Black Christmas (1974)

The same guy who directed A Christmas Story directed this. Bob Clark made a cozy holiday classic about a kid and a BB gun, and he also made one of the most influential slasher films ever. Cinema is genuinely insane.

Black Christmas is seminal - you can draw a direct line from this to Halloween to everything that followed. Seeing it in a theater, I was genuinely scared at parts. The calls, the atmosphere, the restraint in what it shows versus what it implies. It holds up.

That said, this is a very phone-heavy plot, and I got a bit of a headache from all the ringing. But as a computer guy, I was obsessed with the vintage AT&T phone centers in action. Watching how phone tapping and tracing worked in the analog days - the physical switches, the manual labor of tracking a call - was genuinely fascinating. That stuff ruled.

My only real complaint: it’s a tad too long. Trim fifteen to twenty minutes and this is a five-star classic for me. As it stands, the pacing drags in spots that undercut the tension. But the bones are there. This is essential horror history.

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