AUTHOR - SCREENWRITER - HUMORIST - GRUMP
DAVID HINES
Double Feature #7: 'Black Christmas'/'The Hills Have Eyes'
Our next October/Halloween-themed double bill features two films that are uncompromising and merciless in their efforts to brutalize you. And when I say 'brutalize' I'm not screwin' around - most horror films (even great ones) pull their punches when it comes to presenting menace and terror in a realistic way. Sure, there's a crazy guy with a knife murdering teenagers, or zombies trying to eat people, or ghosts and demons trying to possess the living - but at the end of the day you know the main characters will probably make it out alive and the scary killer/zombies/spooks will have been vanquished. Until the sequel, anyway. There are rules, after all.
Black Christmas (Bob Clark - 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven - 1977) aren't having ANY of that 'rules' shit. Each film takes a somewhat hackneyed premise - a murderer terrorizing a sorority house, and a family stranded in the wild set upon by a gang of killers - and ratchets up the tension by making the villains as vicious, vile and uncompromising as possible. Not to mention insane. So insane their victims barely register on their radar at all. Black Christmas' 'Billy' is lost in his own reality, seemingly stranded at a moment of childhood tragedy which he enacts over and over again, while the cannibal family in Hills are little more than animals, interested only in protecting their territory and eating some fresh meat.
Filmed in bleak, cold, grey Toronto, Black Christmas takes place over Christmas break as a group of sorority sisters make holiday plans. The festive atmosphere is ruined by a series of phone calls from "The Moaner," which have escalated from heavy breathing to obscenities and threats. When sweet, naive Claire goes missing, level-headed Jess (Olivia Hussey) contacts the police. Led by Lt. Fuller (John Saxon), the cops are initially too bumbling and too preoccupied with the disappearance of a young girl to be much help. But when the young girl is found murdered in a local park - with Claire still to be accounted for - the investigation turns serious. The phone calls continue to escalate, the caller now identifed as 'Billy,' prompting the police to set up a wiretap. But Billy continues to pick off sorority sisters one by one, the tension rising until the cops realize THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! (Something we in the audience have agonizingly known all along.)
The first moment you realize Black Christmas isn't interested in playing by the rules is during Billy's initial obscene phone calls - which are genuinely obscene. There's no "What are you wearing" nonsense. The language used is still shocking today, and serves notice that this killer - and this movie - means business. In fact, all the phone calls from Billy are incredibly upsetting, as he constantly changes voices and personalities, hinting at a heinous crime (the killing of a baby) while screaming and ranting wildly. Clark claimed he used a mixture of three voices (including his own) to create these calls, and the effect is genuinely horrifying.
Beyond the sorority-girls-in-peril plotline, Black Christmas is effective because it's so unrelentingly bleak. From the frigid Canadian setting and dark and labyrinthine sorority house to the subplot in which Jess and her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) spar over whether or not she should get an abortion (Jess is pro, Peter is con), there is always tension in the air. Even the attempts at humor - most concerning cynical, potty-mouthed sister Barb (Margot Kidder) - are played more for discomfort than laughs. Black Christmas is a film that embraces darkness in plot, tone and setting, achieving an almost unbearable level of claustrophobia and unease.
The Hills Have Eyes is as open and bright as Black Christmas is claustrophobic and dark. Driving through the desert on their way to California, the Carter family breaks down in the middle of nowhere to find themselves set upon by an inbred family of savages. They must fight for their lives - becoming savages themselves - if they're going to survive the ferocious attacks of the cannibal family whose territory they've violated.
Made five years after the horror milestone Last House on the Left, it's no surprise Wes Craven was capable of making a tough, no-holds-barred fright film. What is surprising is how Craven was able to make a film just as brutal and uncompromising as Last House while making it seem like a 'safer' type of horror movie. We've got the all-American family in all their cliched glory: Macho, former-cop dad... sweet, slightly dim mom... young married daughter with her husband and new baby... the bickering teenaged brother and sister... and their two loyal, protective dogs. Archetypes if ever we've seen them. Sure, bad stuff is gonna happen - but how bad can it really get?
Bad. So, so bad.
Two of the many images that will follow you home: Poor, sweet, naive Claire bagged for freshness in the attic... And Billy's fucking crazy eyeball staring at you all buggy-like through the doorjam. To this day if I ever saw that wild eye staring at me I'd probably shit myself - and if someone spoke to me in the insane Billy-voice I'd probably keel over dead.
Yup, this is the kind of movie where they use mom's dead body for bait... and it WORKS! Because the people in the hills aren't people anymore, they're animals. If they'd put her under a giant box propped up by a stick it probably STILL would've worked.
Craven lets us know early the killings won't be your run-of-the-mill
stabbings/shootings/stranglings. When Big Bob, the tough former cop, is
the first to go - burned alive while his family rushes in vain to save him -
Craven signals all bets are off. The scene is horrifying, and the family's reaction (especially from his wife, who refuses to acknowledge the charred corpse is her husband) feels genuine and heartbreaking. The setpiece at the mid-point of the film, in which the cannibals stage a raid on the family camper, is a masterpiece of plot and direction. Because Craven doesn't seem interested in following the rules of 'civilized' filmmaking there's the genuine feeling that anything can happen. Which then pretty much does. The Hills Have Eyes is the only film I can recall where a baby is put in peril and you actually feel there's a better-than-even possibility it's going to be killed and eaten. To create that kind of doubt in an audience - that level of distrust in the filmmaker himself - is a rare and impressive achievement.
Both Black Christmas and The Hills Have Eyes work so well because they're not just out to scare you, they want to traumatize you. They aren't satisfied with making you jump in fright, they want to make you squirm in actual, physical discomfort. In this age of toothless PG-13 horror, these films take on the personalities of their villains - they're out to wreak as much havoc and cause as much damage as they can, and if you're the one in their path? Too bad - you're next. Rules be damned.
BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)
Drected by: Bob Clark
Written by: Roy Moore
Starring: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Andrea Martin, Marian Waldman, Art Hindle, Doug McGrath, Lynne Griffin, Nick Mancuso, James Edmond
THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)
Directed by: Wes Craven
Written by: Wes Craven
Starring: Dee Wallace, Russ Grieve, Virginia Vincent, Martin Speer, Susan Lanier, Robert Houston, Janus Blythe, James Whitworth, John Steadman, and Michael Berryman
NOTE: Each of these films has been remade, both in 2006. The Hills Have Eyes remake benefits from the strong visual sense of director Alexandre Aja, but still pales in comparison to the original. It succeeds in the same way Zach Snyder's 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake succeeds - not nearly as good as the original, watchable if not particularly memorable. The Black Christmas remake didn't fare even that well. Widely considered inferior to Clark's film, I was personally only able to sit through about 15 minutes before abandoning it as a lost cause - and one which was pissing me off, at that.
Watch the originals. It'll take the same amount of time and reward you far more than sitting through inferior imitations.