Black Christmas (1974)
Directed by Bob Clark
As the residents of the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house prepare for the festive season, a stranger begins to harass them with a series of obscene phone calls.
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What critics compared Black Christmas to
Friday the 13th may have lifted its gory riffs from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (just as Carpenter looked back to Bob Clark’s Black Christmas ), but it was Halloween that paved the way for its blockbuster success.
You might expect something reminiscent of The Shining given the Stephen King energy present throughout the first film, but you’ll end up mostly getting an experience that feels like the later Nightmare on Elm Street films; DNA from a bevy of slashers made its way into this one, but Black Christmas and Friday the 13th stood out to me as notable ancillary inspirations.
…to the winter festivities (Black Christmas, Krampus)…
While such a critique holds true with some later slasher films, in both Halloween and Friday the 13th (as well as Bob Clark’s often undervalued but deeply influential 1974 film Black Christmas) it is clearly used as a means of concealing an identity, similar to Hitchcock’s use of the extreme high angle when Mother comes out of the bedroom to meet Arbogast at the top of the stairs.