Black Christmas (1974) 🎄
An OG slasher that walked so every horror movie after it could sprint.


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🎬 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers, shall we?

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⚠️ Warning

This film has disturbing phone calls, violence, stalking, and that nasty 70s grime-horror vibe. Not for everyone.


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📦 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Before Michael Myers.
Before Jason.
Before Ghostface even learned how to dial a phone…

There was Black Christmas, the original “killer-stalking-a-sorority-house” movie — the one that literally invented half the tropes modern slashers feed off of today.

The setup is stupidly simple but insanely effective:

A sorority house celebrates the holidays while a deranged creep — known only as “Billy” — hides in their attic, watching them, calling them, and slowly picking them off one by one. The film is low-budget, grimy, and incredibly quiet in a way that makes it ten times scarier.

It’s slow-burn horror done RIGHT.


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🧍 Character Rundown

Jess (Olivia Hussey) — The final girl who actually has a backbone. She’s dealing with a messy breakup and a pregnancy subplot that’s way more intense than you expect in a Christmas slasher.
Barb (Margot Kidder) — Drunk, chaotic, hilarious, and steals the show until she doesn’t.
Phyl (Andrea Martin) — The responsible one. Probably the most realistic sorority member.
Peter (Keir Dullea) — Jess’s boyfriend. A walking red flag wearing a turtleneck.
Billy (the killer) — You NEVER see him clearly. Just an eye. A hand. A silhouette. A voice. That’s what makes him terrifying.


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⏳ Pacing / Flow

This movie is SLOW — but in the good “you can feel your skin tightening” type of slow. The atmosphere is thick. The phone calls hit like a punch in the jaw. And the kills creep up on you without warning.

It’s the definition of tension.


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👍 Pros

The phone calls are nightmare fuel

The killer NEVER being explained? Perfect

Jess is one of the earliest final girls with depth

The attic shots are iconic

Genuinely atmospheric, cold, and unsettling



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👎 Cons

It’s a 70s movie so the pacing might feel ancient to some people

The ending frustrates people (intentionally)

The acting can be melodramatic in that 1974 way



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📝 Final Thoughts

Black Christmas is messy, raw, weirdly quiet, and absolutely influential.
This movie crawled so Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Scream could run a marathon.

Is it perfect? No.
Is it iconic? Oh absolutely.

It still holds up because it does the one thing remakes always screw up:

It stays simple.
It stays scary.
And it never explains the monster.


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⭐ Rating: 8/10

A slasher blueprint that deserves respect.


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🚨 Spoiler Warning

Stop here if you’ve never seen the original and want the surprise of “phone calls from the attic” to actually hit.


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💀 Spoilers (full detail — no bullet points)

The movie starts with Billy sneaking into the sorority house attic while the girls party downstairs. Nobody notices because it’s loud, chaotic, and the holidays. Billy immediately makes the creepiest phone calls you’ve ever heard — multiple voices, gasping, screaming, whining, laughing, whispering… it sounds like ten people trapped in one throat.

Clare is the first kill. Billy suffocates her with a plastic dry-cleaning bag and sets her up in a rocking chair with her dead eyes staring through the plastic. Her body stays in the attic the entire movie. Nobody finds her. This is already creepier than most modern slashers.

Jess deals with her boyfriend Peter, who spirals when she tells him she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to keep the baby. He gets angry, possessive, weird — and the movie intentionally tries to frame him as the killer.

One by one, the girls disappear. Barb’s murder is iconic — Billy stabs her repeatedly with a glass unicorn, the camera cutting between the attack and Christmas carolers singing outside the door like nothing is happening. Jess is completely alone by the time the police finally take her seriously.

The final confrontation happens in the basement. Jess hits Peter with a fire poker, thinking he’s the killer, and the police assume she was right. She falls asleep in bed, exhausted.

Then the camera pans upstairs.

To the attic.

Clare’s body is STILL there, untouched.
Billy is STILL there, breathing in the shadows, whispering.
The phone rings one final time.
Fade to black.

No explanation.
No closure.
Just pure dread.