Billy (Black Christmas)

Billy is a fictional character from the Black Christmas film series. He first appeared in Black Christmas (1974), as a deranged murderer who taunts and kills a group of college students during the Christmas season. Created by Bob Clark and A. Roy Moore, the character was partly inspired by the urban legend "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs", as well as a series of real murders during the holiday season.

Billy
Black Christmas character
Billy (possibly Albert J. Dunk) in Black Christmas (1974)
First appearanceBlack Christmas
(1974)
Last appearanceBlack Christmas
(2006)
Created byA. Roy Moore
Bob Clark
Portrayed byBlack Christmas (1974)
Bob Clark
Albert J. Dunk
Nick Mancuso
(Voice on Phone)
Black Christmas (2006)
Robert Mann
(Adult)
Cainan Wiebe
(Young)
In-universe information
Nickname
  • Billy
  • The Caller
  • The Killer
  • The Moaner
  • The Sorority House Killer
SpeciesHuman
GenderMale
OccupationMass murderer
Serial killer
FamilyBlack Christmas (2006)
Frank Lenz (father, deceased)
Constance Lenz (mother, deceased)
Agnes Lenz (sister/daughter, deceased)
Unnamed stepfather (deceased)

Several members of the cast and crew would portray and voice the character in the original film, including Nick Mancuso, cameraman Bert Dunk, and director Clark. Neither the character nor his portrayer(s) would be listed in the end credits. In the subsequent years following the original film's release, fans and several media outlets have often cited the character's name as Billy, and director Clark has himself referred to the character by that name in later interviews.

Unlike later slasher film antagonists, the character's true identity and motivations were intentionally omitted from the 1974 film, which the filmmakers felt made him more frightening. Several critics and art historians have noted that by leaving the character enigmatic, it allowed the audience to place their own fears onto the character, forming their own ideas about him and his motivations. While largely overshadowed by more popular horror film antagonists, Billy has subsequently been identified by some critics and film historians as establishing many of the tropes that later became a staple of the slasher film genre, predating John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). He has been described as one of the greatest horror villains of all time.

Appearances

"Billy" made his first appearance in the original 1974 film Black Christmas as a mentally disturbed man known as "The Moaner", who regularly calls a local sorority house, leaving disturbing and obscene messages. During one such phone call, Barb (Margot Kidder), one of the sorority sisters, provokes him; he responds by threatening to kill them. The caller then goes on a killing spree, murdering most of the sorority house's inhabitants, including Barb. Jess (Olivia Hussey), the lone survivor, is attacked by Billy but manages to fight him off, and after discovering the corpses of Billy's victims in Barb's room, accidentally bludgeons her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) to death, thinking he is the killer. The film ends with Billy, still alive, talking to the corpses in the attic, before making a final phone call to the house.[1]

Billy later appeared in the 1976 novelization of the film written by Campbell Armstrong under the pseudonyms Lee Hays[2][3] and the 1983 republished edition as Thomas Altman.[4][5] Both editions gave the character's name as Billy.[2][4]

The 2006 remake of the original film brought Billy back. In it, his real name, William "Billy" Edward Lenz (Cainan Wiebe), was given, and he is suffering from severe jaundice due to liver disease. Although his father loves him, Billy wa physically and mentally abused as a child by his mother, Constance (Karin Konoval), who blames him for being born. After murdering Billy's father along with her lover, Constance rapes Billy after she is unable to conceive a child with her lover, becoming pregnant and giving birth to Billy's sister/daughter Agnes (Christina Crivici). Billy later goes insane and murders his mother and her lover, disfiguring Agnes before being caught and sent to an insane asylum. Years later, an adult Billy (Robert Mann) escapes and goes on a rampage with Agnes (Dean Friss) at their old family home, which has been converted into a sorority house. After murdering most of the inhabitants, both Agnes and Billy are killed by Kelli Presley (Katie Cassidy), the sole survivor.[6]

Concept and creation

Development

Billy was partially inspired by the urban legend of "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs",[7][8] which had become widespread during the 1970s.[9][10] In it, a young woman babysitting three children is tormented by a madman who leaves threatening phone calls, later revealed to be coming from upstairs in the house.[11] It was also the basis for the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls, and its subsequent remake.[8]

