They Don’t Make Trailers Like That Anymore: BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974 and 2006)

I had a conversation on Twitter recently where the subject of ‘What was the first Slasher Film?’ came up.

Now my feeling has always been that what we consider the Slasher Film began with John Carpenter’s Halloween, as it’s the first place where the Template of The Slasher Film is in firm place, the pattern that everything that follows it hews to...but the truth is that no sub-genre appears fully formed, but slowly mutates over a length of time.  If you claim Psycho as that first rumblings of what the Slasher would become, there are a number of films that lead into Carpenter’s setting the guidelines for this new kind of horror film.  One of the biggest contributors to this evolution is this creepy little number from a man better known for another kind of Christmas story, Bob Clark.

I admit that I don’t think this trailer is perfect--I would have front-loaded part of the pseudo-English-Gentleman narration to emphasize the atmosphere and cut short the closing tracking shot--but that leisurely use of the credit sequence is still creepily effective.  As with a lot of trailers of this era, the cutting gives us little hints at what the film is about without spelling out the whole thing, and the emphasis on the telephone in the middle part creates a little bit of a misdirect without being out and out dishonest.

(And trust me, we’ll get to some dishonest trailers soon enough; ask me about The Beguiled sometimes...)

I’m including the trailer for the remake by the team of Glen Morgan and James Wong to show you how differently narration is used.  Whereas the narrator in the ‘74 trailer is used to punch up the mood, the narrator of the ‘06 trailer is there solely to spell out the plot of the movie.  The result, in my mind, is that the remake doesn’t seem as intriguing as the original based solely on these items.

Based on the movies themselves, Clark’s still holds up all these decades later, and the remake...

Look, I have a great deal of love for Morgan and Wong.  They’re the true people responsible for making The X-Files what it was in those early seasons.  They have produced another remake that is actually quite good in Willard (mainly because they recognized Crispin Glover was the film’s greatest special effect)...but I’d rather not talk about how disappointed I was in their efforts here.

74 version courtesy of Scream Factory.