Black Christmas 4K 1974 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

The campus of the University of Bedford. The students are getting ready to go on winter Christmas vacation. Barb asks her friends Jess and Phil to stay with her for a few days of skiing. At the house, the phone rings. Barb picks up the phone, but no one answers on the other end. Then a male voice laughs and says various obscenities. Barb calls the speaker names, to which he replies that he will kill her. Barb hangs up. It is after this call that the girls on campus begin to die one by one, few of them surviving until morning.

Review 4K Movie

A nice Christmas in good old Canada. The Christmas tree is lit with colorful lights, the alcohol is fogging the mind, the mistletoe sprig is hanging in the right place, the bowl of holiday olivier (or whatever they eat in Canada) is ready, all that is left is to go out to smoke on the balcony, finish what was put off for the last moment, leave everything bad in the past and enter the new life with a smile. Who's that noise up there? Santa must be making his way into the house to place presents on the socks hanging over the fireplace (the fireplace, of course, is burning, creating warmth and comfort on this beautiful family holiday). Here Santa walks across the roof, providentially does not get into the chimney (the fireplace is burning, remember?), instead he finds a small window that leads to the attic. He climbs up there, fumbles with his hand in the dark, and suddenly stumbles upon a woman's corpse, suspended from a huge butcher's hook. A few frightened glances and frantic tosses in the dark, and there's another corpse on the floor. A wrong step and an awkwardly placed foot falls off. Santa collapses in a chair, right into the arms of a third body. Merry Christmas, ho-ho-ho!

The idea of having a bloodbath for the holidays is not new and has long been appreciated by directors and screenwriters. For while some are out partying, having fun and having a good time with friends, the less fortunate, more frustrated and psychotic people are going through one of their worst crises. Some climb into a noose (the statistics of suicides during the holidays fly upward, like a body suspended on a hook), and some throw it around the necks of others, so that it would not be a crime. In 1974, however, holiday horror had not yet become a trend. Six years had passed since the release of Romero's first great film, Night of the Living Dead, and four years remained until John Carpenter's best slasher of all time, Halloween. Bob Clark's 'Black Christmas' is frozen in a slightly unsightly position between the genre milestones that emerged one after another in those glorious years. With nothing but the idea of a Christmas massacre behind it, the film still managed to make history, for all other similar projects (including the much more interesting 'Silent Night, Deadly Night') were made after it.

The script, as is usual for a slasher, is not particularly important - there is a maniac who has found a good feeding place (a boarding house for young girls in a small university town), there are assiduously murdering girls of varying degrees of cuteness and there are some police officers, leading the investigation out of hand. In a word, the usual set, a sort of grandiose template (to be fair, in '74 it has not yet become a template) which the viewer should be presented together with ingenious spectacular murders and charismatic characters turning the viewing of a hundred times seen story into a frightening attraction of death. And this is where the film has problems - the camera looks bashfully sideways, and 'Black Christmas' is so innocuous that it can be shown to children. The 'Dark Passenger' inside the viewer sleeps, curled up. The brightest characters are the first to be sawed off, the path to the finale is treaded only by Olivia Hussey, who had shone a few years before with Zeffirelli in 'Romeo and Juliet', but by 'Black Christmas' has faded like a drained champagne.

That's it, between the modest voice-over murders, the awkward detective (the search for the killer seems to be led only by the efforts of a single phone company employee, who time after time tries to trace anonymous calls through the twitching wires in the switching center) and the expected final twist, the film gets to the end, managing to take a couple of naps along the way. The historical value of 'Black Christmas' is undeniable, and much of what will become a must-see for horror movies has been tried here for the first time. However, the sophisticated eyes of the modern viewer have seen it all more than once, and while forty years ago a film like this could recoup its budget seven times over at the American box office alone, nowadays only a genre connoisseur looking for the origins of Christmas horror can take it off the shelf. And yet, after watching the film, you walk up to your Christmas tree, watch the lights on the garland run swiftly and suddenly flinch when you hear a sound behind you. Perhaps it's just a cat, but momentary fear keeps you from looking back right away. Who knows what kind of maniac might be standing behind your back.