.
Black Christmas was always a bucket list film for me. Highly influential as an early slasher flick that went on to inspire John Carpenter’s Halloween, this 1974 Canadian cult classic is considered by some to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. I don’t know about all of that, but I do think it holds up pretty well. Some of those 1970s movies can seem pretty tedious at points and Black Christmas, despite the cult status, has its dull moments.
Inspired by the urban legend "The babysitter and the man upstairs", where a stalker calls the babysitter from inside the home, Black Christmas is about a sorority house where a creepy killer is shacked up in the attic with his victims, constantly making disturbing and obscene phone calls to the girls downstairs before they end up murdered, one by one.
I know it’s nit-picky but how did you call your own house in the 1970s? Maybe they had two phone lines? The entire premise would’ve been impossible after the advent of caller ID. For my money’s worth though, the bigger questions remain unanswered: If Clare was missing for so long, why didn’t anyone even think to check the attic? Did they check the basement? Why did Jess not leave the house when Sergeant Nash told her to walk out the door? Was Peter’s rage caused by years of frustration at the piano? Why did Mrs. MacHenry feel the need to so desperately hide her alcoholism? How do we know Claude (the house cat) didn’t commit the murders? Who the hell are Agnes and Billy?
One thing I did learn after watching Black Christmas, if you kill someone, just set their body in an upper window because no one ever bothers to look up there. 7 obscene phone call threats out of 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment