The holiday season is here again, and you know what that means: It’s only a matter of time before A Christmas Story is being shown on television to absolutely nobody’s surprise. Despite plenty of other Christmas movies to choose from, the annual broadcasts of A Christmas Story still attract millions of viewers each year. TNT and TBS even do 24-hour marathons starting on Christmas Eve of one movie, played back-to-back.
The 1983 comedy, as if you didn’t already know, tells the story of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker (played by Peter Billingsley). Ralphie’s top priority is to get himself a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, something every adult he encounters is strongly against. Their concern, of course, is that he’ll end up shooting his eye out. In the end, Ralphie’s parents do get him the gun, and he does damn-near shoot his eye out with it, but he still looks back on it years later as the best Christmas gift he ever got.
Something you might not know is that A Christmas Story wasn’t the first or the only Christmas-themed movie director Bob Clark ever made. Nine years earlier, Clark directed another film that’s gone on to become a holiday classic in its own right. It might also be the polar opposite of A Christmas Story in terms of tone and overall concept. The movie in question is the influential 1974 slasher Black Christmas, starring Olivia Hussey and future Nightmare on Elm Street star John Saxon.
Black Christmas is a dark and unsettling film about an unseen killer who harasses a house full of sorority sisters by repeatedly calling them from an upstairs phone. One by one, the man murders the sisters as well as their housemother and a police officer who was supposed to be protecting them. Hussey, as the “final girl,” kills her boyfriend, thinking he was responsible, and the police come to the same conclusion about him. Unfortunately, the real killer is still hiding in the house as the cops leave Hussey asleep in one of the bedrooms. The phone then starts ringing once again as the credits begin to roll.
The early slasher flick inspired John Carpenter to make his own holiday-themed horror movie a few years later, which he called Halloween. It also spawned two unsuccessful reboots in 2006 and 2019. So far, though, the film hasn’t inspired any 24-hour TV marathons, for some strange reason.
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