2001: A Space Odyssey, the groundbreaking film by Stanley Kubrick, celebrated its 50th anniversary this month, a milestone for a film that remains unlike no other.

Transcending its face value of a science fiction movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which polarized audiences and critics alike upon its first release in April 1968, remains a visual allegory for a multitude of complex ideas that spread social, humanistic, societal, and ultimately spiritual aspects. Birth, death, and reawakening act as common and essential threads through the entire narrative, and it acts as multitudes of tones and styles interwoven throughout, with dazzling visual spectacles that arrest and envelope sensory perception in ways almost unheard of in cinema prior to 1968. It’s a monumental film, a true epic in the greatest light possible, and it remains a cornerstone of inspiration, wonderment, and an apex of what the cinema can really do and how far it can go.

Black Christmas
Blu-ray (Collector’s Edition)
Director: Bob Clark
Screenwriter: A. Roy Moore
Cast: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon
Distributor: Scream Factory
Rated R | 98 Minutes
Release Date: December 13, 2016

“Oh, why don’t you go find a wall socket and stick your tongue in it, that’ll give you a charge!”

Considered to be one of the first “slasher” films, 1974’s Black Christmas served as an influence for John Carpenter’s Halloween and has since become a cult classic. Directed by Bob Clark (Porky’s, A Christmas Story), the movie was inspired by a series of murders that took place in Montreal, and the urban legend “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs.”

At a Christmas party at the Pi Kappa Sigma house, Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey) receives an obscene phone call from “The Moaner,” a disturbed individual who has been calling the house. Jess and her sorority sisters Barb (Margot Kidder), Phyllis (Andrea Martin), and Clare (Lynne Griffin) listen in on the call. The feisty Barb provokes the caller, who responds by telling the girls that he is going to kill them.