Bob Clark

Few directors have a filmography this hard to summarise. Clark, an American filmmaker who did much of his best work out of Canada, made a slasher, a Sherlock Holmes picture, a teen sex comedy that printed money, and the Christmas film that plays on a loop in American living rooms every December, all inside a single decade.

Black Christmas came first, in 1974, and did more work than it gets credit for: a prowler's-eye camera, a sorority house emptying out for the holidays, and a flat refusal to explain itself, several years ahead of the slasher boom it helped make possible. Clark supplied the prowler's shadow and the voice on the phone himself, uncredited. Murder by Decree in 1979 is the outlier, Holmes against the Ripper played straight and cold and angry about class. Then Porky's in 1981, which made an enormous amount of money and set the template for a decade of teen comedy, and A Christmas Story in 1983, in which he turns up briefly as Swede.

The last two decades are unkinder. Rhinestone, Turk 182!, From the Hip and Loose Cannons are studio assignments with diminishing returns, and Baby Geniuses in 1999 and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 in 2004 carry a reputation among the worst wide releases of their era. A career that ran from real innovation to real embarrassment, with a permanent Christmas fixture parked in the middle.