Before he clogged Yuletide airtimes with A Christmas Story reruns, director Bob Clark held a different sort of stranglehold on the merry holiday. Clark's 1974 entry into the burgeoning psychopath-on-the-prowl genre, Black Christmas tracks a stalker who shacks up in a sorority-house attic and descends to off the unsuspecting sisters (including Olivia Hussey and Lois Lane herself, Margot Kidder) during winter break. Meanwhile, lewd, mumbo-jumbo phone calls only up the suspense. Clark wrests surprising tension from the facts that it takes 20 interminable seconds to trace a call, that attics and stairways always creak, and that a first-person camera (à la Peeping Tom) packs a disturbing thrill.