Director Bob Clark’s seminal slasher Black Christmas is now 50 years old – and its conversation about reproductive rights is as relevant today as ever.
A bold slasher that has carved its path to become a festive favourite, Black Christmas – released 50 years ago today – is also an unwitting pro-choice manifesto.
Five decades after the Canadian movie first graced the big screen, and as we witness reproductive rights being eroded, its abortion storyline rings as a chilling, powerful reminder of what’s at stake in the 21st century.
Premiered on the 11th October 1974, Canadian director Bob Clark’s holiday-themed film is perhaps best known as one of the original slasher horrors, inspired by a real-life murder spree in Montreal. Following in the footsteps of cult thrillers such as Peeping Tom and Psycho, the film lays the groundwork for future mainstream blood-fests – most obviously John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween in 1978.
Received with mixed reviews at the time, the movie has since gained a loyal fanbase, expanding from Clark’s desire to show the authentic lives of college girls in a proto-feminist flick which balances scares with themes of bodily autonomy and distrust of authority.
Set in a sorority house at Christmas, the movie sees Jess (Olivia Hussey) and her friends being harassed by obscene, misogynistic phone calls. When one of the girls goes missing, the sisters have to look out for one another as their mystery caller enacts his murderous plan. Meanwhile, Jess’s anger-prone boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea from 2001: A Space Odyssey), who opposes her decision to have an abortion, emerges as the main suspect.
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As one of the first entries in the serial killer subgenre, Black Christmas paints a blank canvas with generous strokes of crimson. With no established rules to adhere to or subvert, the film operates with relative freedom. It gets away with intentionally ambiguous elements, namely its open-ended finale and the lack of backstory on the killer, making it all the more terrifying.
To a modern audience exposed to years of subsequent slashers, the film’s most interesting trait is the emphasis on the sisterly bond between the protagonists rather than on the male killer’s traumatic past or motives.
Under their catty, rowdy jokes, these women deeply care for each other, putting up a united front when they’re failed by those who should protect them. Unlike most female characters in early slashers, the sisters of Pi Kappa Sigma are given some depth and individual room to shine in Roy Moore’s script. Even their Housemother, Mrs Mac (Marian Waldman), commands the screen in some of the film’s most effective comedic moments.
The women of Black Christmas aren’t silent, helpless prey sitting around with a target on their backs. They aren’t the disposable, interchangeable pawns we sometimes encounter in horror – the type of underwritten, one-dimensional women that relegated the 2006 Black Christmas remake to subpar status.
In their peculiar ways, they’re loud and outspoken. When explaining why she wishes to terminate her unplanned pregnancy, Jess is so eloquent and self-assured that it’s easy to forget that the movie came out just one year after Roe v Wade decriminalised abortion nationwide in the US and five years after Canada legalised the procedure for therapeutic reasons.
Jess appears so resolute because abortion had long been an option for those who were pregnant and didn’t wish to be, even before it became legal. Those with a uterus have always had abortions, with unsafe backstreet procedures being the last resort for many, and organisations like The Jane Collective providing a vital service whilst volunteers and doctors risked imprisonment.
Despite Clark’s assurances that his movie wasn’t intended to be political, Black Christmas’ rich, feminist subtext is hard to overlook.
When Jess informs Peter she doesn’t want to keep the baby, she’s branded a “selfish bitch” for prioritising her well-being and goals. He tries to make her pregnancy about his needs, selling her a heteronormative marriage fantasy where the burden of parenthood doesn’t fall primarily on women. At her refusal to give up on her ambition and her firm rejection of a shotgun wedding, Peter, who’s no stranger to rage outbursts, proceeds to smash some Christmas tree ornaments and moves on to straight-up threats, ominously telling Jess she’ll be very sorry.
The horror canon brims with movies where a pregnancy brings about some supernatural occurrences, yet it’s rare for abortion to be contemplated within a scary film in a way that fosters the conversation on reproductive rights.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there seems to be a niche of frightening films where abortions are sanctioned. These include The Suckling, where the aborted foetus goes on a bloodthirsty rampage, and the more blatantly pro-life The Life Zone, an ill-conceived, hellish cautionary tale about three women seeking an abortion.
Chastising women’s sexual choices is a sadly common trope even in supposedly liberal horror movies, after all.
John Carpenter’s Halloween is said to have been inspired by Black Christmas, though the two movies’ ideas of the last woman standing after the massacre are profoundly different.
With Jess as one of the first-ever Final Girls, Black Christmas depicts the reality of women’s lives with a frank approach to sexuality and self-determination. While she technically doesn’t have an abortion before the credits roll – and a fan-made short sequel, 2021’s It’s Me Billy, imagines Jess U-turning on her decision – the protagonist doesn’t ever falter when claiming control over her body. With such a precedent, it’s a wonder where the idea of the virginal female survivor that was so popular in later horrors came from.
Jess doesn’t hesitate when she says the A-word, with Peter’s response being a textbook example of coercion. Although he’s revealed to be innocent of murder, there’s no doubt he’s a villain.
Gender-based violence has many faces in Black Christmas – not just the killer’s sexist phone calls and brutal attacks, but also Peter’s abusive attitude and the sergeant’s dismissive comments when the girls take their concerns to the police. (Interestingly, John Saxon plays a cop in both this movie and another iconic horror franchise – Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street.)
A by-product of a turbulent historical context and released amid second-wave feminism, the 1974 movie highlights the micro and macro-aggressions women face, turning it into a provocative, gory Christmas miracle centred on their lived experiences.
Half a century later, women’s bodies continue being a battlefield on which men wage war.
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The film’s 50th anniversary follows the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, a shocking ruling that has allowed 14 US states to enact near-total abortion bans. Meanwhile, a federal abortion ban, though hidden in convoluted language, has become a key point of Donald Trump’s campaign in the upcoming presidential election.
Elsewhere, reproductive freedom continues to be jeopardised due to the number of conscientious objectors, which undermines access to the procedure in countries where it is legal. Overall, these restrictions harm women whose care is delayed and result in preventable deaths (39,000 per year globally, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights).
It’s a vision grimmer than any onscreen murder, and Black Christmas perfectly encapsulates the righteous fury of seeing one’s fundamental, lifesaving right to choose endangered.
Fifty years in, the slasher holds its own against more recent, explicitly political, so-called elevated horrors. It isn’t just a gripping, genuinely spine-chilling antidote to Christmas cheer, but also a pro-abortion tale to revisit in order to challenge a bleak present.
