12 Slays of Xmas: "Black Christmas"

Synopsis

Inspired by the urban legend “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” Black Christmas (1974) is a slasher horror film that follows a group of sorority sisters who receive threatening phone calls and are stalked by a deranged killer during the Christmas season. The film holds a 71 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 7.2 rating on IMDb.

How it relates to the field of psychiatry

Referenced by Professor Wexler (Urban Legend, 1998), “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs” is based on the 1940 unsolved murder of Janett Christman, who was babysitting for the Womack family in Columbia, Missouri (Killer Legends, 2014). Like Black Christmas and Urban Legend, “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs” possesses a unique element of horror, because it is inspired by an actual event.

Claude Lévi-Strauss identified myths and urban legends as forms of speech that communicate cautionary tales of contemporary folklore. Folklore, in the case of Black Christmas, that is based on the historical facts of the Christman case. Per Lévi-Strauss, they identify taboos represented in all cultures that capture four common themes: a) misunderstandings, b) poetic justice, c) business rip-offs, and d) revenge. While loosely based on the original film, the 2006 remake more closely adheres to Lévi-Strauss’ nosology in that the slasher is motivated by revenge. Urban legends are a large part of popular culture and often speak to the fears, anxieties, and biases of that culture. In doing so, they provide insight and give us an idea of the moral fabric of the community.

Films such as Black Christmas provide a prosocial warning, similar to When a Stranger Calls (1979) and the 1978 icon, Halloween (which was originally titled The Babysitter Murders). There are consequences for those who shirk their responsibility when placed in the position to care for the welfare of children. Consequently, what these slasher films have in common is the element of revenge, making them fictional case studies in medical anthropology as well as psychiatry.

A more straightforward theme in the film is Barb’s affliction of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). This, combined with the babysitter motif in Black Christmas, parallels Friday the 13th (1980), yet another iconic slasher film that serves a prosocial revenge warning about the prohibitions of alcohol.