10 Canadian Horrors Far More Original Than Those From America
9. Black Christmas
In 1978 John Carpenter's Halloween inspired countless imitators, pastiches and straight up ripoffs, "slasher" pictures where teenage babysitters or sorority girls are stalked and brutally murdered by a mysterious killer with some obscure fixation on a particular point in the calendar. Canada's Black Christmas saw sorority girls Olivia Hussey (the future blessed virgin Mary) and Margot Kidder (the future Lois Lane) receiving creepy phone calls and getting slaughtered by a mysterious attic dwelling creep. On the surface, it's as much a derivative Halloween knock off as My Bloody Valentine, except for the fact that Black Christmas came out in 1974, predating Halloween by four years. Director Bob Clark would stay with the Christmas theme when directing the much lighter perennial American festive favourite A Christmas Story (so popular Stateside that one TV network, TBS, runs a "24 Hours of A Christmas Story" in which the film is shown back to back 12 times over the holidays). Black Christmas may not be flawless, but it is definitely Clark's better holiday feature. The Porky's director is no John Carpenter, but he crafts a nasty little slasher whose key moments like a girl asphyxiated with a plastic sheet and the revelation that a creepy caller is phoning from inside the house (basically the entire plot of 1979's When A Stranger Calls) proved very influential. The films' success inspired not only the wider slasher genre, but also a host of oddly specific festive serial killer pictures including, but not limited to, Silent Night, Bloody Night; Christmas Evil; Silent Night, Deadly Night; Don't Open 'Til Christmas; and To All A Goodnight. Canada, meanwhile, has had a moderately profitable line in sequels to declining US horror franchises (Jason X), their own derivative slashers (Prom Night with Halloween scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis stretched to three sequels in the 80s and 90s) and, finally and unsurprisingly, a 2006 do-over for Black Christmas itself. The uninspiringly lacklustre nature of this version is likely to make any viewer long for the original, in spite of any flaws.
