Black Christmas
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“And For The Real Hero Close Ups… You Wanna Use The Stuff You Find Inside Baby Diapers.”: D.P Mark Schwartzbard on the Practical Snow, Fire, and Black Goo Blood of Black Christmas
DPs don’t often rank up to their title linearly. Mark Schwartzbard did. Trying to break into the industry after film school, he sent letters to productions but never heard back. He got an internship where he cold-called companies like Coca Cola and offered them product placement in return for Cola. Eventually, the production company he interned for offered him his first loader gig for deferred pay. He loaded and A.C’ed for years on features and commercials and eventually bumped up to camera operator. He pulled focus for the length of Borat and operated on Bruno. Dayplaying, he experienced such New […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 25, 2019 -
“All These Other Misogynists Waiting to Pounce”: Sophia Takal on Black Christmas
Rotely obsessed with heroic Final Girls and the murderers brandishing phallic-shaped penetrative weapons who stalk them, slasher films have long been the subject of gender-study discourse and academia, each observation proving that a knife can be perceived as more than a knife, a stabbing more than a stabbing. What is it about the anonymous, shadowy male presence that feels so threatening? Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas seeks to investigate and literalize that question, presenting the modern male as someone who can be equally powerful and deceitful. What’s so scary about the fictional Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees when the world we […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 18, 2019
