A sorority house at night, decorated for Christmas, glows with a warm yellow light in each window that says: this is home. All are safe and cozy here. The viewer realizes that they’re seeing this safe, warm house from the point of view of an intruder and as we climb in through an open window with the intruder, we learn that the places where we’re supposed to be safe can be the most dangerous places of all. Bob Clark’s horror masterpiece Black Christmas plays with color in its title, contrasting the horrific deaths and darkness of the film with the joyfully nostalgic holiday song “White Christmas,” but Clark also plays with color throughout his story of a deranged murderer terrorizing the women of Pi Kappa Sigma. Light, color, and pattern foreshadow deaths, provide clues (along with red herrings), and illuminate the killer’s festering hatred of women.
The sorority sisters have been receiving obscene phone calls for quite some time now. The calls are disturbing and violent, and over the course of the film they escalate into terrifying psychodramas involving multiple voices and a narrative about the childhood misdeeds of Billy, who is presumably the caller himself. Billy often takes on the voices of his parents and his young sister Agnes; it is strongly implied that Billy sexually assaulted Agnes, killed her, and then hid her body. Billy’s actions within the film escalate further from unnerving phone calls to murder. He waits until most of the sisters have left for the holidays and then he picks off the remaining women one by one until only a Final Girl remains.
Clothing reveals a lot about a person, especially the sisters of Pi Kappa Sigma. Billy’s first on-screen victim, Clare (Lynne Griffin), looks every bit the festive schoolgirl: she wears a green blouse and a red plaid pleated skirt. Accused by housemate Barb (Margot Kidder) of being “a professional virgin,” Clare comes across as innocent and prim. She’s soft-spoken and easily hurt, retreating to her room after being insulted by Barb. Billy recognizes this innocence and responds to it in his own twisted way. When Billy suffocates her with a plastic garment bag (subtly underscoring the importance of clothing in the film), he poses her dead body in a rocking chair with a baby doll in her arms. He rocks her gently and sings lullabies to her, repeatedly calling her “Agnes” in a tender, mournful tone of voice. Clare seems to represent the pure side of femininity to Billy; she is the little sister archetype, the victim he preserves and displays like his very own baby doll.
Barb is the opposite of Clare in nearly every way. She is loud, brash, and partial to making sexual jokes at inappropriate times. She stands out visually from her sisters, wearing brilliant blues and purples, showing a fondness for sexy outfits that mix menswear with feminine touches like chokers. Unlike the rest of the sorority house decor, with its warm ’70s florals, Barb’s bedroom is dark and moody. Her sheets have geometric patterns in blue and purple and her drapes match the jewel tones she so clearly loves. She sleeps in a strappy satin ensemble, and its color — bright red — signals that she is marked for death. Every one of Billy’s victims wears red at the time of their murders. In fact, the moment of death is the only time many of them ever wear red: the color of blood, rage, and power.
The dress Barb wears just before her death scene foreshadows her murder. It is a simple but alluring black dress with bell sleeves, drawing attention to her hands which the viewer will soon see vainly trying to protect herself from the attack. The dress features a simple red and green floral motif with a dagger-shaped pattern that lies directly over her sternum, hinting that Barb will soon have a blade in her heart. It is another interesting reference to Barb’s unique definition of femininity: the dress is bold, strong, aloof, and sexy.
Barb is the most overtly sexualized character, constantly cracking wise about her sex life and perusing Playboy after dinner in what seems to be a hint at her bisexuality. Billy establishes himself at the very beginning of the movie as a sexual predator — during the phone calls he tells the girls in hideously graphic detail what he wants to do to them — and he is clearly agitated by Barb’s sexual bravado. Yet he is also aroused: just before he kills her, he approaches her bed slowly and calls her “pretty Agnes.” Her death scene is filmed differently from all the others: rather than seeing her death from Billy’s point of view, the viewer watches from a distance as Billy stabs her repeatedly with the horn of a unicorn figurine. We see blood pooling on the weapon and Barb’s hand weakly trying to ward off the attack, all in slow motion. The camera feels deliberately detached, almost as if it is too horrified by Billy’s frenzied overkill to show us any more than it has to.
If Clare is the little sister and Barb is the object of desire, then house mother Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman) is the warped maternal figure. Just like Barb, Mrs. Mac likes to drink and joke about sex. When the girls present her with her Christmas gift (an old-fashioned robe with a soft floral print), she says she has about as much use for it as a chastity belt. Mrs. Mac prefers bold abstract prints in browns and oranges. However, she does wear a deep blue vest at one point, showing another point of kinship between her and Barb. Mrs. Mac rejects the nurturing house mother role just as she rejects the old lady robe that the girls give her: she would rather sneak hooch and curse at her cat than be anyone’s mother.
Mrs. Mac embraces conventional femininity more when she gets dressed to go visit her sister: she wears a brown and red plaid suit with a flower in her lapel and bows on her hat and blouse. Billy lures Mrs. Mac to the attic by meowing like her beloved cat and then murders her in her feminine red ensemble. He penetrates Mrs. Mac just like he penetrated Barb, only this time he does it with a sharp hook. Still, there is little coincidence that the two most outspokenly sexual female characters are the ones whom Billy murders via penetrative means. Billy’s entire persona is about inflicting his sexual desires onto unwilling women, from the obscene phone calls to the glimpses of how he abused his sister, and he acts out these fantasies through piqueristic murder. After Mrs. Mac dies, the yellow cab waiting outside the house for her departs; once again yellow represents safety, but the cab pulls away from the house because it’s too late for Mrs. Mac to take refuge in it.
