“Silent Night” plays over the opening credits of the holiday slasher Black Christmas, a cruel punchline for a film in which a group of sorority sisters are plagued by the repeated shrill ringing of a landline — phone calls from an unknown pervert — and any silence is eventually shattered by their screams.
Directed by Bob Clark, who would make the feel-good holiday comedy A Christmas Story nine years later, Black Christmas is widely considered one of the first slasher films, a genre definer that influenced horror classics like John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Released 50 years ago, it arrived the same year as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but while Tobe Hooper’s film followed a group of young friends fatally venturing into unfamiliar territory, Black Christmas brought the horror home to familiar bedrooms, inducing a claustrophobic terror from which there was no escape.
