# 7: Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974)

It's going to be hard not to turn this post into a wake. Bob Clark and his 22-year-old son were killed less than four weeks ago by a drunk driver who swerved into their lane and smashed into them head-on. Clark made a series of excellent horror films in the 1970s before moving on to the highly regarded (but unseen by me) Sherlock Holmes/Jack the Ripper movie "Murder by Decree," stupid but funny teenage sex comedy "Porky's," and undisputed holiday classic "A Christmas Story." I love so many movies of Clark's, it's easy to overlook his decline into unfunny mainstream Hollywood comedies and shitty children's movies like "Baby Geniuses" and "Karate Dog." ("Karate Dog?" What the fuck?) He was planning a return to the horror genre shortly before he was killed, and I had a lot of hope for his future projects. Unfortunately, we will never know how those projects would have panned out. Fortunately, his entire filmography is widely available on DVD and/or VHS. I loudly proclaim to the rafters that "Black Christmas" and "Deathdream" are two of the best horror movies ever made. "Deathdream" will show up later on our Fangoria list, so let me concentrate on "Black Christmas." I LOVE this movie. It is scary. It is funny. It is loaded with great character actors, like John Saxon (weary detective), Margot Kidder (alcoholic, caustically witty sorority girl), Keir Dullea (nutty music student), Olivia Hussey (British expatriate, super-serious sorority sister), and Douglas McGrath (dumb-ass cop/police dispatcher). These roles, and the film itself, milk cliches without being slaves to them. It gives an audience what it wants without supplying a lot of dumb-ass solutions. For example, the killer's identity is never revealed. The setting is believable, lived-in, and visually appealing.





















The film has a wonderful structure of alternating disturbing, horrific scenes with relaxed, comedic, or character-heavy scenes, keeping the tension level high and supplying an ever-changing tone. The film is about a sorority house infiltrated by a psychotic killer who hides in the attic, picking them off one by one beginning the first night of Christmas break. Clark's location shooting, interest in actors, and respect for a sharp script allow this film a lot of breathing room. A lot of its slasher flick tropes have been ripped off ad infinitum, but the film still works better than anything following its lead. The sorority house sisters and house mother (a middle-aged party animal with flasks stashed all over the house) are so much more interesting than what you'd expect from a sorority house (fictional or actual) in today's real or fictional world. This film was pointlessly remade last year (Clark, who vowed never to allow any of his movies to be remade, finally succumbed to studio pressure and gave the go-ahead. He later publicly lambasted the film and said it would never happen again unless he remade his own films personally. He didn't live to make good on the promise, so who knows what will happen now.) Let me reiterate how much I love this movie, and how much I consider anyone who disagrees with me to be a humorless stick-in-the-mud. RIP, Bob Clark.

#6: Beyond the Door (Ovidio G. Assonitis aka Oliver Hellman & Robert Barrett aka Richard Barrett aka Roberto D'Ettore Piazzoli, 1974)

The second filmed-in-the-USA Italian production with "Beyond" in the title in a row on our list, "Beyond the Door" has a lot of the same weaknesses as Fulci's "The Beyond" without a lot of its strengths. Assonitis and Barrett don't have Fulci's visual skills. The two men are pedestrian filmmakers, shooting in a flat, anonymous style that, in its use (or lack thereof) of visual space calls to mind an average generic network television show. The dubbing is, again, mostly atrocious. Some of the acting is terrible. The script directly rips off huge chunks of both "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist" with incoherences all its own. (The filmmakers and producers were unsuccessfully sued by Warner Brothers for plagiarizing scenes from "The Exorcist.") Characterization is ignored to such an extent that in one scene, after our heroine Juliet Mills (Hayley Mills' sister) vomits up an ungodly amount of blood, her husband (Gabriele Lavia) tells her she looks tired and needs to go to bed.
However, there are some things about "Beyond the Door" I liked a lot. I liked all the brazen stealing. I believe art and entertainment belong to everyone and should be plundered, reconstituted, and ripped off as much as possible. Copyright laws are for businessmen. Creative endeavors belong to the people, and the people should do whatever they want with them as long as the originals are still available. (Oddly enough, Michael Haneke seems to have stolen the fish-tank smashing scene for his great film "The Seventh Continent.")
I liked Juliet Mills' nutty, creepy performance, particularly when she was in the all-out, balls-to-the-wall throes of demonic possession. I liked the location shooting in San Francisco. I've never been there, but judging the city from photographs and movies, San Francisco's landscape is so remarkable, it can become a strong character the equal of or superior to the actors and director. Setting and how it is used is very important to me as a movie viewer. The full-on horror scenes are very well done even though the rest of the movie stumbles hard narratively. And I particularly like the possibly evil little red-headed kid, the second possibly evil red-headed kid in a row. Demon-possessed red-headed kids were all the rage in the heady days of the demon-possession movies, the mid-1970s-the mid-1980s. My mother should have taken me to Hollywood. I could have been one of those kids. I could be a has-been ex-heroin addict born-again Christian living in a Malibu home with John Tesh, Flavor Flav, and a couple of women wrestlers for a reality series airing on the CW. Goddamn you, my parents.










Here's the trailer: