Tag: Bob Clark

This is the only film I’ve actually planned to watch for this whole “festival”, cos today (i.e. the 11th of October 2024) actually marks 50 years since Black Christmas was originally released in its native Canada. No one can agree on exactly what the “first” slasher was—the Wiki article on the genre notes filmic antecedents at least as far back as the 1920s and theatrical roots in the Grand Guignol—but this one seems to often get credit as a major progenitor and the instance where the tropes really first fell into place. So I thought I should watch it if only for historical reasons, and, well, “historical reasons” felt like the main reason to do so…

Directed by Bob Clark, who had one of rhe most unfathomable directorial careers of anyone I can think of (this is the same man who made the Baby Geniuses movies decades later), Black Christmas struck me as essentially pretty drab, produced fairly cheaply and making not much effort to look otherwise; it’s fairly plain to look at and, for that matter, hard to actually see much in cos it looked kind of underexposed or underlit or something on top of that… acting’s pretty drab as well. One notable thing is that the killer remains pretty much unexplored; we only know he’s called “Billy” cos he calls himself that, otherwise things like motive, backstory, even his appearance are pretty blank. The most shocking thing here, though, is the presumably main male character, played by Keir Dullea, who loses his shit when Olivia Hussey’s final girl announces she wants an abortion and he’s all “but what about meeeeeeeeee, the man, what about my feelings?”… ugh. I imagine that when he gets his in the end, a lot of modern viewers will be pleased just because he’s such a shit. No, on the whole I can’t say I was a fan of this. Happy 50th anniversary anyway, I suppose.