With two low-budget horror movies, Bob Clark captured the anxieties of 1974
In 1974—the year Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate, and just one year after the United States withdrew from the Vietnam War, having wasted 19 years, five months, four weeks, one day, and nearly 60,000 American lives—confidence in and trust of the United States government was in a shambles. Facing failure for what many perceived to be the first time, average Joe Americans found their spirits wavering, like a shed of rotting wood about to suffer a storm. Canada, to which many Americans joked they'd flee to avoid the draft (one thing that hasn't changed), was, in its own ways, not doing much better. Reactionary rationale regarding human rights, particularly control of a woman's body, was gathering strength, in a manner Americans may currently recognize. That was also the year that up-and-coming filmmaker Bob Clark captured the anxiety of the era with two sublime, small-budget, morally vexed horror films that cast their gaze astutely, lucidly, and with much disappointment at the political and cultural consciousness of North America: Black Christmas and Deathdream.
Made in Canada, Black Christmas is an audacious fable and the progenitor of the slasher genre via John Carpenter's Halloween, but it might be even more frightening than Carpenter's immortal classic. The Florida-shot Deathdream, aka Dead Of Night, is at heart an unrelentingly grim metaphor for the inhumanity and long-lasting consequences of the Vietnam imbroglio. Also fable-like, it takes influence from “The Monkey's Paw” and the myths of Ishtar and anticipates Stephen King's Pet Sematary. Fifty years later, both films continue to instill anxiety, break the heart, shake the soul, and leave one, as the credits roll by like flurries of snow blown unnaturally upwards, feeling as if the world is a slightly stranger, slightly scarier place.
Black Christmas opens with an establishing shot, pretty as a postcard, Rockwellian in its comeliness, of a sorority house decorated with colorful Christmas lights and surrounded by a Stygian darkness. It looks as if the house is about to be swallowed by the boundless oppression of lightlessness, which reflects the encroaching horror of an unclear future waiting just beyond the coming graduation. All the cheer and hope insinuated by the lights and wreaths will soon seem hopeless against the unknown threats of night—of the future, what little they have. Within this sorority house, a gaggle of college girls drink and banter. Their festivities are interrupted by a phone call from a repeat offender who spews vulgarities, the words coming out slobbery and grotesque. He ends the call: “I’m going to kill you.”
Santa Claus is a symbol of tireless and incorruptible goodness in a troubled world, as pure as the white of his beard, this jolly old fat man who brings presents and eats cookies, his corpulence shaking as he chortles. On Christmas Eve, good little boys and girls go to bed knowing that while they sleep, dreaming pleasant dreams, portly St. Nick will come by shroud of night and leave them presents before sailing into the starry dark with his magical reindeer. In Black Christmas, Clark makes literal the idea of a strange man breaking into a house, only instead of presents wrapped in pretty paper, this man leaves bodies wrapped in plastic. He is Billy, who has no motivation or backstory or personality, and whose lurid and lubricious, wet-mouthed blatherings on the phone evoke no man but an id bursting from flesh; he is a shadow prowling through halls, a voice on the phone, the darkness inherent in the most cheerful time of year.
There are no traditional good boys or girls in Black Christmas, a cruel perversion of the Santa Claus myth. Or, rather, there is one girl who may not exhibit good old-fashioned Christian behavior, but is the hero: Jess (Olivia Hussey, known for her deeply pained performance in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo And Juliet), who is, along with Marilyn Burns in that same year's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the seminal final girl. She is one of horror cinema's most audacious characters because she is not an angel, and yet we care for her. Sounds simple, but in 1974, that was a rarity. She's pregnant with the child of an emotionally craven musician boyfriend and contemplating getting an abortion.
In 1967, Minister of Justice Pierre Trudeau introduced a Criminal Law Amendment Act which allowed doctor councils to decide if an abortion was justified; the bill was worded so vaguely, it gave doctors open opportunity to help women, citing, for example, a woman's mental health, though the nebulous definition of “health” also made abortion access wildly uneven across the country, with low-income denizens more likely to find themselves out of luck. As Trudeau famously opined, “there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” When, in 1973, a jury refused to convict Henry Morgentaler for performing abortions, a victory for progressives evincing a change in Canadian culture, the response from the right was baleful. (In the United States, there was Eisenstadt V. Baird and United States V. Vuitch in 1972.) Surely all of this was in the minds of moviegoers in 1974.
Whereas the template of the horror movie heroine would come to dictate purity and abstention from sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, our pregnant heroine is a real person. She’s a sorority sister and woman with autonomy (threatened by her boyfriend and outdated laws), not a cartoon of traditional values starkly contrasted with the perverted kids destined to die, or the piteous girl who gets jabbed by her friends for spending her Saturday nights with a book instead of beers and boys with cars. In the believable, empathetic, and honest portrayal of a modern woman who makes bad decisions as well as good ones, Jess preemptively rebuffed the slasher heroine, virginal as fresh snow.
