5 Feet of Fury

Uh oh: something else Canada didn’t invent

Canadian like to lie about having invented stuff, like the telephone, or brag about inventing the dumbest stuff, like the arm on the Space Shuttle. (Wow! The arm!! Not the whole damn Shuttle like those goddamn stupid fat evil Americans!!!)

And let’s not get started on ROOTS.

But just last month, when I blogged about horror movies, an American on Twitter congratulated “us” for inventing the holiday themed slasher film in particular, and the slasher film in general, with Black Christmas.

Which is basic common knowledge among geeks.

Except now this guy says Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974) is the first (holiday) slasher, because it was actually shot in ’72.

So then I thought: hey, maybe the tax-shelter classic Cannibal Girls (1973) can save us. Alas, Silent Night was filmed a year ealier, released or not. But while Cannibal Girls doesn’t have a holiday theme, DVD Drive-In observes:

With its satirical, improvisational approach carried throughout the film, CANNIBAL GIRLS not only evokes the more graphic independent drive-in horror flicks of the 1960s, but also the Manson cult murders, and it also predates such landmark works as THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (it has at least one very similar nighttime chase sequence) and the later slasher films that would indeed become self parody, employing a number of plot devices found here.