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Record W321102417

Black Christmas: The Slasher Film Was Made in Canada

2011· article· en· W321102417 on OpenAlex
Sara Constantineau

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCineaction! · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGothic Literature and Media Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHollywoodMovie theaterFilm directorArtSensibilityFilm industryIncarnationVampireHonourLiteratureHistoryArt historyMedia studiesSociology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Contrary to popular belief, John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is not the first incarnation of the modern-day slasher film. That honour belongs to the small Canadian production Black Christmas (1974). This relatively unknown film is responsible for a genre that Informed dozens of Hollywood imitations and continues to be a popular part of contemporary cinema. Black Christmas is an example of how the formulaic nature of genre cinema does not necessarily restrict a filmmaker's means of political and national expression, because this film reflects a Canadian sensibility that doesn't exist in its Hollywood counterparts. That an influential cinematic genre originated with a Canadian film challenges the assumption that genre cinema opposes national cinema, and the constant exchange between cultural texts means that Canadian cinema can impact an institution as dominant as Hollywood. Black Christmas--a low-budget Canadian horror film directed by Bob Clark--follows a group of co-eds during the days leading up to their Christmas holidays. While living in a sorority house, these women repeatedly receive threatening phone calls and are eventually murdered by a man named Billy, whose true identity is never determined. This film takes place during a holiday, foregrounds the killer's subjective point of view, and features adolescent female victims stalked by a deranged male predator--all characteristics typically associated with the slasher film (1). Subjective camerawork is prevalent; the camera is often restricted to Billy's point of view so that his body remains hidden. The film begins with an extended sequence in which a shaky camera approaches the sorority house, accompanied by Billy's heavy breathing. The camera voyeuristically peers through an open window obscured by curtains, and we see male hands reach up to climb a trellis and scale the house. We see through Billy's eyes throughout the film, especially when he is killing the girls. Another slasher trope established in this film is the Final Girl. In virtually all slasher films there is a female character who knows what is going on, resists the killer's attacks, and survives until the end of the film. (2) Jess is such a character in Black Christmas. John Carpenter's Halloween was released four years after Black Christmas, but it is often recognized as the first slasher filing (3). Because it was so successful, its stylistic and narrative choices were imitated and developed by later Hollywood films. While Halloween did not necessarily copy Black Christmas, it gets the credit for starting the slasher tropes found in the earlier film. Carpenter's film also follows a group of adolescents, overwhelmingly female, who are killed by a psychotic male named Michael. It uses a subjective camera to reflect the first-person perspective of the killer, most prominently in its opening sequence that bears a striking resemblance to the opening of Black Christmas. Halloween begins with a long take from the killer's perspective, effectively concealing his Identity. The camera peers in the windows of a suburban home before entering the house. Next we see a long-sleeved hand grab a knife and murder the film's first victim. Halloween also features a Final Girl, Laurie, who is hyper-aware, fights off the killer's repeated attacks, and survives until the end of the film. There are significant differences between these two horror films, and even Bob Clark does not think Carpenter is guilty of plagiarism, as indicated by his interview on the 2002 DVD release of his film. However, he does acknowledge that his film influenced Carpenter's production. In the same interview he recalls a conversation he had with Carpenter in which he described a possible sequel to Black Christmas; this purely hypothetical films would have taken place during Halloween of the next year, and Billy would have broken out of a mental institution to resume his stalking of the sorority house. In Halloween, Michael escapes from a mental Institution to return to his former home and stalk those he associates with it. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.571
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.241
Teacher spread0.220 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it