Black Christmas (1974)

After attributing a number of game changing genre traits to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the time has come to reassess those initial accreditations. Don’t get me wrong, this takes nothing away from Carpenter’s film, it is still very much the masterpiece I have always thought, but Bob Clark’s fantastic Christmas themed slasher nails the genre clichés four years previously, and also spins out a true horror classic. A group of sorority sisters live in a house together and have just broken up for the winter holidays when they begin to get perverted, anonymous phone calls. Initially dismissing the issue as a crank caller, things take a nasty turn when one of the girls, Claire, disappears. Black Christmas simmers with tension throughout, and manages to amalgamate this with a surprising (and welcome) lack of gore, leaving most of the horror to the imagination and subsequently making for a simmering atmosphere of dread rather than the traditional blood spattered genre bore fests. The camera work is brilliantly effective, showing you Paul Greengrass like point of view shots of the killer as he stalks the house; but crucially not revealing identity of him/her. This means that you appreciate the terrifying ordeal of the girls themselves even more as you are essentially in the same shoes as them but with the added terror of knowing the killers’ movement but not knowing when or where he or she will strike next. So often with something this promising in the horror genre, I find the final act is dreary, blood spattered and predictable; Black Christmas is thankfully anything but. The closing sequence has you on tenterhooks, but even finer is the final shot itself, giving the film a palindromic style feel and really puts the wind up you, it’s genuinely creepy. Having sat down to watch this as part of a Christmas horror comedy double of sorts, I was surprised and thrilled at how terrific Bob Clark’s horror is. 8.4/10