Although some very good things naturally go together, as we all know from those commercials where some klutz gets his peanut butter on that other guy's chocolate, filmmakers have had a mixed and mostly unhappy time trying to merge Christmas with the horror movie. Sure, it's always kind of fun to stick a psychopathic killer in a Santa Claus suit, but it's seemed anticlimactic whenever anyone has done it since 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night — not a good movie, but its ads got seen by the wrong bunch of tightassed ninnies and inspired a wonderful episode of Donahue where Phil and his legion of overcaffeinated housewives fretted that such films would result in a new generation of demonic hell-spawn hanging out at the Gap. Then there's Bob Clark's 1974 Black Christmas, which was recently revived and remade, just before Clark's death earlier this year. It has earned a reputation as a seminal shocker that established both the holiday-themed horror movie gimmick and the strategy of assigning the killer a trademark tracking shot and an asthma condition before John Carpenter's Halloween, as well as possibly inventing the whole "The calls are coming from inside the house!" wheeze. But some of us have always thought that its ending is kind of a cheat, and besides, so far as tapping the horrific potential of Christmas break goes, Black Christmas kind of misses the point. Because the sorority girls who are its principal victims get murdered in time for school break, they are spared the experience of going home for the holidays, which is when the scary stuff really starts.
The ghost story Wind Chill, which was briefly released to theaters earlier this year and recently came out on DVD, can be seen as a corrective to Clark's error in timing. Directed by Gregory Jacobs, Wind Chill opens in a lonely, eerily depopulated college campus. The heroine, played by the strikingly assured young Emily Blunt (of My Summer of Love and The Devil Wears Prada), appears to be among the last students to get the hell out of Dodge for the holidays. She piles into a car with a guy she doesn't know (Ashton Holmes, Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello's son in A History of Violence) with whom she's agreed to share a ride, and right away a creepy vibe sets in. Holmes, channeling one of Michael Cera's clueless nice guys, keeps trying to charm his new friend, who plainly just wants to get the trip completed as painlessly as possible and then go back to being unaware of his existence. As he keeps trying to make contact, and she begins to respond to his overtures with ever greater displays of contempt and condescension, it may begin to dawn on viewers that they're watching an uncannily well-executed performance of a dance they may recognize from their own college days or, if they're really unlucky, even their more recent lives: the awkward non-mating ritual between the worshipful boy trying too hard to craft a perfect day for himself and the wrong person, and the girl who's only trying to decide whether her unwanted suitor is even worth regarding as a stalker.
One of the nice things about this set-up is that when things switch gears and the supernatural element (which includes Martin Donovan as a hulking, phantom state trooper) comes in, you're kind of relieved; as in a sci-fi story where the arrival of the aliens unites the Earth's superpowers together against a common threat, confusion and fear make it possible for a bitch princess and a geeky dork, trapped together in a stalled car, to actually be civil to each other for minutes at a time. Wind Chill may have just been too small a film to take much away from 300's take at the box office, and it may not be weird or bloody enough to become a cult classic now, but it's a smart little genre flick that ought to be perfect for winter cocooners looking for an excuse to jack up the thermostat, huddle together on the couch, and think about how cold it looks inside that damn car. — Phil Nugent