Black Christmas: Squared!!! (1974, 2006)

Black Christmas (1974)
From the man who brought you A Christmas Story, comes its disfigured, misanthropic, taking –a-dump-in-the-neck-stump-of-a-rectally-desecrated-St. Nick counterpart: Black Christmas. OK, maybe that is too much of a buildup. But it is a horror movie that takes place on/around Christmas, and there is no Red Ryder bb gun to save the day here.

BC is the story of a sorority house that gets terrorized and slaughterized during Christmas break. That is the movie in one sentence. The terror comes in the form of phone calls to the house after each killing and the slaughter coming in sporadic bursts in various parts of the house (preceding each phone call) throughout the film. The creepiest parts of this movie were the phone calls. Each one consisted of multiple voices, whispering, tittering, atonal shrieks and yelps, and they got progressively weirder and more disturbing. The killings were fairly swift and virtually goreless, so a bit of a disappointment there. But it was a nice touch to keep the first victim sequestered and undiscovered in an attic chair with her head wrapped in a plastic back for the entirety of the movie.

Anywho, we never get to see the killer, the killer is never caught, and the movie ends sort of open endedly. I kind of like the ending, but I wish we had gotten a little bit on the killer ID/motivation. This was one of the earlier films to use killer POV camera shots and it worked well in adding to the atmosphere of creepiness. This film also made use of the “The call is coming from inside the house!!!!” meme. Tracing a call back in the 70s was no small thing either. In this case, some poor schmuck had to run around a room the size of a city block filled with cacophonous clacking towers.

Actors of note in the movie include Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey, and an atypically mousy Andrea Martin (of SCTV fame). Something to note, this is a horror movie set in a Sorority House, and there was NO nudity. For Shame, Bob Clark, for shame! Let me remind you that Bob Clark also directed Porky’s and Porky’s II: The Next Day, so he is capable.




Black Christmas (2006)
Same setup as the original, but a lot more story. The 2006 version gives us an identity of the killer (killers, actually), motivation(s), backstory/origin, and a much more fleshed out and elaborate ending. This version also gives us a lot more gore, with one of the killers having an eyeball fetish (gotta collect ‘em all!!). This was also a more modern telling of the tale, with the phone calls coming from each victim’s cell phone.

Actors of note include Lacey Chabert, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Andrea Martin again. This time she plays the house mother, rather than a sorority sister.

I’d give each of the movies 3 Georges but for different reasons. The original had a good creepy atmosphere and POV work, with disturbing phonecalls, but no gore or nudity. Plus the fact that it was directed by the guy who gave us A Christmas Story, great duality.
The remake had a great story, plenty of gore, and did its predecessor justice, as so few remakes do.