In this edition of Horror Madness, we see two very different homes come under attack by two very different kinds of invaders. In one corner, we have Bob Clark’s other Christmas movie:
In the other, we have a popular franchise starter:
See the introduction and full slate here: https://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/
What makes a place a home? The cliched answer, which is like all his little aphorisms at once recognizable as a truth and unsatisfying the more you think about it, comes from Robert Frost: it’s the place where when you go there, they have to let you in. There’s a lot that’s unspoken in that line; home is a location, but one defined by relationships. It’s welcoming, otherwise it wouldn’t be your home, but there is a constant barrier. You have to be let in, you can’t simply enter. Even if your entry is unconditional, it is conditioned on you being who you are. Your home is never a place where everyone is let in. No home is home for everyone; it wouldn’t be home then, it would be something else.
These two films have different living places - one a college sorority house, one a suburban mcmansion - but each place is defined both by who lives there and who is not allowed to. Each home is, in a sense, a fortress. They are protective places: safe for their residents, but only so because the residents police who can come and go. This is made explicit in The Purge, in which home security systems figure prominently, but all of the girls in Black Christmas’s sorority are there to escape something. It’s a place where men are not and where relationships between women take primacy. This makes certain men very angry.
All of the dangers in both films come from outsiders. Houses and homes are important in many kinds of horror; the gothic is all about houses. Very often, the danger is from the house itself; the presumption of safety in the home is subverted by pointing out all of the dangers within it. Home invasion horror is not quite like this. The danger comes from outside here; the horror (and subversion) comes from realizing the flimsiness of the house’s walls. The home isn’t safe because the boundary separating it from the outside is weak, and porous. Anything might come in. It might not be easy to tell the difference between someone who should be there and someone who shouldn’t.
“The call is coming from inside the house.” There’s a reason that line has had such a long life, because what it means is “it’s too late.” It means “you thought you were safe here, but you’re not safe anywhere. There’s no difference between inside and outside.” That’s what all home invasion stories are about: if haunted house horror is about how the home itself is dangerous, this subgenre is about how having a home makes you a target. Having anything that other people don’t have makes you a target.
The Purge, and the series it started, wears its class politics on its sleeve, particularly in the later installments. They, correctly to my mind, reorient the story of this dystopia around the regular people on the bottom, rather than the worried, status-anxious people near the top. This first film is about the latter, as many home invasion films are. There are seeds of interesting things here about inter-suburban class tensions, and about the way these people all hate each other and become consumed by petty jealousies even as the world falls apart. The family at the center of the film isn’t really much of one; you never get the sense that they love each other. That’s probably accurate for this kind of community, more or less, but it means you don’t really care who lives or dies.
That isn’t true of Black Christmas, which for all its violence is startling in its warmth and its affection for its characters. The girls in the sorority house are flawed. They drink too much and argue and date shitty guys that their friends don’t like - they’re college students, experiencing independence for the first time and shakily adapting to it. They have each other’s backs, though – they love each other and look out for each other. They make each other laugh, and confide in each other, and goof off. Even though they mostly fail to protect each other, they try, and that counts for a lot. There are ways this could have been an intensely misogynistic movie, and there are plenty of imitators that are. But everyone making the film remembered that these young women are human beings, first, which makes everything both scarier and, in the end, sadder. There’s no triumph in being the final girl when it means you’re all alone.
The Purge does have one thing going for it and that’s Lena Headey. One wishes the movie deserved her a little more. There are shades here of her performance on Game of Thrones, of an intense frustration that threatens to boil over into rage. She seems out of place as a suburban mom; she’s too glamorous and sharp to be in this world, but that works for the character. She doesn’t belong in the suburbs and hates everyone there. You can’t blame her. Nothing else in the movie is quite that good; it’s most interesting for its dystopian premise, which was better explored in subsequent films. Ethan Hawke is fine, but he doesn’t do much.
Margot Kidder would make Black Christmas a classic all on her own, but thankfully the rest of the film matches her. It’s as fascinating and beautiful and tragic as horror gets. Black Christmas wins it.