Trailer
Plot summary
The Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house is holding its Christmas party when the phone rings again. The caller, who identifies himself as Billy, has been making obscene calls to the house, and the girls call him the moaner. Barb Coard answers with a snide remark and gets a threat in return. Jess Bradford has separate trouble: she is pregnant and has not told her boyfriend Peter Smythe. By morning one of the sisters is missing, and the desk sergeant brushes the report aside, especially with thirteen-year-old Janice Quaife also missing nearby. Chris Hayden presses for action, and Lieutenant Fuller has the house phone tapped as the calls keep coming.
Cast
- James Edmondas Mr. Harrison
- Michael Rapportas Patrick
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Black Christmas (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Roy Moore said he was inspired by holiday-season murders in Montreal's Westmount area; according to The Telegraph, those 1943 murders were committed by a fourteen-year-old boy who bludgeoned several of his own family members to death.
- Gilda Radner accepted the role of Phyllis Carlson but dropped out one month before filming because of her Saturday Night Live commitments, and was replaced by fellow Second City performer Andrea Martin.
- Before the 1975 American release, Warner Bros. executives asked Bob Clark to change the concluding scene so that Chris appears to Jess and says 'Agnes, don't tell them what we did' before killing her; Clark refused and kept the ending ambiguous.
- Olivia Hussey, already internationally famous as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, took her Black Christmas role after a psychic told her she would 'make a film in Canada that would earn a great deal of money'.
- Lieutenant Fuller was first played by Edmond O'Brien, but when he arrived the producers found his failing health (Alzheimer's disease) made him unable to do the part; John Saxon was called in and had two days to get to Toronto from New York City.
- For the film's second U.S. run, Warner Bros. publicized a telephone number that played an automated, sinister message; it drew over 10,000 calls in the New York City area in 24 hours, tying up the studio's line until the New York Telephone Company asked them to pull the ads.
- Composer Carl Zittrer made the film's eerie score by tying forks, combs and knives onto the strings of a piano to warp the sound of the keys, then recording it onto audiotape and slowing the sound down.
