hideously, pitifully intimate, a broken mind connecting its few working neurons like arcing wires to revive or sustain in some way the ghost of whatever it was that happened to young, innocent Agnes and Billy.