12 minute read
FILM
Glebe Report December 10, 2021 25 Canadian horror film stands test of time
Black Christmas
Directed by Bob Clark (Canada, 1974)
Review by Angus Luff
What separates Christmas from other holidays is the interpretability and flexibility of the true meaning of the holiday. You could ask 10 different people what Christmas means besides the literal definition and almost everyone would have different answers. That’s what makes it so uniquely special for so many people for different reasons. We all love Christmas films that reflect the typical warm and fuzzy feeling of the holiday, but there’s always a risk-taking storyteller who goes beyond the usual Christmas movie norms – when done successfully, it can truly twist the most familiar version of the holiday from joyful to nightmarish.
Black Christmas is a 1974 Canadian Christmas horror film directed by Bob Clark. During the holiday season, a group of sorority girls are invaded by a dangerous stalker, making his presence known with obscene phone calls and striking victims without warning inside and outside the sorority house. When the situation escalates further, the police get involved to find the mysterious killer.
Early in his career, Bob Clark cemented himself as a cinematic force with this genuinely shocking and horrifying Christmas film. In 1983, he made another famous film, A Christmas Story. But Black Christmas is more notable for me because of its effect on movie fans all these years later. It is a horror film that stands the test of time because it was way ahead of its time. It never resorts to overused horror tropes or the typical directing of popular 1970s horror cinema. Clark scares his audience by showing horrible images as bluntly and honestly as possible and by hinting at possible horrible images offscreen. Each directorial decision is elegantly yet maniacally chosen. The unclear and sudden directions that the film takes keep you on the edge of your seats. I recommend this film, though be warned it is very disturbing and shocking – I would not recommend it for children.
Besides excellent direction, other aspects make this film a landmark for indie horror cinema, especially the memorable, realistic performances by Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and the rest of the sorority girls. All of them are distinct and alive; some are more comedic, ruder or more reserved. You truly feel that a real-life situation has been captured on film. What really gets under my skin is the perfect way they nail the disturbing and uncomfortable atmosphere of the film. It feels as though you’re not supposed to see them like this, as if you’ve stumbled upon something you really shouldn’t have. The girls look just as afraid of the killer as they are of you. As the film goes on, the audience acts as another pair of eyes to watch the sorority girls’ every move; the slow buildup of tension demands that close response from the audience, especially at the end when it makes you reflect on the trauma and horrifying images you witnessed. It is horror filmmaking at its strongest, not pulling any punches, not adding humour or references, just showing you how it is.
Black Christmas succeeds at trying something new. Original and unique horror films like this one and the equally nightmarish Texas Chainsaw Massacre opened the way for the “slasher” sub-genre, which includes films like Halloween, Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine and Child’s Play. Such films became extremely popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s but because so many were produced, the sub-genre became a punching bag for critics and was generally looked down upon. While there was undoubtedly a lot of trash produced, I wish more people would give great films like Black Christmas a chance. Though it gets lumped in with other lazy garbage in the slasher sub-genre, this film is anything but lazy – it’s a classic in Christmas and Canadian cinema, something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
If there’s one alternative film to challenge your notion of jolly Christmas stories, make it Black Christmas, but only if you think you can handle it. After you see it, you likely won’t stop thinking about it.
Available on The Criterion Channel and Shudder Running time: 1 hour 38 mins
Angus Luff is a student at Glebe Collegiate. He grew up in the Glebe and is obsessed with movies.
Ordinary Love
Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa (Ireland, 2019)
Review by Barbara Popel
The excellent Irish film Ordinary Love does something relatively rare – it takes us into the lives of a very ordinary middle-class, middle-aged couple whose placid, uneventful lives are knocked sideways by a traumatic crisis.
Tom and Joan (Liam Neeson and Academy Award nominee Lesley Manville) have been married for many years. The degree of their “ordinary” love is evident before the title credits roll, as the two of them stride briskly along the shore – she taking two steps for every one of his – getting their daily exercise. They come to a small tree which is their halfway point but rather than allowing Tom to turn on his heel and head for home, Joan pushes him around the tree so he does their complete exercise circuit. Sweet. Then they comfortably hold hands on their way home. They share an easy-going camaraderie such as develops – if a couple is lucky – after the romance and passion have abated in a marriage. As they josh and tease over the dinner table, we get the feeling they’re each other’s best friends. Their bickering about Tom’s evening beer and who puts away the Christmas ornaments is mild. All seems perfectly ordinary. No drama
Ordinary Love is anything but never-ending nightmare. They always come back to each other and to the love that grounds them. here, folks, just move along. Ordinary Love is anything but ordinThen Joan finds a lump in her breast. ary! See it with someone you love. And their ordeal starts. Terrified, Joan asks Tom, “What’s Running time: 92 minutes going to happen if I’ve got cancer?” Rated: PG (Warning: brief scenes of a He reassures her, “If you do – and you don’t! – we’ll do whatever has to be done, just the two of us.” They’re in this together, but their lives are about to change forever. Any woman who has been through the usual steps of diagnosis, from “It’s probably just a cyst” to “I’m afraid I have to tell you that you have breast cancer,” will empathize with Joan. They’ll do so even more as Joan goes through a radical double mastectomy, then more tests to see if the cancer has spread to her liver or bones, then many debilitating chemo treatments. Any man whose loved one has been down this terrible path will empathize with Tom. He hates being in the hospital – it’s full of sick people! He rails against the medical establishment. Why can’t the doctors be certain about the test results? After Joan’s mastectomy, why can’t her surgeon say she is cancer-free? Tom seems very alone. (By this time, we’ve found out that their adult daughter, Debbie, died some time in the past. We don’t know what caused her death, but there are hints it wasn’t a disease.) Tom dreads what will happen to him if Joan dies. He asks a stranger at the hospital, “How do you say to someone, ‘Don’t die!’?” The most harrowing scene isn’t when Joan is shivering and retching from the side effects of the chemo or when Tom is talking at his daughter’s graveside about his fear of being alone. It’s when their terrors – she of death, he of being alone – explode in a screaming fight full of blame and hurtful words. How can they possibly forgive each other, after what they’re just said? Well, they do. The focus isn’t on the horrible things these two people are going through. It’s on how they react to this seemingly woman’s breasts.) Available: Apple TV, Crave, Google Play, Illico, Kanopy and YouTube Barb Popel has lived in the Glebe since 1991. At university in the early 1970s, she was introduced to the joys of film. She’s been an avid filmgoer ever since.
