Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Nine

Some of the more subversive filmmakers have looked towards the holidays as a perfect setting for horror.  The first, and most successful, example of this is Bob Clark's 1974 film Black Christmas.   In Black Christmas a sorority house full of girls is terrorized by an unseen maniac.  At first they get just explicit phone calls, but soon after girls start to go missing. 

Black Christmas is a landmark in horror films for a couple of reasons. It was the first horror film to use the first-person point of view for the killer.  Clocking in at almost four years before Halloween it is the first horror film based around a major holiday (John Carpenter's original Halloween was originally intended to be a sequel to Black Christmas).  The film also bucks the standard horror film cliches in making having the main heroine be a pregnant girl who wants an abortion (as opposed to the virgin being the one person left alive). 

Beyond this, Black Christmas is a great film overall.  It's really fun watching the suspense build as characters fall prey to the killer and it has a marvelous twist ending.  There's also a great sense of humour coursing beneath the surface. It's also Canadian for those who are counting. Here's the trailer...