Bob Clark may be the greatest American Christmas director. Not only did he helm one of the best feel-good holiday season movies in A Christmas Story but he directed Black Christmas, arguably the foundational slasher film and a prime influence on John Carpenter’s Halloween. So many of the tropes that we now recognise as central to the genre are established in this vision of a serial killer picking off a sorority house in the buildup to Christmas – POV shots from the perpetrator, phone calls from the perpetrator, a whole host of comic side characters, and even a moment when one person playfully dons a hockey mask in anticipation of Jason Voorhees. Black Christmas also foreshadows Halloween II in the way its ambit spreads out to encompass an entire town over a twenty-four hour period, as Clark alternates between the claustrophobia of the sorority house, where the killer is enconced in the attack, and his dispersed presence across the socal energies and anxieties that drive the wider community.

While the killer moves through an array of victims, his attack is ultimatey directed at the sorority house itself, presented here as a den of iniquity, an emblem of all the excesses of the late counterculture – or rather as a parodic and hyperbolic vision of these excesses and the moral panics that they produced, the moral panics that the slasher himself embodies. For one thing, parents are completely absent. Barbara “Barb” Coard’s (Margot Kidder) mother can’t see her for the holidays because she has a new boyfriend. Mrs Mac (Marian Waldman), the house mother for the sorority, has no interest in ensuring the young women in her care conform to traditional norms (“Am I supposed to be responsible for the morals of every girl in this house? These girls would hump the Leaning Tower of Pisa”) and is a dissolute alcoholic who hids liquor in every conceivable crevice of the building. And the father of Clare Harrison (Lynne Griffin), the killer’s first victim, arrives too late to save her. Clare is also the only conservative sorority sister and vanishes exactly when her traditionalism is most dissonant with the house; Barb’s parting words to her are “I know a professional virgin when I see one.”

With no real parents around, two women stand out as particularly affronting to the backlash against the counterculture. First there is Barb, who is tipsy the whole time, insists that “you can’t rape a townie,” attends an event for underprivileged children only to swear in front of a toddler and offer him champagne, and gives the phone code of the sorority house as “F-e-l-l-a-t-i-o” to a naïve police officer. Oblivious to the grief of Clare’s father she flicks through a porn magazine while he’s collecting himself and tells him an anecdote about a turtle that can apparently “screw for three days.” She represents the libidinal empowerment that the killer despises and fears – appropriately, some of her final words are “I should be so lucky to have a stranger come into my room,” an offer the killer fulfils in the most brutal way imaginable. Yet if Barb is abrasive, her sorority sister Jessica “Jess” Bradford (Olivia Hussey) represents an even more terrifying prospect to the killer: a woman’s control over he own body. Not only does she break up with her boyfriend Peter Smythe (Keir Dullea) in an agonisingly emasculating scene for him (“I love you” “I know”) but she announces she’s going to abort their baby, doesn’t ask his permission, and admits she almost wasn’t going to tell him at all.

Between the jouissance of Barb and the independence of Jess lies the slasher’s primal anxieties and much of the horror of Black Christmas stems from the more specific threat this poses to the authority and autonomy of the masculine voice. The sheer crudeness and angularity of the sorority dialogue in the opening scenes draws pointed attention to this newly liberated female voice – there’s a really profane edge to the screenplay – which the killer attempts to counter with the telephone as his prime weapon. For this is one of the great telephone slashers, comparable to Play Misty for Me, an object lesson in how the rearguard of the 70s and 80s would use technology to augment a waning male voice. In this case the killer has two distinct strategies that permit him to “get to sleep” and achieve some semblance of peace. The first is depraved and involves calling the sorority house to issue invective and perverse commands to one woman after another. The second is prudish and involves declamations of the women’s apparent shortcomings as women: “Where did you put the baby?” Aptly, the killer is calling (mainly) from the attic of the house itself, meaning that he is both embedded in the perverse economy of the sorority but has also appointed himself its de facto parent, as he indicates by reserving one of his darkest calls for the house mother’s room. While these calls induce similar vocal disruptions for each of the sorority sisters (Barb has a vocal spasm in the middle of the night as an extension of her regular asthma attacks), they remain unreadable to the police as representatives of the masculine and paternal law that the killer has hyperbolised: “It’s probably just one of your boyfriends playing a little joke.”

