Shared Darkness

I’m not sure if there’s a definitive earlier incarnation of the
phrase, “The calls are coming from inside the house!” but it traces most
memorably back to this 1974 flick, a moody little thriller generally credited
with helping kick-start the modern-day slasher genre. Naturally, this holiday
season brings us the inevitable remake/re-imagining, from the producing tandem
of Glen Morgan and James Wong.

Black Christmas is set
in the college town of Bedford,
where the girls of Pi Kappa Sig are preparing for the holiday season. These
young women include brassy, cynical Barb Coard (Margot Kidder), Phyllis Carlson
(Andrea Martin) and Jess Bradford (Romeo
& Juliet’s Olivia Hussey), who’s secretly pregnant by her boyfriend
Peter (Keir Dullea). They’re beset by a series of harassing and lewd phone
calls in which the cracked, deranged voice makes sexually suggestive comments,
repeats the phrase, “It’s me, Billy,” and threatens to kill the girls — a
threat on which he eventually makes good. When one girl goes missing in advance
of meeting her father, police investigator Lt. Kenneth Fuller (John Saxon)
steps into the proceedings, trying to figure things out.

Looking back now, Roy Moore’s screenplay cribs a bit from
other notable genre entries, including Psycho,
and there are additionally swathes that are outdated, to be certain (all of the
phone tracing stuff, for one). Still, Black
Christmas stands as a worthy genre forebear. It isn’t flashy or gory, but deals in tension and locates its
payoff in held “shock” shots. The dialogue has an edge, both in glancing
content (“You can’t rape a townie,” spits Barb) and doting coarse language, and
Porky’s director Bob Clark trades in
smartly thought out compositions — including a single take push-in for the
final shot — and subtle POV work that much lesser directors would then
completely grind into the ground.

There have been previous editions of this movie on DVD, but
none have captured its cult appeal with quite the same painstaking attention to
detail. A newly created 5.1 stereo surround sound audio track stands alongside
a 2.0 stereo track and digitally re-mastered video here, presented in 1.78:1
anamorphic widescreen. DVD special features herein include two original scenes
with a new (and different, heretofore unused) audio track, as well as a
20-minute documentary with a slew of cast and crew interviews and a nicely
guided narration that both points up the title’s cult genre appeal and also
includes plenty of anecdotal highlights. Among the best bits are excerpts with
cameraman Bert Dunk, who explains how he and cinematographer Reginald Morris
devised and composed some of the unique point-of-view shots in the movie. The
only rub: while the doc does touch on it, I wish there had been a bit more in
the way of specifics about the movie’s botched American distribution, where it
saw release under the monikers of both Silent
Night, Evil Night and Stranger in the
House.

Twenty minutes of Q&A footage with Clark and Saxon from a December 2004 screening at Los Angeles’ Nuart Theatre prove a nice addition. Three discrete interview segments are also included in their
entirety — 17 minutes with the polite, mannered Hussey, 23 minutes with Art Hindle and 22
minutes with the aforementioned Kidder, who unflappably cops to partying off-set and, when
asked about similarities between director Clark and Brian De Palma, breezily
points out that she was sleeping with the latter filmmaker during the making of
Sisters. She’s a candid, pretty
fascinating interview, and if the off-screen interviewer too frequently lobs
some of the same, overly vague questions her way, and has the audacity to try
to compare Black Christmas’ success
to that of Superman (a foolhardy
notion which Kidder quickly shoots down), you’re certainly never bored with her
direct responses, recounting and ruminations. B (Movie) A- (Disc)