Billy is a fictional character from the Black Christmas film series, first appearing in Black Christmas (1974) as a deranged murderer who taunts and kills a group of college students during the Christmas season. Created by Timothy Bond and A. Roy Moore, the character was partly inspired by the urban legend "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs", in addition to the crimes of George Webster and the serial killer William Heirens.
Several members of the cast and crew portrayed and voiced Billy in the original film, such as Nick Mancuso, who performed the voices for the phone calls, while cameraman Albert J. Dunk performed Billy's POV shots and director Clark portrays both the villain's shadow and the phone voices. Neither the character nor his portrayers were listed in the end credits. In the years following the original film's release, fans and media outlets have often cited the character's name as Billy, and director Clark has himself referred to the character by that name in interviews.
Unlike later slasher film antagonists, Billy's true identity and motivations were intentionally omitted from the 1974 version of the film, which the filmmakers felt made him more frightening. Critics and art historians have stated that by leaving Billy enigmatic, it allowed the audience to place their own fears onto the character, forming their ideas about him and his motivations. While largely overshadowed by more popular horror or slasher film villains, Billy has also 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 by some writers as one of the greatest horror villains of all time and has been referenced in several other entertainment media.
Appearances Film Billy first appeared 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.
In the 2006 remake, his full name is William "Billy" Edward Lenz (Cainan Wiebe), and his backstory is prominently featured. Born with severe jaundice due to liver disease, he is physically and emotionally abused as a child by his mother, Constance (Karin Konoval). After murdering Billy's father along with her lover, Constance rapes Billy after she is unable to conceive a child with her lover, 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.
Literature In 1976, Billy appeared in the novelization of the film written by Lee Hays. Hays based the novelization upon Moore's original draft, which expands upon Billy's actions, depicting inner dialogue, and alterations to key sequences. Another novelization was published in 1983 by Campbell Armstrong, under the pseudonym Thomas Altman. While Armstrong's novelization contains similarities to the original film, the plot and characters are considerably altered. In the novel, the mentally-challenged Billy Cole is partially based on Billy, although he is revealed to be a red herring to the actual killer.
Concept and creation Original concept and inspirations
The original concept for Billy was created by Timothy Bond and Roy Moore, with further contributions to the character by Bob Clark. During the early 1970s, Bond and Moore sought to jumpstart their careers in the film industry by writing a horror film. Hearing stories of a babysitter who terrorized children in his care, Bond and Moore began writing the script. When developing the script, Bond and Moore used oral traditions and real-world events as a basis in crafting the character. A major source of inspiration was the urban legend of "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs", which itself is based on the unsolved murder of Janett Christman, who had been babysitting for the Womack family in Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the script's development, the urban legend had become widespread in Canada and the United States, with slight variations depending on the region. The basic storyline describes a young woman who, while babysitting three children, is tormented by a madman who leaves threatening phone calls, later revealed to originate from upstairs in the house. The legend was the basis for other films, including the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls and its subsequent remake.
Additional inspiration was drawn from serial killer William Heirens, who left taunting messages in lipstick for one of his killings, and a series of murders that occurred during the 1943 holiday season in the Westmount area of Montreal, in which 14-year-old George Webster bludgeoned several of his family members to death and attempted to kill others. Modern publications have described the crimes of serial killer and rapist Wayne Boden as an additional influence.
Name While commonly referred to by fans and some media outlets as Billy, the character and his portrayer(s) are not mentioned in the end credits. Modern sources acknowledge Nick Mancuso as the primary voice of Billy, though he did not receive an actor's credit in the film as he was not a member of the actor's union at the time of production. The script credits him as "The Caller", while in the film, he is referred to by sorority sisters as "The Moaner". Several of the original film's cast members, including Clark himself, have referred to the character as either "Billy" or simply "The Killer" in interviews.
For the 2006 remake, he was formally named William "Billy" Edward Lenz and given a sister/daughter, Agnes.
Backstory and identity Working on the script, then titled Stop Me, Bond and Moore created a detailed backstory for Billy to explain his identity and motivations. Bond comments that the character was "very well fleshed out in the sense that we knew his entire back story". As Clark states, Billy would have originated from a small town, where he either injured or killed his baby sister. As Clark elaborates:
He was a disturbed child, and we got a lot of tension from his behavior, was probably jealous of his baby sister and created that schism between him and women. You could write a whole history on him if you wanted, there were enough dynamics, but we never really did.
Much of his ambiguity was intended from the outset, which Bond states that details of Billy were always meant to be subtle and never fully revealed. Once Clark joined the project, the script went through more rewrites which added more ambiguity to the character. Clark was adamant that Billy should remain as obscure as possible, feeling that he was more terrifying when the least amount of information was revealed about him. Though Billy is never fully revealed, Clark left the subtle backstory for the character, in "his [Billy's] behavior and responses".
Clark worked closely with cameraman Bert Dunk to create shots that obscured the character as much as possible. This included using lighting techniques to "shape the shadows" cast by Billy, making him look slender in some scenes and burly in others to distort the audience's perception. Clark intentionally played upon the mystery of Billy's identity, creating the allusion that Claire's boyfriend Chris was Billy, only to reveal in the film's conclusion as a red herring, with Billy still at large. Nurturing the audience's suspicion that Peter was the killer, Dullea would perform certain actions to mirror Billy's. In many scenes, Peter is framed as a silhouette and kept off-camera during his phone conversations with Jess. Once distribution rights for the film were purchased by Warner Brothers, studio executives requested that Clark make significant changes to the killer's identity, as they disliked the film's ambiguous conclusion. During preparation in 1975 for the film's American release, studio executives suggested that Clark alter the film's ending to reveal the identity as Chris in a proposed scene where Chris appears in front of Jess, the film's final girl, telling her to "[not] tell Agnes what we did" before killing her. Clark, however, was able to convince the studio to retain the original ending.
In Glen Morgan's 2006 remake, Billy's enigmatic nature was abandoned for a greater physical presence. 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. Morgan, an admirer of the original film, wanted to create a more defined version of the character, as well as reveal more of his traits. Morgan also wanted to explore subplots from the original film that he felt were not fleshed out, including Billy's history and the reasons for his insanity. Morgan thus created a subplot that explored the origins of Billy, which showed the connection between Billy and Agnes, the remake's secondary antagonist. 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. According to Morgan, he and producer James Wong had various disputes with Dimension Films executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein. In a 2014 interview, Morgan said his original intention was to have Billy as the film's only antagonist, but the studio forced him to include a second killer. 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. 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. In the new ending, Billy is killed after being impaled on the hospital's Christmas tree-topper.
Casting and portrayals