That sense of morality and the honest acceptance that sometimes evil things happen, maybe for no discernible reason, or for reasons that are themselves evil, also pervades and propels Deathdream, as astonishing a work of culturally conscious, morally disgruntled low-budget horror filmmaking as Black Christmas (and with less than half that film's budget). An American soldier named Andy (Richard Backus) is slain in Vietnam, another life wasted, betrayed by the country whose jingoism he was forced to defend. The film opens in the gloomy haze of chaotic jungle as plumes of fire consume the earth and bullets tear through the night and human bodies. The howls of dying boys fade into fleeting echoes and soon go silent.
Andy's family grieves him incongruously. His mother (Lynn Carlin) vehemently insists that her son is still alive as she goes manic in the delirium of depression, while his father (John Marley)—who informs his family of the tragic news with the simple sentence, “It's Andy…”—can only stand in the resignation of the suddenly bereaved. Calm, crestfallen. How will he bring his wife back to reality? Reality may be miserable, but it's where they are supposed to be. But, as they will soon learn, reality can be tainted by the impossible, and become a nightmare from which you cannot awake. Their son does return, but whether Andy is actually alive—whether he is, in his soul, truly Andy—remains unknown, though it doesn't seem good. He's awfully creepy. The metaphor for Americans returning home ruined may be obvious, but Clark subtly laces the familiar scenario with a hallucinatory gloom that makes reality seem unreal, and supernatural horror truthful.
With Deathdream, Clark finds a mood born of the same impassioned spirit as George A. Romero: incisive, angry, tinctured with hope which may prove futile, observing and commenting and offering no promises. The thriftiness with which Clark galvanizes images of existential dread, intimate in aesthetic yet vast in conviction, with such limited resources is the spiritual kin of Romero's Martin. These are lo-fi films that can unsettle not just with terror and violence but by delving into deeper, darker depths. And like Romero, Clark politically provokes, unrepentant and sincere.
Clark understands the power of his performers’ faces, with many shots of them and them alone, talking, listening, staring at the next realm. He also makes the small town, with its thick pools of shadow, seem realer than real with stylized chiaroscuro and dream-swoony shots and editing—images of traditional unamazing American small town life, and images of that small town torn from the rules of reality. Like Romero, Clark uses every low-budget trick you can imagine to make his $300,000 look like a million (as his adroit use of zooms in and out of windows does in Black Christmas). Consider Andy's return: reverb-drenched snarls like the devil's breath accompanying the camera prowling the night. The doorknob cryptically turns, and standing still in the shadows, a slit of smile on his face, is Andy. Or “Andy,” as he is called in the opening credits.
The lives America threw away destroy families and towns in Deathdream, as in real life. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to The New York Times, and the Reserve Officers Training Corps’ enrollment decreased from 191,749 in 1966 to 72,459 by the end of that year. Henry Kissinger won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for his involvement in that January’s Paris Peace Accords; less than two months after those accords, America would drop out of the war, and Nixon would insinuate, in Tricky Dick style, that the U.S. would intervene with force if North Vietnam launched an offensive. Deathdream came out after America admitted defeat, with great shame and even greater denial, and just weeks after Nixon's resignation on August 8, 1974, a seminal and sad moment, captured on television and beamed into millions of living rooms. Deathdream captures the anxiety of the era, one which has yet to really abate, implying its own eternal eon-spanning influence with each new atrocity.
Those stricken with the awful ache of morality, who protested the Vietnam War and peacefully expressed grievances, were—and still are, through inherited wisdom—accused of hating and berating and hurting veterans, a myth of virulence which, of course, is not true. Clark made a film that doesn't judge veterans; rather, Deathdream shows this country's poor treatment of them, demanding their lives and destroying their families and then forgetting them. Deathdream is anti-war, yet painfully empathetic.
Black Christmas and Deathdream find uncomfortable truths lurking in front of us, right there in the honest light of day. (At least the fantastical horrors of Clark's films strike in the dark.) They capture the anxieties engendered and augmented by elected officials representing a society with no other choice but worry. Clark's vision is damning in its evocations of modern North America's widespread, deep-seated wickedness stemming from archaic ideas which refuse to stay in the past.
In Black Christmas, faceless Billy, a man of sinister ambiguity, takes revenge on women for no discernible reason, going after their bodies, invading their bedrooms. He is an entity as vague as the wording of Canadian abortion law. In Deathdream, the dead return corrupted, like all the men returning home from war to be abandoned by the systems which made them go in the first place. Back to U.S. soil came a legion of broken men. Both films have within them moral dyspepsia, such deep disappointment in their respective countries, resulting in a rotting of the soul calling out to sucking flies. Clark controls these intense emotions and political provocations through striking images, deepest, darkest shadows contrasting with pretty pools of light and red-and-green-bulbed strings draped lovingly from snow-capped homes all aglint with false hope.
The fear of the unborn, the vacancy in the soul of the undead…these subjects are classic horror. Their realization is thoroughly, terribly modern. In cinema, we see dreams; and in these dreams, glowing gorgeous on big white screens in big dark rooms, cruel realities manifest as entertainment, with the lucidity of warping memories burrowed deep. Jorge Luis Borges, drawing from the Romantics, put it pretty well in “Ragnarök”: “The images in dreams, wrote Coleridge, figure forth the impressions that our intellect would call causes; we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel.” You watch Black Christmas and Deathdream, and you know how Bob Clark felt.