Black Christmas was NOT first

Five years and change later . . . I have finally seen "Black Christmas." (Oh, how time flies, ticklemejoker, when you're having fun.) Now, it's a solid film, much superior, I believe, to most psycho-killer films. However, I can't say that it scared me the way "The Sitter" did. Maybe it's that I'm older now (MUCH older!). Maybe it's that I have so much more cinema experience now. I dunno. But there wasn't anything in "Black Christmas" that made me scream bloody murder, and that even with the fact that my own phone rang just one beat after the ringing phone stopped in the end credits!

That said, having seen this and now being aware of the dates of both releases, I must admit that "Black Christmas" was the first to use the ringing-from-the-same-house device. However, there is a major difference here in audience experience. In "Black Christmas," while we are unaware of the killer's identity, as we are in "The Sitter," we are long aware that the killer is inside the house, that he is somehow phoning from the house. We *don't* know that in "The Sitter." The audience learns this fact only when the sitter does. Talk about terror! "Black Christmas" was not famous enough, by any means, for this device to have become a classic film trope. There was no urban legend that I knew of at that time, either, and you have to remember that urban legends did not have the same kind of huge, lightning-fast distribution that they do today. Thus, the surprise reveal was, for most of the audience, a real surprise. We screamed our butts off.