“No Clare, that’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing the annual obscene phone call.” This is how casually Margot Kidder’s tart-tongued Barb treats the killer at the beginning of Bob Clark’s 1974 holiday horror masterpiece Black Christmas. Before the end of the movie, she will learn just how wrong she was not to take this particular obscene phone call seriously. As it turns out, the calls received by Barb, Jess (Olivia Hussey), Phyl (Andrea Martin), and their sorority sisters, are coming from a killer who has holed up in the attic of their sorority house. He only picks up the phone after he has committed yet another murder.
He never gets a name. He’s referred to by the characters as The Moaner, and by most fans as Billy (the calls do heavily imply that he is Billy, and that he has a dark backstory regarding something terrible happening to his sister Agnes), but he remains an amorphous, unknowable presence even at the end of the movie. Hell, he’s not credited, and he’s never even properly seen except as a shadowy figure with a single visible, staring eye. But the killer looms large over the movie as he picks off the main cast one by one, and this is largely because of the contents of the calls he places to the sorority sisters.
They’re all terrifying, but the question is, which ones are the most terrifying? To get us in the festive spirit, I thought I’d rank the six phone calls the killer places throughout the movie. So kick back, put on some holiday tunes, pull out the bottle of sherry the house mother, Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman), hid between the cushions of the couch, and come with me on a deeply disturbing journey. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good fright.
The 6 Phone Calls From Black Christmas (1974) Ranked
#6 Call 2 (Clare’s Death)
“Where did you put Agnes, Billy?”
While it’s creepy, this call pretty much sets the template for what the rest of the calls in the main body of the movie are going to be. It offers a little glimpse into a potential backstory for the killer, and showcases his seemingly inhuman ability to contort the pitch of his voice, playing multiple characters with such little space between them that they almost seem to be talking over each other. However, this call is much too short to put up much competition against the others, as Jess (wisely) hangs up on him after about four lines.
#5 Call 3 (Mrs. Mac’s Death)
“Please, stop me! Oh God, please!”
Call 3 is another shorty with some Agnes backstory, so it’s pretty similar to Call 2. But the fact that it starts with a plea for someone to stop him highlights the fact that the killer isn’t fully in control of his own faculties. If the killer himself desperately wants to stop his own reign of terror and isn’t able to, how the hell is anybody else supposed to do it?
#4 Call 5 (Phyl’s Death)
“You left Billy alone with Agnes!”
Call 5 isn’t exactly the creepiest of the bunch. It also mostly follows the standard “Agnes” script. However, it’s one of the more prolonged calls because it takes place when Jess is trying to help the police track where the killer is calling from, and it allows the killer the chance to show off his vocal calisthenics the most, and his one-man audio drama about two parents screaming at a shrieking child is quite a compelling and eerie listen.
#3 Call 4 (Barb’s Death)
“Just like having a wart removed…”
Call 4 does get a little repetitive, I’m not gonna lie. But that’s what makes the final line pack such a punch. The killer, in a hideously shrieking voice, repeats something that Jess’ boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) said earlier that night about her desire to have an abortion. While this line is partially meant to implicate Peter as a red herring, it is also a chilling early revelation to Jess that the killer has been nearby the whole time and overheard her conversation. She has no reason to trust her creeper of a boyfriend, but if only she had, she might have put two and two together and lived to tell the tale.
#2 Call 1 (Janice’s Death)
“I’m going to kill you.”
The first call the killer makes in the movie starts off innocently enough. Well, innocent on the type of scale Bob Clark’s later movie Porky’s might judge it upon. There sure is some judicious use of the “C” word, but at first, he seems like your typical down-home sex pest, attempting to shock his listeners with raunchy and sexually aggressive talk. Hence Barb’s comment from the beginning of this article. She’s a woman in the 1970s, she’s heard worse.
The call might be spiced up with some slurping and animalistic grunting, but for the most part, it’s run of the mill. Until the very last line, when he intones “I’m going to kill you,” with a sudden cold, casual clarity that is the total opposite of the manic, intense energy of the rest of the call. It’s not a warning, just a statement of fact. If the snowstorm outside didn’t already put a chill down your spine, this call sure will.
#1 Call 6 (Jess’ Death)
“…”
The final call of Black Christmas is by far the most disturbing because it goes unanswered. The movie ends with the police leaving Jess alone to rest in her room, assuming that the newly dead Peter was indeed the killer. Because of this, they are blithely unaware that the real killer is still lurking in the attic. Although we don’t ever see what happens to Jess because the camera cuts to an exterior shot of the house, the fact that the phone is ringing off the hook unheeded certainly implies that some awful fate has befallen her. The killer is continuing his ritual of placing a call after a murder, but now there’s nobody left to hear him after his bloody rampage.
The fact that the phone just keeps ringing while the credits roll in their entirety is the icing on the cake. There is no more story to be told here, for Jess, or for anybody else who we’ve come to know and perhaps even love over the course of the film. It’s a shockingly grim way to end a movie, and the shrill jangling of the phone, which gets louder and louder as time goes by, just keeps rubbing salt in the wound.