A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Black Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Christmas. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974)

Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas

Cast: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Marian Waldman, Andrea Martin, James Edmond, Doug McGrath, Art Hindle, Lynne Griffin. Screenplay: Roy Moore. Cinematography: Reginald H. Morris. Art direction: Karen Bromley. Film editing: Stan Cole. Music: Carl Zittrer. 

One of the progenitors of the "the call is coming from inside the house" trope, Bob Clark's Black Christmas generates a lot of suspense once you get through the first hour, which is full of cheesy jokes and naughty talk, much of it given to Margot Kidder as Barb, one of the doomed coeds in a sorority house being stalked by a psychopath. Bob Clark's pacing is off in this first part of the movie, but it doesn't much matter once the victims keep dropping. The Christmas setting is gratuitous and the father of the first victim is played oddly for laughs, so the film also takes its time finding a consistent tone. Still, there are those who think it's a classic of the genre. 

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