A. Roy Moore took further inspiration from a series of murders that occurred during the 1943 holiday season in the Westmount area of Montreal.,[12][13] in which a 14-year-old boy bludgeoned several of his family members to death.[14] After finishing the first draft, which was initially titled Stop Me,[15][16][17] Bob Clark and Timothy Bond developed both the script and its characters in subsequent rewrites.[7] .[17] Clark said later that, from the outset, he had never intended to fully reveal the character, feeling it was more frightening to have the character remain ambiguous.[10][18] In a later interview he admitted that the character does have a very subtle backstory, adding logic and reasoning behind his actions and phone calls.[10][17]

Warner Brothers, who later purchased distribution rights for the film, disliked its ending and wanted significant changes as to the character's identity.[18] During preparation in 1975 for the film's American release, studio executives asked Clark to change the concluding scene to show Clare's boyfriend, Chris, appear in front of Jess and say, "Agnes, don't tell them what we did" before killing her.[7] Clark, however, was able to convince the studio to retain the original ending, in which both the ending and the character remained ambiguous.[18]

The 2006 incarnation of the character was partially inspired by the crimes of serial killer Edmund Kemper.

Billy's enigmatic nature was subsequently abandoned in favor of a more physical presence in Glen Morgan's 2006 remake. Morgan had intended to rework elements of the original film that were left ambiguous or implied, such as the cryptic phone calls to the sorority house. He also wanted to explore sub-plots from the original film that he felt were not fleshed out, including Billy's history and the reasons for his insanity. Morgan thus created an extensive subplot delving into Billy's origins and introducing his younger sister Agnes as the secondary antagonist.[lower-alpha 1][20][19] Morgan was inspired by the life of Edmund Kemper, a real-life serial killer who as a child had been locked in the basement of his home by his mother, whom he later murdered.[20] According to Morgan, he and producer James Wong had various disputes with Dimension Films executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein.[21] In a 2014 interview Morgan said his original intention was to have only Billy as the film's only antagonist, but the studio forced him to include a second kille.[21]

Billy was originally intended to have survived at the end, with the original conclusion having Kelli and Leigh, who thought he was dead, in the hospital getting a phone call from him.[lower-alpha 2] Bob Weinstein, who disliked the original ending, scrapped it shortly after the scene was filmed, and requested that Morgan write and shoot a new one, which radically altered the fates of many of the characters. In it, Billy is ultimately killed after being impaled on the hospital's Christmas tree-topper.[21]

Name

The character is commonly referred to by fans and some media outlets as Billy,[14][22][23] from his regular mentions of the name during his obscene calls in the original, and the film's final scene, where he refers to himself as "Billy".[1][24] In the end credits, he is unnamed,[lower-alpha 3] and the sorority sisters call him "The Moaner".[1][7][27] Several of the original film's cast members, including Clark himself hav referred to the character as either "Billy" or simply "The Killer" in interviews.[28][29] For the 2006 remake, the character was formally named William "Billy" Edward Lenz,[6][30] and given a sister/daughter Agnes, in reference to the original film's obscene calls where those names are mentioned several times.[31]

Actors

In the original film, Billy was played by multiple actors.[1] Point-of-view shots of the character were done by Clark himself, who also contributed the voice.[32] The scene, shot from Billy's point of view, where Billy scales the house and enters the attic was done by camera operator Bert Dunk using a camera rig attached to his shoulder,[10][18][33] Dunk also portrayed the character in the POV scene where Billy murders Clare, using the same technique.[13][14][28]

The character's voice during the disturbing phone calls was performed by Clark, and actor Nick Mancuso,[7] in his feature film debut.[34] When auditioning for the role, director Clark had Mancuso sit in a chair facing away from him, so as not to see the actor's face. Clark then had Mancuso experiment with different voices in order to come up with one that was right for the character, which got Mancuso the part.[14] He spent three days recording dialogue for the character, recalling the experience as being very "avant-garde", with Clark encouraging him to improvise in the character's voice.[14] During some of these sessions, Mancuso stood on his head to compress his thorax, making his voice sound more demented.[10][14][35]

Robert Mann was hired to portray the character in the 2006 remake.[36] Likening the character to a "time bomb", Mann felt that the character harbored a long-boiling rage due to the severe abuse he suffered.[20]

Characterization
Where other horror movies would have tried to explain the madman's behavior, or pull a big reveal in the final scene, this killer stays hidden throughout. At a time of year when everyone is supposed to be together and celebrating, he's at the edges, shrieking with a fury so intense and destructive that it's barely recognizable as human. Instead of drawing the attention of the authorities, his bizarre behavior makes him invisible. He's a creature so out of bounds with the season that he can operate with unsettling impunity. And not just impunity.