Sorority sister Phyl (Andrea Martin) is more of a house mother than Mrs. Mac is; she is the supportive friend who tends to fade into the background, offering a shoulder to cry on but rarely taking the lead. Her wardrobe reflects this role. Phyl favors earthy, comforting neutrals: forest green sweaters, oatmeal button-downs, and deep brown shawls. Until her death, the only pattern Phyl wears is a subtle striped sweater vest in browns and beiges. From the perspective of color theory, Phyl never stands out. That changes dramatically when she gets ready for bed: Phyl dons a red floral nightgown with white lace trim that is much brighter and far more feminine than her previous wardrobe choices. This is when Billy makes his move. Just like Clare, Barb, and Mrs. Mac, Phyl is marked for death in her girlish red outfit. Even in death, however, Phyl fades away: other than that of young Janice Quaife, a schoolgirl found butchered in the park, Phyl’s is the only murder in the film that takes place offscreen.
We see Phyl again, though, when Final Girl Jess (Olivia Hussey) learns that the bizarre phone calls have been coming from inside the house this whole time. Rather than walking out the front door as instructed by the police, she goes upstairs and discovers Phyl and Barb’s dead bodies. The two women are tangled up in Barb’s bed almost like lovers. Barb’s coded bisexuality and the clear closeness between the two of them from earlier in the film — they share nearly every scene, and after Barb spars with Billy on the phone, Phyl says “Super Tongue strikes again!” — leave open the possibility that they had some kind of sexual and/or romantic relationship. There is an ambiguity to the way their bodies are displayed, though: on one hand, they do seem to be intertwined in bed in a lover’s embrace. On the other hand, they seem rather haphazardly stacked on top of one another, almost as if Billy is treating them like trash. Perhaps Billy picked up on their relationship; after all, he has been stalking the girls and living inside their house for a long time, eavesdropping on their conversations and watching them go about their lives. In tossing the girls’ bodies around like garbage, Billy is showing his violent disdain for women who appear to reject men.
Jess’s wardrobe and color coordinations are the most complex in the film, reflecting the tension between her as the Final Girl and Billy as her would-be killer. Most notably, she wears a sweater depicting hands splayed across her chest. At first it seems provocative, as if the hands are caressing her body. Upon further consideration, though, it seems to be a protective barrier or a warning. Her sweater says, “Hands off my body.” This message becomes quite literal when Jess tells her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) that she is pregnant and they argue over her decision to have an abortion. She is firm and clear in her position, telling him that it’s her choice and that she will not change her mind. Furious at her decision, Peter goes into a violent, erratic spiral, and he jumps to the top of the suspect list for viewers and for Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon), the police detective investigating Clare and Janice’s disappearances.
The film uses clothing patterns to cement Peter in viewers’ minds as the logical solution to the puzzle of Billy’s true identity. Clare dies in a red plaid skirt; Mrs. Mac dies in a red and brown plaid suit; the search party volunteer who discovers Janice’s body wears a red plaid coat. Other than these victims (for the volunteer is also a victim: she screams in horror when she finds Janice, clearly traumatized by the sight of what Billy has done to her body), the only other character in the film who wears any plaid is Peter. His plaid coat is brown, though, and the fact that it’s not red ironically identifies the pattern choice as a red herring.
Jess’s clothing is the most wide-ranging in terms of color and style: she most frequently wears yellow, the color identified at the beginning of the movie as representing safety, but she incorporates other color schemes and mixes femininity and masculinity like Barb does. When she visits Peter to tell him about the pregnancy, she wears a dark cardigan and suit jacket with a light blue shirt and dark pants. She pairs this rather stern and minimalist look with a pink beret that looks like cashmere or angora. It is a highly feminine addition to an otherwise masculine look, emphasizing Jess’s strength and confidence in her womanhood. In a later scene, she wears a bubblegum pink bathrobe as she fields another one of Billy’s calls. This is the call when he first mentions Agnes’s name; perhaps Jess’s stereotypically girlish robe reminds Billy of his younger sister.
In the most iconic shot from the film, Billy peers down at Jess from a crack in the door just after she discovers Barb and Phyl’s bodies. Jess sees only one of his eyes; it is a warm brown that seems to glow red from barely contained rage, lust, and madness. It’s a terrifying moment that freezes the viewer (and Jess) in place, but it also continues the film’s clever use of color as a storytelling device. At the end of the film, Jess kills Peter because she believes he is the murderer. Police swarm the house and find Jess and Peter in a shadowy pietà: Peter lies dead, his bloody face cradled in Jess’s lap and his bright blue eyes wide open yet unseeing. Dullea’s unsettling performance, the plaid wardrobe hints, and numerous ambiguous clues throughout the movie suggest that Peter could be the killer, but the viewer knows the truth: Billy’s eyes are brown and Peter’s are blue. Billy is still alive.
Thinking that they’ve caught their man, the police leave Jess alone in her room after a doctor sedates her. Lieutenant Fuller provides a timeline of the people who will be arriving at the house (forensic lab techs, Jess’s parents, etc.), establishing that Jess will be alone in the house for at least an hour. Alone except for Billy, that is. Jess’s fate hangs in the balance: throughout the film she is frequently shown being lit by both yellow and red light, setting up a frightening tension between safety and danger, making her survival an unanswerable question. Jess’s bedroom continues this motif. Yellow drapes and wallpaper infuse the room with warmth, but blood-red furniture surrounds her. Most ominously, a bright red clock sits just over her head, ticking down the seconds until either real help arrives, or (perhaps more likely) Billy claims his final victim. The final shot of the film is an exterior view of the house, which is completely dark; the absence of warm yellow light in the windows indicates that this is no longer a safe place. The outside Christmas lights twinkle, warring between red and yellow, as the phone rings. Jess lies defenseless, left to her ambiguous fate. Horror lurks all around her; the call is still coming from inside the house.
