With absent families, impending abortions, volatile boyfriends, a murderous prank caller, and a dead teenager in the attic, the holiday season offers the sisters of an American sorority few reasons to be merry. Before Halloween there was director Bob Clark’s pioneering upmarket teen slasher film Black Christmas (1974) – an expertly crafted exercise in horror, suspense, intrigue, and early 70’s anti-establishment sentiments which at one-time was seen as the probable saviour of the Canadian movie business and was expected to be a youth market hit on the scale of Easy Rider (1969). Bad timing and bad marketing may have ensured that Black Christmas limped out of American theatres to become one of the best kept secrets of the golden age of Hollywood horror but slowly Clark’s tale of youth-in-peril is finally beginning to be acknowledged for what it is: the first and probably the most intelligent teen slasher film ever made.
