Chamber Films Series Presents: Black Christmas

Chamber Films will showcase the classic and the curious, the weird, the wired and wonderfully askew. There’s no theme, no thesis, no seam running through these films, unless there is. The subconscious is a hell of a film programmer.

Black Christmas

Dir. Bob Clark. 1974. Starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder.

Margot Kidder is back, in this Canadian proto-slasher film, inspired by the “babysitter and the man upstairs” urban legend and a spate of real-life murders that took place in the Westmount district of Montreal. A sorority house is rocked by a series of deranged and obscene phone calls. The girls name the caller “The Moaner” and laugh at his unhinged rants. Little do they know, this Christmas, someone has let himself into the attic. And it isn’t Father Christmas.

Black Christmas was a huge influence on John Carpenter’s Halloween, spawning the entire slasher film genre. Though I wouldn’t hold that against it. Oh, and John Saxon is in this film. John Saxon. You love John Saxon.