— Zack Handlen's characterization of Billy in his review of the film[37]

In both the original and the 2006 remake, Billy is depicted as mentally disturbed, and sexually perverted.[24][38] Unlike many slasher film villains, Billy's true identity and motivations are never revealed in the original;[39][40][41] his appearances are mostly offscreen.[42][43] Film scholar Adam Rockoff notes Billy's actions and motivations are never explored in a way that would "rationalize or justify his madness", with insanity his defining trait.[44] This lack of physical presence and identity would lead behavioral scientist and psychiatrist Sharon Packer and art historian Jody Pennington to classify the original's Billy as a "faceless killer".[45] Film historian Martin Rubin noted parallels between the character and the shark from Jaws, both of whom are a remorseless, near omnipresent and omniscient force.[46]

Several critics have noted that Billy's lack of a clear backstory in the original forced viewers to place their own fears on the character. As one critic wrote, "Lacking a distinct form or personality, Billy's really anything you want him to be."[47] Brian Collins of Birth.Movies.Death echoed this sentiment, noting that by leaving so many questions unanswered, the original invites viewers to try and solve the mystery of Billy.[48] IndieWire's Jamie Righetti pointed out that Billy's obscene phone calls, "ma[de] it clear that some horrors are all too common, and don't require a boogeyman in a mask."[23] Filmmaker and literary critic John Kenneth Muir felt that part of Billy's effectiveness during the phone calls was due in part to their believability, drawing parallels between the phone calls and crank calling.[49] Graham Austin from FilmEra.com explained that, by using multiple actors to both voice and portray the character, "it "obfuscate[s] his identity and provide the eerie schizophrenic rantings he has between several of his characters.[50] Bud Wilkins of Slant Magazine distinguished Billy and Halloween's Michael Myers, noting that Billy represented a more human killer as opposed to what he called "the unstoppable boogeyman that Michael Myers represents".[26]

In the absence of any clear motivations, critics have offered their own suggestions for the reasons behind Billy's actions. Thrillist's Jourdain Searles felt the character represented a critique of toxic masculinity, calling the character "more metaphor than man, an unstoppable, unexplainable personification of masculine id with a singular purpose: to kill all the pretty women." Searles went on to note that Billy's dialogue hinted at a deep-seated fury towards women, which seemed to emerge in their presence. [25] Hannah Shaw-Williams pointed out Clark's statement on the character, in which he purportedly revealed Billy and Agnes as siblings, and Billy's dialogue hinting at something horrible which occurred in the character's past. But leaving Billy's true identity, backstory, and motivation ambiguous, she said, made the film more interesting.[24]

For the 2006 remake, writer and director Glen Morgan wanted a more defined killer, abandoning the original character's ambiguity in favor of a more traditional slasher villain. He thus added a backstory, revealing that Billy was born with severe jaundice,[51] which turned his skin yellow. Billy's insanity was also explained as being the result of severe abuse at the hands of his mother, leading to the birth of his sister/daughter after being raped by his mother.[24][52]

Robert Mann, who portrayed the adult character in the remake, felt that Billy's abuse at the hands of his mother had created a long-suppressed rage that threatened to emerge at any moment and Billy's moments of extreme violence came from that long-boiling hatred stemming from years of abuse. Glen Morgan stated that the character's motivations arise from their twisted definitions of love and family, which Billy equated with violence after witnessing his father's murder, and the years of maternal abuse he suffered. Morgan went on to reveal that Billy's acts of cannibalism were, in the character's view, a way of "showing his love to them".[20]

Art and cultural historian Berit Åström explained that many aspects of the character in the remake, including his backstory and motivations, mirrored that of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, noting both characters have Oedipus complexes toward their abusive mothers.[53] Åström further explained that both eventually committed matricide.[54] Several critics, including admirers of the original film, would criticize the remake's exploration of the character's backstory as being generic, and less frightening.[30][55] In her book Life Lessons from Slasher Films, Jessica Robinson argued that the remake's extensive backstory for the character was an attempt by the filmmakers to elicit sympathy for the character.[56]

