I’ve wanted to write some sort of a tribute to Bob Clark since news of his death last week, but damn, I just didn’t know where to begin. Like so many others, I felt (and still feel) cosmically ripped off at what happened; that Clark was just starting to get the appreciation he deserved; that he was going to have a triumphant return to horror from the dregs of kiddie flick mediocrity; that maybe he had a few more great films in him; that no family deserves to lose a father and son on the same day. It’s the reaction anyone has to a tragic death of someone they respect, but this sadness has lasted longer and the filmmaker has been on mind more than I would’ve thought over the past week.
As far as actually meeting Clark, I only talked with him on the phone briefly a couple of times while setting up an interview with him for the magazine, and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy – warm and accommodating. Last year I also worked on setting up a 30th anniversary screening of Black Christmas for one of our movie nights, which he would attend, but dammit, the timing was off and we had to let it go, with the promise that we’d try to do the Toronto premiere of his remake of Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. In the end, I’m just glad we at least got to do a piece on him.
Like so many other horror fans, I feel he was an underappreciated force in the genre. To me, he represents a major flaw in the way cinema artists are evaluated. The auteur theory – basically the idea that a director has particular themes he works out time and time again in his films – pioneered by the French New Wave so many decades ago, champions repetition. A guy like Clark isn’t considered an auteur, largely in part because his body of work is all over the map, from slasher films (Black Christmas) to family fare (A Christmas Story) to detective thrillers (Murder by Decree) to low-brow comedy (Porky’s). Being successful in variety of genres makes you an everyman, despite demonstrating a remarkable adaptability that only comes with a studied understanding of genres. That’s key to why I find his body of work so interesting. (I was also intrigued by the idea that he was an American who came here, found success and stayed to make some of the most important Canuck genre films.)
It’s was Black Christmas, though, that first caught my attention. It happened back in the ‘90s, while attending university in Edmonton, chipping away at a Film and Media degree and working at a video store with a massive collection of VHS tapes. I was taking a course on Canadian cinema and a co-worker suggested I check it out. Not only was I surprised that it was setting the slasher template long before Halloween, but it was a perfect fit for what we were studying in terms of characteristics of Canadian film – stuff like ineffectual male “hero” characters, narratives of failure (they never catch Billy), weak Tax-Shelter-era attempts at pretending to be set in the US (remember the tiny American flag on the policeman’s desk?) and the telltale inclusion of a Hollywood B-actor (John Saxon!). Hell, it’s even set in the dead of winter and has a snowmobile in it. I remember thinking that if I ever went to Toronto I should try to find the house from the movie – something I still haven’t done.
I managed to convince my film prof to let me write a paper on it, so I set about researching the movie. I found a couple of brief mentions of it in some text books on Canadian cinema, a few old newspaper reviews in the library, and there was a little bit of info about it online at the time. The biggest source was this strange little website called Canuxploitation, so I emailed the guy who ran it and he was really helpful at providing details about the movie. I ended up citing his site in my paper.
From there, three important things happened. First, I discovered this hidden world of Canadian exploitation films, which immediately fascinated me and led to a thorough examination of the video store’s collection. I found obscure titles such as Visiting Hours (which I wrote a paper on later in the year; I’m sure I’m the only shmuck in the world to do so.)
Second, I became a lot more interested in horror films in general after realizing that there were a lot of excellent ones out there like Black Christmas that were flying just under the radar. I started to read more about them and seek out dusty, used VHS copies of movies such Death Weekend and Curtains from video store delete bins. In addition, Anchor Bay was really starting the horror revival with its widescreen special edition VHS horror releases, and I soon picked up Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.
And Third, I stayed in touch with the guy who ran Canuxploitation: Paul. He lived in Toronto and we became pen pals – as post-summer camp dorky as that sounds. I wrote about his site in This magazine and interviewed him for the film-themed radio show I had for a while, and he turned me on to all kinds of amazing exploitation stuff from my own backyard, and beyond.
Eventually this burgeoning interest in horror led me to Rue Morgue. I fell in love with it, decided I was going to write for mag and I became a regular contributor. When they did a feature on Canadian horror, they knew I had an interest and offered me the piece, but I passed them along to Paul, who was a real expert. Then he began writing for the mag as a regular contributor. Eventually, I was offered the job here and moved out to Toronto, which gave me the opportunity to meet Paul face-to-face for the first time. We instantly hit it off and he’s now one of my best friends (not to mention those fine folks I work with). So, last year when we decided to use the remake of Black Christmas as an excuse to do a retrospective on the original and a piece on Clark himself, there was a glowing satisfaction that I got to help put the feature together and set up an interview between Paul and Bob.
I thought about this a lot over the past week – how, if it wasn’t for Bob Clark, there’s a reasonable chance I wouldn’t have found my way to Rue Morgue, and a definite chance I would not have met one of my best friends. And for that, Bob Clark, I can’t thank you enough.