BLACK CHRISTMAS

1974

CONVENTIONS• The setting is typical,

an isolated suburban house (sorority) where there are no immediate neighbours to be seen.

• An almost cliché, were the film not old, midnight tolling of the church clock can be heard.

• POV shots are used so that the audience can see things from the killer’s mindset.

SOUND• There’s a tolling of the church clock at

midnight, the chimes ringing out into the otherwise very quiet air, drawing attention to the fact that it’s now late.

• Non-diagetic sound can be heard of people off screen singing a rather eerie rendition of Silent Night - this combined with the clock chimes indicate it must be Christmas Eve.

• The singing sounds very downcast and melancholy, which combined with the sounds of the wind gives a strange atmosphere of mystery.

• The only other sounds are a dog barking as the girl walks around the fence which fits in with the suburban background, and the soft footsteps from the POV shot of the killer which is even more noticeable as it’s such a quiet night.

USE OF TITLES• The titles are fairly

simple. • A black font with a

white outline is used, ornate like the sorority house it’s displayed in front of.

• The rest of the titles’ text is plain white and shaking a little – shaky text being a common use in slasher titles.

CAMERA TECHNIQUES I

• There is an establishing shot of the house at the very beginning, showing how isolated it is. These girls are most definitely alone for the night.

• The camera focuses on the doorstep, the POV shot watching the girl which goes in and then following her. The killer is observing her. The camera cuts to the window where she is, watching her take off her coat and hat and zooming in slightly before panning left to watch her from the next window and slowly zooming in further and further to see her better. It’s like he’s scanning for a victim, noting down her movements, trying to see her undress more. It’s disturbing and very focused on her and nothing else.

• The camera is shaking slightly at all times, but this increases significantly when the view changes to a POV shot from the killer’s point of view. We can hear his unsteady footsteps and see his shadow stretch across the wall as he walks forward up to the house.

CAMERA TECHNIQUES II

• The POV shot from outside the gate is at an oblique angle, unsteady like the killer and his footsteps and the house is seen from a low angle. Though normally the low angle is used to suggest inferiority, here it seems more as if the killer is observing the house. The viewer looks up, at the door then the windows above focusing on so we can see that a light is on in one and not the other, then to the lower windows. It seems as if he’s estimating how many of them there are in the house and their locations – calculating, intelligent, stalking their movements.

• The camera is looking through a mid level POV shot at the window that is centre frame, the girls that can be seen through it from behind the curtain the centre of the killer’s attention, and then his shadow falls ominously over it – these girls are doomed.

MISE EN SCENE• The girl seen was dressed in a blue hat and yellow

trousers. Blue is symbolically the colour of calm and yellow the colour of happiness – there was nothing to mark her out in particular as a victim, except that she went into that house which the killer was observing which indicates she is one of the people in the house who will be in danger.

• Young people are the usual victims of slashers. The girl looked quite young, and being a sorority house which is isolated means that there are no adults there and everyone else is also young, most likely adolescent age.

• The lighting’s all quite dark and everywhere is filled with shadows – this is expected as the view is only from outside the house, where the only real light to be found is from all the festive lights attached to the trees and the windows.

• The killer is never seen but we know he is there from the POV shots, from hearing his presence and footsteps, his shadow falling over the wall and window, from seeing things from his mindset as he watches the girls and stalks them. A mystery stalker is also typical of a slasher, and Black Christmas is an early slasher which helped set the characteristics of them in a similar fashion to how Psycho did for most horror films.