Legacy

Since his first appearance in the original film, Billy has been credited by several critics and film historians as establishing many of the tropes that later became a staple for the slasher film genre,[57][58] such as the image of the "faceless killer",[59][60][45] predating John Carpenter's Halloween.[61][62] They have also noted that both Billy and Black Christmas have been largely overshadowed by more popular slasher film entries and villains.[63][64]

Several critics have noted that Halloween was possibly inspired and influenced by Clark's film and its antagonist.[25][65] Clark himself has stated that Carpenter might have drawn partial inspiration for Carpenter's film after a conversation about what a possible sequel to Black Christmas might look like.[17][40][66] However, Clark also admitted that this may or may not have been the case,[18] and Carpenter himself denied 'borrowing' anything from Clark's film, noting that Halloween was not originally his idea.[67] Many aspects of Billy, including his threatening phone calls, would be utilized in countless other slasher films and characters. As Complex's Matt Barone pointed out that Scream franchise's Ghostface killer, who uses the same method of phoning his victims, would not have existed if not for Black Christmas and Billy.[68][69]

Billy has been listed in several media publications as one of the greatest horror film villains of all time. In 2017, GamesRadar included the character in their "30 Cruelest Horror Movie Villains".[70] Daniel Kurland from Bloody Disgusting included the character in his list of "The 10 Best Non-Monster Horror Villains", calling him "the prototypical slasher villain".[71]

The character has been referenced in several other entertainment media. In the 2006 mockumentary slasher film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, the title character was mentored by a "retired" killer named Eugene. According to writer David J. Stieve, the character was written as both a homage and an allusion to Billy, pointing out allusions to the character by stating that both characters helped "pioneer the business of fear", but were not as widely recognized as much as their successors.[72] In earlier drafts of the film's script, Eugene was heavily implied to be Billy, but the idea was later abandoned in subsequent drafts in favor of making the character a combination of various slasher villains.[73] Billy also appeared in Season 2[74] of the flash cartoon parody series 30-Second Bunnies Theatre.[75]

In the 2019 remake Billy was replaced by a cult of misogynistic killers. According to director Sophia Takal, the original version of the character "had symbolized all the misogyny and sexism implicated against women", and, wanting to further convey this theme, Takal reinterpreted the character as a cult of misogynists rather than a single killer.[22][76] In spite of Billy not appearing in the film, co-writer April Wolfe revealed that the fight scene at the end of the film, where the main characters use Christmas decorations as weapons, was a direct reference to him.[77] This change was unpopular both with critics and fans of the original.[78][79] As one critic wrote, the character's "terrifying ambiguous threat" had been replaced by what they called a more "explicit and hackneyed embodiment of the patriarchy itself".[31]

See also

Notes
  1. The name "Agnes" was constantly mentioned by Billy in the original film.[19]
  2. According to Morgan, this ending was intended to be an homage to the original film's conclusion.[21]
  3. Several media outlets have mistakenly reported that the character was listed in the end credits as The Prowler,[25][26] but neither the character nor his portrayer(s) are listed in the end credits.[1]

