Writer/director Bob Clark is probably best known to movie audiences as the writer/director of Porky’s (1982) and as the director of A Christmas Story (1983), for which he also wrote the screenplay with Jean Shepherd. Despite these forays into teenage sex comedy’s and sweet Christmas classics, Clark actually got his start in the movie business making horror films. His first film of that ilk, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972), was a mix of humor and graphic horror.
Released in 1974, Clark produced and directed Black Christmas. Written by Roy Moore, the film was largely based on a series of real-life murders in Montreal, Quebec, around Christmas time. Made for a budget of $700K Canadian, the film has developed a large cult following in the years since its theatrical release, and is largely considered “an influential precursor to the modern slasher film genre.
For such a low budget film, quite a few notable names pop up. among them John Saxon (who would later appear in another slasher flick, Nightmare on Elm Street), Olivia Hussey (who was much sexier in Romeo and Juliet), and Margot Kidder (who looks more like a house mother than sorority girl, and such a lush that it’s hard to imagine her playing clean-cut Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve just four years later, but then she is an actress).
The sisters of Pi Kappa Sigma are being pestered by obscene phone calls. At first it’s just heavy breathing, but then the mystery caller starts going off into rambling, graphic depictions of sex. It’s kind of unnerving, but the girls don’t worry about it too much. Christmas is right around the corner, and most of them are out the door for the holidays as it is. The calls become more frequent and more intense after a goodbye party at the sorority house and Claire (Lynne Griffin) suddenly disappears before the last few stragglers in the house stumble out of bed the next morning. The cops dismiss it off at first, but when Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon) starts to connect Claire’s disappearance with the depraved phone calls, a full-blown search party starts scouring the town.
The premise is simple. The phone calls continue, people disappear and the police get involved, and try to figure out who’s behind it all. The problem is, almost everyone is a potential suspect. Jess (Olivia Hussey) has a boyfriend with seriously violent tendencies. He makes threats to her if she goes ahead and aborts their baby. Barbie (Margot Kidder) is a raving alcoholic who shows disdain for almost everyone. Then there’s Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman), a closet drinker who comes and goes like a tenant and does nothing to really care for the girls she’s supposed to be house-mothering. Other boyfriends and would-be boyfriends also lurk around strangely rather than simply knock on the door and go off on dates, as they would in any other sorority house. No, everything here is covered in the same sort of gauze that hangs all over their Christmas tree (I mean, what is that all about?).
The murder of the first girl is bound to put a knot in your stomach. The problem is, from there, things get pretty formulaic. The pacing and even the music is such, that you can pretty much tell when each of the subsequent victims is a goner. However, Roy Moore managed to write a script that delays the finding of the bodies so that there’s a gap between what the characters (and possible victims) know and what the audience knows. For some horror neophytes this ploy may create enough suspense to keep them on the edge of their seats. For those who like to be totally surprised by all the events in a horror movie, this one won’t pass the test.
Despite its flaws, Black Christmas deserves a place in any horror fans movie collection. Bob Clark directed the film with a remarkably keen visual eye. The extensive use of P.O.V. shots–seeing the murders from the killer’s perspective–may have been old hat in giallo thrillers, but it was a novel approach in America films that would later become a fixture in slasher movies. The lifeless body wrapped in plastic, creaking away on a rocking chair, is as enduring and iconic as any image in any horror movie nearly four decades after its release; for that, Black Christmas deserves some measure of the cult status it has achieved.
In all honesty, Black Christmas is the worst looking title I’ve screened on Blu-ray. There’s been no apparent restoration, and the colors are faded, there’s no hint of 3-dimensionality, and the overall picture looks as rough as sandpaper. The aspect ratio isn’t listed, but it would appear to be 1.66:1, or else a 1.78:1 stretched to fit the entire 16×9 monitor. Not great stuff.
The audio isn’t great either. The original English 1.0 Mono is included, as well as a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround that was made for this release, but a poor master means it’s fairly useless. You may as well listen to it in Mono, listening to the Surround track will make you feel like your underwater.
This edition of Black Christmas sports an impressive array of special features:
• 12 Days of Black Christmas (20 min.): Narrated by John Saxon, this retrospective tackles the real-life rash of murders that inspired the story, how the P.O.V. shots of the killer were executed, hammering out the collage of voices behind the twisted phone calls, the musical score, the production design in the sorority house, and the movie’s Canadian marketing campaign. Several of the cast members also briefly reflect back on the shoot.
• Midnight Q&A (20 min.): A Q&A session with director Bob Clark, John Saxon, and composer Carl Zittrer following a midnight screening in 2004, fields a bunch of questions: what the relationship is between Billy and this Agnes that he’s raving about over the phone, the mishap with an ailing Edmond O’Brien that dropped John Saxon in front of the camera as originally intended, the weeks-long process of recording the deranged phone calls, the influence a potential sequel may or may not have had on John Carpenter, creating so many of the movie’s sounds by manipulating recordings of a piano being trashed, and how long one of the actresses was stuck with plastic wrapped around her face.
• “Uncovered” sound scenes (3 min.): Alternate soundtracks for a couple of scenes were unearthed while piecing together the disc’s 5.1 remix, and they’re offered here over the original footage.
• Olivia Hussey interview (17 min.): The final girl in Black Christmas briefly discusses what drew her to the role, laughing about her expanding waistline as the shoot drew on, the ambiguity behind who “Billy” really was, and noting what she was actually reacting to from the other end of the obscene phone calls as cameras were rolling.
• Art Hindle interview (24 min.): He may have one of the smallest roles in Black Christmas, but Art Hindle’s interview is the best extra on this disc. He chats about auditioning with a stack of Keir Dullea’s lines and even standing in for Dullea for a couple of weeks during Olivia Hussey’s rehearsals, lobbing out one suggestion to Bob Clark that left him pelted by a barrage of hockey pucks, how this movie led to him setting up shop in Los Angeles, and how he still has that amazing coat hanging up in his closet.
• Margot Kidder interview (22 min.): The chat with Margot Kidder is interesting too. Some of the highlights include Kidder’s frantic hot-and-cold career in its early days and the playful tone on the Black Christmas set
• Trailers (8 min.): Trailers in English and French round out the extras, clocking in at four minutes each.