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Now for something completely different: Centos for the 21st century
Poet JC Sulzenko is curator of the Glebe Report’s Poetry Quarter. Her collection, Bricolage, A Gathering of Centos, published by Aeolus House and launched this fall, represents a departure from her lyric and narrative poetry, so much so that it came out under her pseudonym, A. Garnett Weiss.
The Glebe Report asked Sulzenko (or Weiss) why and how she embraced the cento, a particular and unusual form of poetry. A cento is a poem composed entirely of lines taken from other poems. The word cento is derived from a Latin word meaning “patchwork garment.”
What attracted you to the cento form?
Collage always has attracted me as an art form. Centos date back to the Greeks and the Romans and the term conjures the notion of patchwork, a collage in words.
Perhaps that’s why I find joy in using what comes to hand and in drawing lines from the work of other poets – well or lesser known, living or passed, Canadian or international – to create a cento, independent in form and meaning from the source material. It’s an adventure each time. The first cento I wrote won an award and I never looked back.
Do you go searching for a specific type of line of poetry, or are your choices serendipitous, led by chance and inspiration? How do you recognize the next line – is it like a Rubik’s cube where you know when you’ve got it right?
I approach current or archival collections and anthologies as a predator. I note lines that stay with me. Then I live with them, sometimes for hours, sometimes for weeks or longer. Until a first line or a title suggests itself. The next line and lines fall into place from that starting point. In a way the cento tells its own story.
Not every collection or anthology I read leads to a new cento. On the other hand, sometimes more than one cento emerges from the same anthology or collection.
For the most part, I don’t begin with any preconceptions about how a poem will evolve. On occasion, I may write a piece for a reason, prompted by an event or a person. Sometimes, after a cento has been written, it acquires new purpose, which an epigraph may reflect. Though these are the exceptions, rather than the rule.
In his review of your book, Colin Morton talks about a kind of “spooky action at a distance.” Is there a sense that you are working “once removed” from the source material, giving you a sense of distance and a larger perspective? Or is it the opposite, a sense of digging deeper, dissecting, examining and rearranging close up?
That characterization interests me. I see my own involvement and how I live the process as an intimate experience, felt close-up as each line leads me on. I relate to each line, I respect the relationship of the line to what precedes and what follows it and I revere
Comments by Miller Adams
Bricolage invites us to examine the cento by meticulously piecing together language by other poets which have been gathered from anthologies and individual collections into admirable revelations. As examples, “Sacred place where each thing speaks itself,” gleaned from lines by Don McKay, Roo Borson, Marilyn Bowering and eight other poets, unfolds into a comprehensive dissertation. A cento also can be comprised of lines taken from a single poet, from such writers as W.H. Auden, Al Purdy, Tomas Transtromer, Natalie Shapero and Fred Cogswell, in a way that blends their observations. In her preface, Weiss acknowledges the excitement she experiences reading an anthology or a poet’s collection. The words of poets come to her as gifts and she assures us of her gratitude. The resulting poem in each effort adds sparkle and opens up enterprising possibilities. the source poet and poem. That’s why the collection includes a key with full attribution to the originating poet and poem for each line. And why bibliographical notes list the anthologies and individual collections from which the lines were taken.
Who would enjoy this book?
This is a collection poetry readers and writers can appreciate as they discover how poets, renowned or obscure, dialogue with each other or with themselves in each cento of my making.
While each poem stands on its own merits, the added twist, the mystery if you will, comes from taking the poem in and then checking the keys to find out the origin of the lines in the piece. The reader becomes somewhat of a sleuth, pursuing these threads to gain a deeper understanding of the new poem.
Copies of Bricolage are available at Octopus Books and from bricolage. weiss@gmail.com.
These comments first appeared in The OSCAR, November 2021.
Comments by Colin Morton
Rather than expressing a feeling or proving an argument, a poem can create a mood. It may make you think of all the ways its words can mean and try to hold all those meanings together in your mind for a moment. It can be magical, but it’s a magic that speed-readers miss. In the rush to acquire useful information, they don’t hear the wealth of meaning that resides in everyday events and words. The best poems in Bricolage create a mysterious energy, a kind of “spooky action at a distance” through the entanglement of poetic lines from disparate sources.
