How Black Christmas Led to the Creation of Halloween

When looking at the history of the slasher genre, it seems to start for many with John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978.

Yes, there was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960, but it’s remembered more as a psychological film rather than as a straight-up slasher.

There was also Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974, but there is so much madness going on, that to label it as simply a slasher is to do it an injustice.

Halloween started the phenomenon that would carry horror through the 1980s, of a masked madman hunting down teenagers until only the final girl is remaining.

While Halloween is no doubt a classic that deserves all the accolades it gets, it’s also not the first to deliver horror in such a way.

Four years earlier, Bob Clark did it first with Black Christmas, and one fateful conversation with John Carpenter may have

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