Black Christmas (1974, Bob Clark) (Patreon)

70/100

Second viewing, no change. It'd been 15 years, so I'd forgotten most of the details and was caught off guard all over again; the film somehow comes across as both influential and anomalous, creating several slasher tropes while remaining blissfully ignorant of others yet to be established. Introducing future victims primarily from the killer's POV (and keeping his face hidden throughout) obviously anticipates Halloween, though I'm more creeped out by Carpenter's detached-stalker vibe than I am by the wide-angle lens Clark employs here. (On the other hand, I was quite surprised when the camera climbs up the trellis with "Billy," a year before the Steadicam made its debut. Custom head rig, apparently.) There's a Final Girl whose status as such is never really in doubt, so long as one's aware that Hussey was a bigger star than Kidder at the time. Despite being set in a sorority house, however, Black Christmas doesn't get primly moralistic with its death sequence. Foul-mouthed, proudly libidinous Barb gets it (3rd), as does closet lush Mrs. MacHenry (2nd)...but so do Clare (1st) and Phyllis (4th), both of whom are ostentatiously virtuous. This killer is indiscriminate as well as motiveless, and we repeatedly shift back to his first-person viewpoint as he prepares to strike—not so that we'll identify with him, exactly, but to create a sense of queasy inevitability. Meanwhile, we get an ideological red herring in the form of bad boyfriend Peter, whose refusal to accept Jess' decisions—not to marry him, not to have the baby they accidentally conceived—gets him equated with the gibbering lunatic in the attic, by Jess and by us. (Keir Dullea's maddening impassivity makes him ideal for the role.) That would still seem fairly bold even today, but it's ultimately revealed to be irrelevant. The real killer has no agenda, no backstory, no reason. And while many (most?) slasher films subvert their ostensible return to normalcy with some sort of sequel-enabling sting, few have ever ended on a note as overpoweringly bleak as the final shot of Clare's still-undiscovered corpse framed in the attic window, her saran-wrapped rictus of fright looking out over the world's lack of comprehension.

Potent stuff! Gotta say, though, since I watched it on Christmas night: This is barely a Christmas movie at all. Setting it over the holidays allows for some contrapuntal holly-jolly imagery, but that's pretty much the extent of it; you could digitally remove the lights and wreaths, ADR a few lines so that they refer instead to Thanksgiving break, and nobody would ever know the difference. Good luck thinking up a memorable title, though.