References

Citations
  1. Clark 1974.
  2. Hays 1976.
  3. LibraryofCongress 1977, p. 2472.
  4. Altman 1983.
  5. Delaney 2000.
  6. Morgan 2006a.
  7. Smith 2016.
  8. Koven 2008, p. 129.
  9. Brunvand 2012, p. 46.
  10. Jackson 2018.
  11. Brunvand 2003, p. 54.
  12. Dupuis 2016.
  13. Duffin 2006.
  14. Power 2019.
  15. Nowell 2010, p. 63.
  16. Orchard 2005.
  17. McConnell & Mihalka 2015.
  18. Duffin & DuFort-Leavy 2005.
  19. Hantke 2010, p. 112.
  20. Morgan 2006b.
  21. Vander Kaay & Fernandez-Vander Kaay 2014, pp. 168–169.
  22. Bibbiani 2019.
  23. Righetti 2019, p. 4.
  24. Shaw-Williams 2019.
  25. Searles 2018.
  26. Wilkins 2016.
  27. Crump 2013, p. 43.
  28. TerrorTrap 2011.
  29. Morris 2005.
  30. Lipsett 2018.
  31. Smith 2019.
  32. Doupe 2015.
  33. Brundtland 2002.
  34. Rist 2001, p. 135.
  35. FilmReel 2015.
  36. Willis & Monush 2010, p. 240.
  37. Handlen 2014.
  38. Hart 2019, p. 236.
  39. Rockoff 2011, p. 44.
  40. Zinoman 2011, p. 181.
  41. Muir 2012, p. 25.
  42. Hart 2019, p. 92.
  43. Zinoman 2011, p. 216.
  44. Rockoff 2011, p. 42.
  45. Packer & Pennington 2014, pp. 38.
  46. Rubin 1999, p. 161.
  47. Corupe 2006.
  48. Collins 2016.
  49. Muir 2012, p. 316.
  50. Austin 2018.
  51. Shotwell 2016.
  52. Robinson 2012, p. 175.
  53. Åström 2017, p. 212.
  54. Åström 2017, p. 214.
  55. Hartlaub 2006.
  56. Robinson 2012, pp. 112–113.
  57. Benshoff 2014, p. 323.
  58. Weinberg 2019.
  59. Harper 2004, p. 11.
  60. Paszylk 2009, p. 136.
  61. Collum 2015, p. 10.
  62. Thrower 2007, p. 25.
  63. Paszylk 2009, p. 135.
  64. Hantke 2010, p. 111.
  65. Schaefer 2019.
  66. Muir 2012, p. 315.
  67. Zinoman 2011, p. 182.
  68. Barrone 2013.
  69. Barrone 2017.
  70. Winning 2017.
  71. Kurland 2016.
  72. Squires 2016.
  73. IconsofFright 2007.
  74. Shiman 2013a.
  75. Shiman 2013b.
  76. Page 2019.
  77. Deckelmeier 2019.
  78. Grierson 2019.
  79. Kennedy 2019.

Sources

Books
  • Anon. (1977). Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series: 1976: January-June. Copyright Office, Library of Congress.
  • Altman, Thomas (1983). Black Christmas. Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-23198-4. Retrieved December 4, 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Åström, Berit (July 11, 2017). The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination: Missing, Presumed Dead. Palgrave Macmillian. ISBN 978-3-319-49037-3.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Benshoff, Harry (July 31, 2014). A Companion to the Horror Film. Wiley. ISBN 978-1-118-88349-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Jan Harold Brunvand (December 17, 2003). The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-34653-4.
  • Jan Harold Brunvand (2012). Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. 1 (Revised ed.). ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-59884-720-8.
  • Collum, Jason (January 27, 2015). Assault of the Killer B's: Interviews with 20 Cult Film Actresses. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-8041-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • William D. Crump (August 28, 2013). The Christmas Encyclopedia (3rd ed.). McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-0573-9.
  • Harper, Jim (2004). Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies. Critical Vision. ISBN 978-1-900486-39-2.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Hart, Adam (2019). Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-091623-7.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Koven, Mikel (2008). Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-6025-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Hantke, Steffen (June 1, 2010). American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium. Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-454-6.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Hays, Lee (1976). Black Christmas. Popular Library. ISBN 0-9658657-7-0.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Muir, John (November 22, 2012). Horror Films of the 1970s. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-9156-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Nowell, Richard (December 23, 2010). Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4411-8850-2.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Packer, Sharon; Pennington, Jody (July 15, 2014). A History of Evil in Popular Culture: What Hannibal Lecter, Stephen King, and Vampires Reveal About America. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-313-39771-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Paszylk, Bartłomiej (June 8, 2009). The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-5327-6.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Rist, Peter (2001). Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-29931-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Robinson, Jessica (June 7, 2012). Life Lessons from Slasher Films. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-8503-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Rockoff, Adam (October 21, 2011). Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-6932-1.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)*Rubin, Martin (March 28, 1999). Thrillers. Genres in American Cinema. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58839-3.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Thrower, Stephen (2007). Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents. FAB Press.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Chris Vander Kaay; Kathleen Fernandez Vander Kaay (August 15, 2014). The Anatomy of Fear. Norlightspress.com. ISBN 978-1-935254-97-3.
  • Willis, John; Monush, Barry (May 1, 2010). Screen World 2007. Hal Leonard. ISBN 978-1-55783-729-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Zinoman, Jason (July 7, 2011). Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror. Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-101-51696-6.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Websites

Further reading
  • Billy at Black Christmas (wiki)
  • Billy at Horror Film (wiki)
  • Billy at Villains (wiki)
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