Everything old is new again, but some are newer than others. Sophia Takal’s daring Black Christmas remake takes elements of Bob Clark’s original 1974 horror classic – a film that is often credited as one of the first slasher movies, if not the official progenitor of the genre – and brings them smartly into the modern day. It’s a classy slasher filled with great characters, memorable kills, thoughtful commentary, and some go-for-broke, burn-it-all-down ideas that don’t always work, but are undeniably distinctive and intriguing.
It’s Christmastime again at Hawthorne, a college built on traditional male values and which, in recent years, has been pulled kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes) is being protested for ignoring all historical authors who weren’t white men, the bust of the problematic college founder has been removed from public display after a widespread petition, and the fraternities are all struggling to understand why the women they have sexually assaulted are accusing the men who sexually assaulted them of sexual assault.
It is, as Black Christmas points out, a very political world we currently live in, and the people who are making the most waves – the women of the Mu Kappa Epsilon sorority – are now targets for abuse and violence by men with a vested interest in maintaining a sexist status quo. A mysterious campus cult starts sending threatening texts, stalking them, and killing them in a variety of memorable, scary ways, mostly involving Christmas paraphernalia like icicles and Christmas lights. Because ’tis the season for everybody, I guess, including homicidal maniacs.
The original Black Christmas wasn’t just a checklist of crazy murders, it introduced an ensemble cast of three-dimensional characters enduring realistic campus dramas first. Takal’s remake follows suit, with a group of protagonists who make wonderful impressions. Imogen Poots gives a striking and nuanced performance as Riley, who is still recovering from an assault she suffered at the hands of a classmate, and Aleyse Shannon steals many a scene as her best friend Kris, an activist who stands up for her values even when it makes Riley uncomfortable. Their various sorority sisters all have stand-out moments even though they have less screen time; Brittany O’Grady in particular has a one-liner about baking a ham that is, perhaps, the most endearing sentence anyone has uttered in a movie all year.
The latest Black Christmas remake plays a lot looser with the plot of the original, forsaking the mysterious “Billy” murderer and replacing him instead with a sinister cabal, whose motives are both obvious and, by the end, unexpectedly bizarre. The script for Black Christmas is mostly razor sharp and fiercely intelligent, and successfully captures the push and pull between various aspects of the college experience – friends, parties, homework, dating, politics, danger – but it eventually takes a hard turn which is undeniably wild but, arguably, gives some of its monsters too much of an excuse. (Without getting into spoilers, this is bound to be a controversial film in a variety of ways. Let’s just say that much.)
Black Christmas is PG-13, but it doesn’t feel like it’s pulling punches. The film tackles harsh subjects and features a variety of brutal murders. There’s not a lot of blood, per se, but the violence is often shocking and the threat is always real. Many of the set pieces are references to the original film, but cleverly reversed, and there’s at least one reference to The Exorcist III that’s bound to make many a horror fan happy.
Sophia Takal has made an excellent horror film about political people and the people who hate political people, and like many of the best horror films it takes its contemporary anxieties to huge extremes. It’s hard not to admire a film for jumping into a difficult conversation and using the iconography of a genre, one that all-too frequently indulges in sexism, to make a feminist statement. And by setting it in a location where those conversations are everyday occurrences it feels especially organic and absorbing, at least until everything gets weird. Black Christmas is a remake but more importantly it’s completely of its time, a truly modern slasher for audiences who deserve more than mere nostalgia.
