Film #10: Black Christmas (1974)

I’ve always contended that John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween stole this movie’s place as the progenitor of the slasher genre. The 1974 Canadian shocker Black Christmas is classier, scarier, and nicer to look at than any other slasher film out there (with Carpenter's movie coming in a close second). The story is familiar: an escaped killer sneaks into the attic of a sorority house during Christmas and begins to pick the girls off one by one. You’ll see things you’ve seen before, but produced with utmost care: lengthy shots from the killer’s point-of-view, sinister obscene phone calls (the film’s most frightening moments), and much slasher violence, including an Argento-esque murder with a glass unicorn. It even has an unsettling, Halloween-like ending--but this came out three years before (as Silent Night, Evil Night, its alternate title, Clark's film was banned from airing on NBC in the mid-70s during Ted Bundy’s reign of terror, thereby upping the film’s cult status.

The excellent cast includes Olivia Hussey (very good as the most sheepish of the sorority sisters--love that sweater with the hands on it), Keir Dullea (Hussey's slightly batshit boyfriend), John Saxon (as a cop--what else?), SCTV's Andrea Martin (Hussey's nerdy best friend), and a scene-stealing Margot Kidder as the sorority's queen foul-mouth. Director Bob Clark (who died along with his son in a tragic 2006 car accident) would later become more famous for pioneering the teen sex comedy with the Porky’s franchise and making A Christmas Story a holiday perennial (there's occasionally some humor--often misplaced, I think--in Black Christmas as well). But Clark should be considered, also, a major figure in the horror movie history, having done notable work with Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deranged (the riveting Roberts Blossom starred in this Ed Gein-inspired story, on which Clark was an uncredited producer working for Dead Things writer Alan Ormsby), the terrific Dead of Night/Deathdream, about a zombie Vietnam vet returning stateside to wreak payback on his family and the military, and his high-powered Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack The Ripper movie Murder By Decree. All these movies are very much worth seeing. But Black Christmas remains his most thrilling contribution to the genre.

I wanna conclude with one short, vivid memory I have of Black Christmas. Upon its 1975 release in Atlanta, when I was 9 years old, I saw an ad for the film in the newspaper. At its bottom, inside a little square, was an invitation to call a phone number so you could hear a special Black Christmas greeting. I remember calling the number nervously. But the phone on the other line would just ring and ring. I must have hung up and called that number twenty times, but no one ever answered. Being a kid hankering for instant gratification, I remember being quite frustrated by this. But now, when I think about the movie, too (the ending, in particular)--I find the marketing stunt to be creepily brilliant. By the way, I own a Silent Night Evil Night movie poster that, unusually, came with a black-and-white paste-on piece that, if applied, would change it into a poster with the Black Christmas logo on it--very rare and extra-cool.

Film #9: Targets

It's time for us to rethink what constitutes a horror film, especially in this time of exquisitely poured-over daily bloodbaths. I know that, in literary circles, the horror genre has split into “fantasy horror”--Frankenstein, Dracula, ghosts and the sort--and “modern horror,” which considers serial killers, madmen and mass murderers. But why doesn’t this distinction exist as strictly for movies? Most viewers don’t feel films about reality-based multiple murderers deserve to be included in the horror genre, even though these monsters are scarier than any ol’ mummy or wolfman. I mean, is Seven a horror movie? Deliverance? Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer? I Stand Alone? Or Funny Games? I think yes.

In Targets, Peter Bogdanovich’s sobering look at the varying distances between fantasy and modern horror, Boris Karloff portrays Byron Orlock, an embittered old screamfest idol who’s announced his retirement from Hollywood because he's sure the real world has become scarier than any of the cheapos he’s been making. While he’s in L.A. for the drive-in premiere of his last film, one of these worrisome true-life horrors is unveiling in another part of the city, as the all-American Thompson family is too busy with the daily grind to notice the breakdown going on inside the head of their Ken-doll son, Bobby (Tim O’Kelly). Byron’s and Bobby’s worlds collide, but not before Bogdanovich stages one startling act of violence after another. No movie, ever, has matched Targets for vile, matter-of-fact depictions of random violence (though there’s very little blood). We quiver, matching Bobby short-breath-by-short-breath at his every pull of the trigger. Adding salt to open wounds, the director shoots this berserking in an unforgettable quasi-documentary style (the scene with Bobby taking potshots at highway-bound cars while munching on a Baby Ruth will make you wince).

