Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
There’s allegedly a second remake of Black Christmas opening this coming Friday, so I decided it was finally time to get through the first remake from 2006. This is not a movie I’ve wanted to watch, to be honest. A big part of that is that Bob Clark’s 1974 original is considered a must-see classic. Clark’s film is formative for the slasher genre, and as much as Halloween seems to set the standard, Black Christmas came first and also was earlier in featuring a holiday-themed killer.
There were a couple of aspects of Clark’s film that made it noteworthy. The first is that much of it comes from the killer’s perspective. Our killer babbles and gibbers, and frequently when he does, we are see what is happening from his perspective. Sure, that’s been done before (Peeping Tom was entirely that, after all), but perhaps never this disturbingly. Second is that we never really see the killer. What happens is just something terrible that happens. There’s no explanation, no resolution—it’s just a killer on a spree with an essentially captive group of victims.
