{"id":23512,"date":"2016-12-09T22:16:59","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T03:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=23512"},"modified":"2016-12-09T22:16:59","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T03:16:59","slug":"black-christmas-1974-collectors-edition-blu-ray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/09\/black-christmas-1974-collectors-edition-blu-ray\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Christmas (1974): Collector\u2019s Edition [Blu-Ray]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s about time the world has caught up with \u201cBlack Christmas<\/a>\u201d and (thanks to Shout!) given it the proper treatment it\u2019s always deserved. What is arguably one of the first slasher films ever made was always out of print and hard to find while \u201cHalloween<\/a>\u201d was granted various editions of VHS, and DVD. While \u201cHalloween\u201d is a masterpiece, \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d is far more superior. It works as a slasher film, a mystery, a dark comedy, and is genuinely spine tingling in a movie draped in Christmas ephemera. It\u2019s surprising since the tone for \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d is almost the same tone from his other Christmas classic \u201cA Christmas Story<\/a>.\u201d Yet director Bob Clark really never misses a beat, offering up a very scary tale about an inexplicable maniac wreaking havoc on a small neighborhood during the holidays.<\/p>\n

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Set on Christmas in the college town of Bedford, the residents of Pi Kappa Sig are preparing for their various trips to family out of town for Christmas. As they\u2019re readying to part for the season, a maniac randomly finds their house and sneaks in to their attic. Before long the girls begin receiving seemingly random obscene and disturbing phone calls. As the sisters are stalked by the maniac, the police attempt to trace the calls and figure out who is perpetrating these incidents. \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d is a movie reliant on slow boil tension that begins with a lot of establishing of sub-plots and plants various threads for these characters that will come in to play later in the movie. Clark is very good about working within the expectations of the audience, and by the time the climax rolls around, we definitely want to see who this maniac is.<\/p>\n

Clark\u2019s film garners a genuine sense of uncomfortable tension and suspense, as he stages some incredibly scary scenes, including Margot Kidder\u2019s death, and the final scene of a victim peering through a snowy window with a bag firmly planted around her shocked frozen visage. While \u201cHalloween\u201d launched the slasher crazed in o full force, \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d laid down the foundation for holiday related horror films, and brought home the idea of mindless horror without an apparent motive. Michael Myers was destiny incarnate coming home to terrorize a babysitters during Halloween. Billy is a maniac without much of a motive, except to terrorize the sorority girls living in a small house. \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d is a genuine horror masterpiece, one that\u2019s flawless in delivery, and doles out a ton of brutally scary and uneasy moments of terror and menace.<\/p>\n

Scream Factory knocks it out of the park once again with a Two Disc edition that fans will love. It comes with new reversible art, and a series of audio commentaries. There\u2019s one with director Bob Clark, with actors John Saxon and Keir Dullea, with Billy, and there\u2019s an interview with Bob Clark that plays over the film. On Disc two there\u2019s the \u201c2006 Critical Mass Version\u201d of \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d which is the original transfer used for the original Blu-Ray release, for fans that want a less restored version. \u201cFilm and Furs: Remembering Black Christmas\u201d is a twenty six minute interview with Art Hindle, who discusses the fun shooting the film. \u201cVictims and Virgins: Remembering Black Christmas\u201d is a twenty six minute interview with Lynne Griffin, who discusses her own experience working on the film, and how the film defies all of the future tropes of the slasher sub-genre that would be exhaustively used in the 80\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlack Christmas Legacy\u201d is a wonderful retrospective from the 2006 Blu-Ray release. There\u2019s also \u201c40th Anniversary Panel at FanExpo 2014\u201d which features John Saxon, Art Hindle, Lynne Griffin & Nick Mancuso, all of whom speak at the Canadian Covention. \u201cOn Screen! Black Christmas\u201d is a forty eight minute vintage featurette featuring people from the film and the Canadian film industry discussing the film\u2019s long legacy. \u201c12 Days of Black Christmas\u201d is a nineteen minute look at how \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d set the stage for the slasher film to dominate the eighties and how ahead of its time it was and still is; it\u2019s narrated by John Saxon. \u201cBlack Christmas Revisited\u201d is a vintage thirty six minute retrospective, there are over a hundred minutes of archival interviews with various cast and crew including Olivia Hussey and Bob Clark.<\/p>\n

The most interesting of all is the twenty minute \u201cMidnight Screening Q&A\u201d with John Saxon, Bob Clark, and Carl Zittrer; here Clark discusses the film and tells fans his famous story involving John Carpenter and how \u201cBlack Christmas\u201d and \u201cHalloween\u201d were connected. There are two scenes with a new soundtrack that give the film a new kind of nuance, as well as eight minutes of theatrical trailers in English and French. There are three minutes of TV and Radio Spots, and fun alternate title sequences when the movie was named \u201cSilent Night, Evil Night,\u201d and \u201cStranger in the House.\u201d Finally there\u2019s a four minute photo gallery with various posters, lobby cards, articles, et al.<\/p>\n