Black Christmas (1974): The Slasher Before the Slasher

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Everyone credits Halloween with inventing the slasher, and everyone is roughly four years wrong. In 1974, a Florida-raised director named Bob Clark shot a low-budget horror film in Toronto about a killer hiding in the attic of a sorority house over the Christmas holidays, and in doing so laid down almost every rule the genre would spend the next decade codifying. The prowling first-person camera. The teenage victims picked off one by one in a single building. The obscene, taunting phone calls. The final young woman left alone with the threat. The killer whose face and motive you never learn. Black Christmas is not a rough draft of the slasher — it is the finished blueprint, arriving before anyone knew there was a genre to blueprint.

Proto-Slasher - vo.rs

Black Christmas (1974): The Slasher Before the Slasher