It’s only a matter of time before the killer’s agency starts to collapse into Jess’ boyfriend’s rage at her plan to abort their baby. Since the film understands masculine traditionalism as a vocal phenomenon this convergence occurs first and foremost on the auditory plane. Peter’s emasculation quickly intensifies his dialogue to the same twisted rage as the killer: “You selfish bitch – you’re talking about killing our baby as if you’re having a wart removed.” Likewise the dissonant music that has accompanied the killer’s phone calls seeps back into the diegesis, as Peter smashes his piano in frustration, the rippling keys trickling over, as soundtrack, into the pan from the sorority staircase to the attic entrance, the shot that stands in for the largely invisible killer throughout the film. Finally, the prospect of abortion distorts Peter’s voice (“We can’t kill the baby…you want our baby, I know you do”) until he sounds exactly like the killer, who in turn begins to mirror’s Peter’s phrases (“Just like having a wart removed”). Over time, these sonic resonances start to transition into the visual language of the film, as when the killer’s panning shot shifts outside to show Peter watching the house from behind a tree as the police, satisfied that they have inspected the property, drive away.

Converging in this way, Peter’s voice and the killer’s voice produce a third voice that is not quite reducible to either – a male voice that has reached a crisis point in its capacity to regulate American bourgeois thresholds. The great twist of When a Stranger Calls was that the calls were coming from inside the house but that denouement is already foregrounded here as a fundamental component of the slasher lexicon. For the male voice of Clark’s film is never comfortably inside or outside, never confident in differentiating between the two (and, more specifically, in separating the feminine interior world of domesticity from the masculine exterior world of action). Hence the strange two-way quality that the phone accrues in the hands of the killer, who undoubtedly uses it as a way of delivering his messages but also, antenna-like, picks up, distorts and condenses fragments of what is occurring in the sorority house’s own impoverished approximations of bourgeois life. Alternately speaking in his own voice (or rather, the hyperbolised voice of the father) and those of a mother and daughter, he vocalises the entire nuclear family in his utterances, emphasising the sanctity of the foetus even as he prosopopoeically plays out an Electra drama that necessitates killing daughters.

By the third act this voice has become disconnected from any individual human agency and has instead become a sonic emanation of bourgeois ideology itself, both in its opposition to the counterculture and in its continuities with the counterculture. You might say that the voice is the dialectic between the bourgeoisie and the counterculture, a mobile force that becomes more abstracted, free-floating and constellated around the thresholds of the house. In time, these thresholds extend out to the infrastructure supporting the house, as the police set up a wire tap that requires a technician at a local telephone station to physically situate the call across endless aisles of exchanges. Against that backdrop, traditional voices of male authority are ineffective insofar as they are still individuated, most terrifyingly when Lt. Kenneth Fuller (John Saxon), the chief investigator, calls Jess and instructs her to walk straight out the front door instead of exploring what is happening upstairs. Her own voice only collapses further in response, as she screams out hysterically to a house inhabited by corpses.  

Incredibly, Clark and screenwriter Roy Moore maintain this dialectic between bourgeois containment and countercultural expansion right until the end. When Jess finally kills Peter there seems to be some kind of provisional resolution. However just when peace appears to have descended over the film, Clark introduces a new camera movement – zooming back from the scene, rather than across the scene. It’s a simple shift but it relocates the killer’s gaze so that instead of scanning the sorority house he is now embedded in it, as inextricable as the phone exchange that formed the outer limit of his voice. As Jess lies recovering in her bed, one person after another leaves the house, and the camera zooms back to follow, the cacophony gradually dying away, before Clark conflates it with the panning motion, by way of the longest pan of the film, up to the attic entrance, where the killer remains a presence.  

There are a few ways to read what happens next. Most literally, it’s possible that Jess was mistaken in killing Peter and that the “real” killer is still lurking in the attic, ready to make himself felt in the now empty house. But this is to discount the way in which Peter and the killer have already merged into a third voice – a free-floating masculine anxiety that can take anyone as its agent and mouthpiece. The question of whether Peter was the “real” killer is therefore somewhat beside the point; he was a vehicle for a voice that continues to drift disembodied through the house, in the same way that the phone continues to ring, louder and louder, with nobody to answer it, as Clark replicates the zoom out from Jess’ bedroom, but this time from the attic window, until the credits are rolling over the entire house. And in that magnificent ending he sets the stage with for a whole generation of horror films in which the male voice is neutered, whether in the silence of classic slashers, the technological augmentations of phone killers, and the manic monologue and disquisitions of 90s slashers.