Black Christmas’s Feminist Blueprint of the Eulogized Final Girl
Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974) is an early slasher film about a cozy sorority house whose residents are being taunted by obscene phone calls over Christmas break. As the sisters begin to go missing, the rest fail to realize the killer is inside the house and responsible for the harassment by phone. The killer remains mostly unidentified throughout the movie, other than his creepy voice heard over the phone and the hair-raising shots from his point of view. The film follows many different female characters who are all representatives of a female archetype, such as a “professional virgin” and a loud, promiscuous drunk. Although the film alludes to these characters’ backstories and individual feminine hardships, it is through the eyes of Jess Bradford, played by Olivia Hussey, that the viewer gets to see a majority of the film as it takes place and it is because of her levelheadedness that the audience gets to see her survive (sort-of), both the killer and the threat to her reproductive rights. Having a large cast of female characters and handling their personal issues is not enough to call this film “feminist,” but the fact it avoids overtly catering to the male gaze warrants an investigation of the film’s feminine representation. Through its subversion of typically misogynistic genre norms, Black Christmas is a horror film that avoids the male gaze through its exploration of feminist themes and through its Final Girl, Jess Bradford.
Black Christmas utilizes many of the horror genre’s most beloved tropes to create a feminist’s nightmare. Aesthetically, the film opens by capturing the women being jolly and festive from the perspective of the peeping eyes of the killer as he breaks into the sorority house’s attic and the film maintains this style of voyeuristic, predatory shots of the sisters throughout the film. Additionally, the film explores the ways feminism is represented in the horror genre by making the film’s cast of characters (and victims) representative of stereotypical feminine archetypes and by making the most bone-chilling parts of the plot deal with sexual harassment and Jess’s right to get an abortion. This film stands out from other classic slasher films of this time because of its inclusion of explicitly feminine peril. Watching this film in 2023 makes it all the more horrifying as the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Case decision, that federally protected reproductive rights, has been overturned. At the time of the film’s release, one might consider these to be bold choices to make in a historically male-dominated genre like horror.
In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey discusses the two ways one may view cinema, “[O]ne implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like” (808). Of these two ways of looking or feeling seen by what’s on-screen, both of these perspectives are typically geared toward the male gaze in horror films. Linda Williams further defines the type of gaze inflicted on women in horror in her essay Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, “The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography’s portrayal of orgasm, in horror’s portrayal of violence and terror, and in melodrama’s portrayal of weeping… [In] each of these genres the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain” (4). Due to the fact that horror is one of the three body genres, the spectator is meant to take on the emotional role of the protagonist. Unlike gruesome slasher films of the same year, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), the film does not linger on weirdly erotic, violent shots of women being murdered and instead uses these scenes to draw connections to the implications of female shame through juxtaposition and symbolism. Williams continues, “Each of the three body genres … hinges on the spectacle of a ‘sexually saturated’ female body, and each offers what many feminist critics would agree to be spectacles of feminine victimization” (6). As the killer suffocates “professional virgin” Clare early on in the film, the camera closes in on her face before cutting, creating a sound bridge and graphic match with the Pi Kappa Sigma sisters’ squeals of approval over a new dress from downstairs, cinematically punishing these women for their frivolous joy. From the beginning of this film, it is made evident that the viewer the filmmakers had in mind was not of the male variety.
None of the female characters in Black Christmas “freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” nor do they trivialize their characteristics (Mulvey 809). For example, the first time the audience meets outspoken, promiscuous party girl Barb, played by Margot Kidder, she is told by her mother that they won’t be seeing each other during the holidays due to her mother’s plans with a new boyfriend. This moment of characterization early on in the film allows the audience to have empathy for Barb’s sometimes belligerent behavior and turns her into a meaningful character and not simply an actress fitting into a mold, a misgiving of many female characters. There are more moments in the film like this which aim to add depth and meaning to the women of the film. Additionally to its subversion of character formulas, Black Christmas also differs from typical films in the slasher horror genre because of the way it explores feminist themes, such as a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body. Due to the fact, that the film’s heroine is Jess, a female that is still alive at the end of the film, and that this is a horror movie with exclusively female victims, it would be obvious to reference Carol J. Clover’s book Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film and her concept of the Final Girl. When looking at this film through the lens of Clover’s Final Girl, Black Christmas’s Jess Bradford is defined by the trope and its key features.
“Final Girl” has become a term known by many since the release of Clover’s work and with widespread usage often comes new interpretations and meanings. However, the term goes deeper than just the word “final” and the word “girl” placed next to each other. In her own words, “The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again” (35). Clover adds in later editions of the book, “She's a boyish girl, even named something like Stevie or Will or Stretch, but a girl nonetheless. As a sketch, at least, the Final Girl does look something like a female hero...” (x). The Final Girl is a representation of the externalization of the male gaze’s effect on an entire genre. In many ways, Jess is not the Final Girl of the film. She isn’t a virginal, feminine woman that feels more like a Disney princess than someone about to survive a slasher film and she ultimately brings down the wrong suspect and leaves the killer at large, but she thematically feels like a Final Girl and showcases many of the qualities defined by Clover. Although the discovery of the sisters’ murders isn’t until the third act of the film, it is Jess who discovers them and Jess whose point of view the audience follows from beginning to end. Other than the film’s ending, where it’s revealed Jess has killed the wrong suspect and the killer is still in the house, we see her think with a level head when dealing with the obscene phone calls and handle herself maturely when dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. She even lacks elements of femininity, comparable to how other female leads in horror films define femininity, and other than the literal fact she is a pregnant young woman in a sorority, all identifying characteristics of her gender are wiped clean until she is forced to face them. In fact, the film revolves around Jess’s emotional struggle surrounding an abortion. What’s remarkable about this post-Roe v. Wade film is that her emotional struggle lies not with her choice, but with her insufferable boyfriend, Peter, whom she definitely doesn’t want to marry and have a baby with. He spends the majority of the film threatening her, harassing her, and guilting her about the abortion to the point of being a primary suspect for the obscene phone calls. As Jess is chased throughout the house by the killer in the final moments, it is Peter who discovers her in the basement and Peter who she kills thinking he is the suspect. According to Clover’s definition of a Final Girl, Jess was unsuccessful in taking down the killer herself, but one could argue that the film had two killers: a typical slasher villain and a symbolic threat to the end of women’s rights. Given the timing of this movie in conversation with American politics, one could also argue that it was the killing of Peter that would have held the most weight.
Clover has since spoken up about the ways the Final Girl trope, and her definition of it has become misconstrued over the years with people eager to label any horror film with a female lead a “feminist horror film” when this is oftentimes not the case when considering the context of the film. She describes the “wildly phallic imagery of slasher films” that aligns mostly male viewers and mostly male filmmakers with female characters, quoting “giving them dose after dose of so-called feminine masochism of the most extreme sort.” Black Christmas does not fall victim to this type of masochistic misogyny and ultimately manages to align the audience with its female characters as people rather than damsels used as tools for the emotional manipulation of audience members. This fact, the film’s attention to detail in the feminine screen space, and its willingness to take female characters seriously align this film with feminist theology. Calling Jess a feminist Final Girl, by definition, makes sense, but as Carol Clover put it, “To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development...is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking. She is simply an agreed-upon fiction and the male viewer's use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies is an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty" (53).
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Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 15th ed., Princeton University Press, 2015. Princeton Classics.
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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film: Psychology, Society, and Ideology.
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Williams, Linda. "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess." Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991 pp. 213.