Bogdanovich was one of the first to make a film about modern monsters, predating The Honeymoon Killers, Helter Skelter, and the similarly Charles Whitman-based TV movie The Deadly Tower. That the filmmaker did it while simultaneously paying tribute to the great Karloff, who gained his fame playing fantasy monsters, is no mean feat. Plus he's even one of the leads in Targets, unbilled as Sammy, Karloff's put-upon director (it's a sarcastic, showy performance in which sometimes I swear Bogdanovich is doing a Jimmy Stewart impersonation). Here I have to mention my favorite scene in the film: Karloff's recitation of the classic horror tale "A Date with Death." It was performed in one take, in a hotel room setting, as the camera slowly pulls in on the English actor's ancient face. The final moments of this monologue are especially stupendous because Bogdanovich told Karloff to think about his own death at the tale's final line, and it shows.

There are a lot of details to comment on here. The sharp cinematography here is by Laszlo Kovacs, who impresses with scenes of mysterious darkness (as where Bobby is smoking a cigarette, waiting in the night for his wife to get home), blinding brights (sniping on the oil tankers), and pretty chiaroscuro (Byron's hotel room). Kovacs landed his union card because of this film and went on, with most everybody who toiled behind the scenes on Targets, to collaborate with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on Easy Rider. Next, let's give a shout-out to Polly Platt, Bogdanovich's then-wife and muse; it was she who gave him courage to mount this film, plus she provided its excellent art direction (the cool blues in Bobby's parents' soulless house are appropriately maddening). Let's make note, also, of the fact that the idea for the film really first sprang from the head of legendary director Samuel Fuller, who refused any credit but still gets a "Thank You." And pay attention to the kooky pop songs that play on Bobby's radio--they were provided to Bogdanovich from Sonny Bono's collection of rejected demos. Bono trashed them, giving them away for peanuts, but I think they all have a Nuggets (or at least a Pebbles) compilation-style zing to them.

Of course, Targets famously begins with the ENDING of another film, Roger Corman's Karloff / Jack Nicholson classic The Terror (so weird to see a movie start off with the title THE END flashing up on screen)! As well, there's a long look at an earlier Karloff film, Howard Hawks' mortifying 1932 prison drama The Criminal Code. Then, for drive-in fans, there's some exciting documentary-like footage of a '60s-era LA ozoner's concession stand, playground, box office, marquee, projection room, car park, and even some glimpses inside the drive-in screen itself.

And, by the way, Bogdanovich didn't intend this movie to be about gun control so, while I think the anti-gun, Charles Whitman/Lee Harvey Oswald statements at the film's outset add to the chills, Bogdanovich fought the studio over them and lost. But despite that, Targets from 1968 remains a wonder on many different levels.

Film #7: Night Moves

With Night Moves, director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, The Miracle Worker) emerged with his best effort since 1970's Little Big Man and, as he did in Coppola's The Conversation a few years earlier, star Gene Hackman marked his career with another outwardly strong, inwardly crippled character. This time he plays Harry Moseby, an emotionally distant former football star now operating as a small-time L.A. private eye. When a faded movie star (Janet Ward) enlists him to find her runaway daughter (an adolescent Melanie Griffith), the search leads him to an island in the Florida Keys and to shady characters Jennifer Warren and Edward Binns. Who are they? What are they doing? Are they grifters, perverts, or murderers?

Writer Alan Sharp's complex, confounding whodunnit expertly peels away the layers of this mystery at just the precise moment. By the time cutter Dede Allen's astonishingly well-edited climax crashes into us, we are as speechless and disoriented as Hackman, who doesn't know what the whole shabang's been about until the film's final seconds. And, believe me, your jaw will drop, too; you'll have to rewatch the ending again, just to make sure you saw what you thought you saw. A landmark '70s movie, with that great, warm feeling of existential angst! Also starring Susan Clark, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, and a young James Woods.