Dis­cov­er this yule­tide slash­er that inspired John Carpenter’s Halloween

Black Christ­mas (aka Silent Night, Evil Night and Stranger in the House) opens with exte­ri­ors of the snowy Pi Kap­pa Sig­ma soror­i­ty house fes­tooned with Christ­mas lights at night, as a POV shot (accom­pa­nied by heavy breath­ing) cir­cles in search of a way in before climb­ing a trel­lis on the out­er wall to the attic win­dow above, as the young women and their male guests par­ty down­stairs, obliv­i­ous to this home invasion.

If the sub­jec­tive cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the cal­en­dar set­ting, and the co-ed body of vic­tims, plus the man­ic cold caller, the suc­ces­sion of gris­ly mur­ders, the cli­mac­tic game of cat and mouse played by ​‘final girl’ Jess (Olivia Hussey) in the building’s base­ment, and even the pres­ence of fig­ures in hock­ey mask and ski masks, all seem like the hack­neyed ingre­di­ents of a clas­sic slash­er, in fact this film from Bob Clark (direc­tor of Chil­dren Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Death Dream, and Porky’s) was unwit­ting­ly lay­ing down all the con­ven­tions for a sub­genre that did not yet exist.

It would be anoth­er four years before John Car­pen­ter made Hal­loween, very much under the influ­ence of Black Christ­mas. Clark and his screen­writer A Ray Moore had only Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho, Michael Powell’s Peep­ing Tom, the ​’60s urban myth of the babysit­ter and the man upstairs, and Italy’s gial­li, to guide them in their inven­tion of the tropes that would come to dom­i­nate the hor­ror land­scape of the late ​’70s and ​’80s.

The idea of the creepy pest caller who is actu­al­ly inside the house also inspired Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls – but note the way that Black Christ­mas inte­grates this into its yule­tide theme, as killer ​‘Bil­ly’ keeps climb­ing down into the house’s inte­ri­or like a dark ver­sion of San­ta Claus, met­ing out pun­ish­ments to the naughty and the nice alike. His own back­sto­ry – a high­ly dys­func­tion­al home life of guilt-rid­den incest and mater­nal dom­i­nance – is con­veyed entire­ly by his unnerv­ing­ly deranged rant­i­ngs down the phone line (in a schiz­o­phrenic psy­chodra­ma of mul­ti­ple voices).

Mean­while the anti-Christ­mas theme con­tin­ues in a sub­plot that sees Jess con­tem­plat­ing get­ting an abor­tion dur­ing the hol­i­day that cel­e­brates mirac­u­lous birth – and the baby’s father, neu­rot­ic con­cert pianist Peter (Keir Dul­lea), is as much sus­pect as support.

Black Christ­mas is bet­ter than your aver­age slash­er, not least because of its cast and char­ac­ters, includ­ing Mar­got Kid­der as a sybarit­ic stu­dent, Mar­i­an Wald­man as the dip­so­ma­ni­ac ​‘house moth­er’, and John Sax­on as a street-smart police lieu­tenant. Scenes in which a tech­ni­cian traces a call by quite lit­er­al­ly walk­ing through the maze of phys­i­cal con­nec­tions at the tele­phone exchange cer­tain­ly date the film, but are also part of its immense charm. Made at a time when there were as yet no fixed rules for the slash­er sub­genre, here any­thing goes, and the sur­vival of nei­ther vir­gin nor even final girl comes guaranteed.

Black Christ­mas is released on Blu-ray by 101 Films on 20 November.