Black Christmas (DVD)

Since the remake of Black Christmas is on the horizon, now's the time to spread a little Springtime holiday cheer and review the original.

Made in Canada in 1974, Black Christmas was one of the first horror movies to use ominous crank calls "coming from inside the house!" to herald the bloody carnage of a sorority sister-lovin' serial killer. In reality, Black Christmas isn't all that gory, and the body count doesn't start to rise until well into the film.

Black Christmas is a classic because it's a pioneer in the genre and spawned a thousand clichés, but for horror fans brought up on a steady diet of 80s slasher flicks, 90s realism, and 2000s CGI, Black Christmas might be a tad anti-climactic.

Black Christmas presents many of the now-obligatory slasher ingredients: coeds of various stereotypes (geeky girl, bad girl, good girl "in trouble", and so on), an insane psycho killer with a sex fetish, a creepy multi-level house, eerie phone calls coming from inside, widespread panic in town, and a clueless police department.

Barb (Margot Kidder) is a sassy, soused sister who seems to the leader of the pack — her posse comprises of sweet Jess (Olivia Hussey), snotty Clare (Lynne Griffin), and nerdy Phyllis (Andrea Martin) — and by extension, the ring of victims and suspects includes the seriously alcoholic house mother Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman), Jen's hot-tempered boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea), and the intense Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon).

The first sign of trouble is with the ring of a phone — a foul-mouthed heavy-breather calling himself Billy (voiced by several people, including director Bob Clark) is harassing the girls of Pi Sigma Kappa day and night. Finally, they enlist the local cops to trace the calls, but not before bad Billy has already killed two of their own (what with this being Christmas holidays, the absences aren't much noticed at first).

It's not a spoiler to say that Clare's corpse cuts a most memorable figure — it's her lovely, suffocated face that's on the cover of the DVD packaging (there are several editions of the movie out on tape and disc), and it's eerie how she's shown throughout the film, stashed in the attic. She's been placed in a chair by the window, and she looks almost wistfully out over the front yard as everyone — including her worried father (James Edmond) — search for her.

There are a couple of killings in the very beginning of the movie, but then no one we know dies until the end of the movie. In between, there's a lot of couples-angst between Jess and Peter (she wants an abortion, he doesn't), drunken supposition from Jess, and circles-running by the police force until they finally figure out that the killer has tapped a line from within the house.

Unlike the horror flicks of today, there's no twisty parting shot (but it is a downbeat ending), no significant red herrings, and very few jump-scares. Still, the suspense is pretty well-done particularly due to the intensity of the phone calls and the POV-camera angles.

Director Bob Clark made a minor cult fave before this — Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972) — then he went on to comedy with Porky's (1982), A Christmas Story (1984), and Loose Cannons (1990).

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson