Black Christmas review (DVD) ★★★★

Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Marian Waldman, Andrea Martin,
James Edmond, Doug McGrath, Art Hindle, Lynne Griffin, Michael Rapport, Leslie Carlson | Written by Roy Moore
UK Certification 18 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 94 minutes | Directed by Bob Clark

Known as the original stalk and slash movie, Black Christmas is a cult classic that is severely underrated. It's a film from a time before the golden age of the slasher in the '80s and one that even precedes John Carpenter's masterful Halloween, a picture widely attributed, and fairly so, with giving birth to the horror juggernaut in the Decade of Excess. But without inspiration from the likes of Hitchcock's Psycho and even Black Christmas itself – rumour has it Carpenter came up with Halloween after he took a fancy to a nixed idea for a sequel to Clark's film – there would be no golden age.

For those who haven't been fortunate enough to see this creepy gem from 1974, it concerns a sorority house which keeps receiving obscene phone calls from a mystery dialler. The voice changes in a heartbeat from male to female, from moans to laughter, and sexual slurs to the chilling nonchalance of “I'm going to kill you”. The calls are genuinely disturbing for the exact reason that they are so realistic in their explicitness, and the man making them is so clearly insane. It's like the age old camp fire story of an escaped madman running rampant in a quiet neighbourhood, only the nightmare scenario here is turned up a notch when we discover early on that the caller is in fact making use of a separate line within the house itself, tormenting the students from inside the very walls where they feel most safe. Hiding in the basement, the unidentified stalker, whose eyes we see through in effective and at the time innovative point of view shots, takes his frightening dialogue to the next level and begins to pick off those in the house.

Black Christmas isn't the bloodiest film in the world and all the better for it. There is nothing schlocky about it, nor does it feature any gratuity for the sake of gratuity. It is instead one of those elusive nuggets of cinematic gold that still remains as effective now as it did upon its original release simply because it's so well made. Even to an experienced horror fan, Black Christmas retains all its flames of brilliance, none having been extinguished by desensitisation to the mindless violence that is all too prevalent in the genre today. It's an atmospheric and eerie prime cut of the macabre that, thanks to its direction, script and performances by wonderful leading lady Olivia Hussey and the ever magnificent John Saxon, is still a spine-tinglingly realistic treat that genre fans would be foolish to miss. Just make sure you're not buying the (awful) remake.

EXTRAS Not a sausage, which is a real shame as the original UK DVD, which went out of print when the distributor originally folded, actually had special features, and since the rights are now with Metrodome, they've put out this horrible bare bones edition.