I wish it was Winter break
...thinking of Black Christmas 1974 and 2019
When Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas was released in 2019, I recall horror fans greeting it with disdain if not outright hostility. I shared this perspective for a couple of reasons. First, Bob Clark’s original Black Christmas from 1974 is one of the greatest horror films ever created, if not one of the greatest of any genre. It is generally considered the first slasher film, but it is far more than that. It has an ensemble of great actors, a complex script, and viscerally creepy vibes thanks to the creatively disgusting prank calls heard in it throughout. I watch it at least once a year. Black Christmas had already been re-made in 2006, but that one was so unfortunate that even Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s doe eyes couldn’t save it.
The second thing which was irking about the 2019 remake was how it was promoted. Produced at the height of the rage over Brett Cavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, Black Christmas was advertised as some kind of feminist version of the material, which disregarded elements of the misogynistic original. This notion was insulting to fans of the 1974 film because that one clearly already had feminist, pro-choice themes right from the beginning. It was yet another example of contemporary cinema degrading what came before it in hopes of making a buck. I didn’t get around to actually watching the most recent Black Christmas until well into the pandemic in January of 2021. It still can not be compared to the original in any way, but I did kind of like it, to my surprise. The reason I have a vague respect for the film is because it is a definitive exploitation film in the formal aspects of the term.
The most recent Black Christmas is about a group of sorority girls on the campus of fictional Hawthorne College, in particular Riley (Imogen Poots) who serves as our protagonist. They stage a satirically sexy Christmas-themed song and dance in which they call out a frat boy who had roofied and raped Riley. In retaliation, the frat boys terrorize and murder the sorority girls in a set up that clearly brings the traditional, patriarchal aspects of fraternity culture into question. The themes are not difficult to follow because they are constantly hitting you over the head.
The original Black Christmas is about a group of sorority sisters about to go on Winter vacation. They are getting strange phone calls from an absolute psycho named Billy, who we embody via POV creeping into the attic of the sorority house in the first scene. Olivia Hussey is Jess, our main protagonist, and for much of the film her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) is strongly suspected of being the prank-calling stalker/murderer. The main character conflict is between Jess and Peter after Jess finds out she is pregnant. Peter insists they have the baby and get married, while Jess refuses, saying she will get an abortion. Peter is mentally broken over this, and acts weirder and unhinged. By the end of the film, we know he isn’t the killer, but we also still know very little about Billy, the cryptic antagonist, aside from what we already knew--the calls are coming from inside the house! While Black Christmas is a Canadian film, it followed on the heels of the Roe vs Wade decision made in the US the year before. Like with many of the best horror films, the makers brought this socio-political issue to the forefront.
The main annoyance of Takal’s more recent Black Christmas is how it uses the name and spirit of the original while also degrading the original in the process. This is just a symptom of a larger cultural trend of new horror films attempting to differentiate themselves from earlier examples of the genre that are incorrectly viewed as being simplistic, dumb, and/or misogynistic. This approach is now generally associated with “post-horror”, as dubbed by Guardian critic Steve Rose in 2017. Most clearly related to distributor A24, these are films that claim to have legitimacy via their psychological depth and/or attention to social justice--as if some of the greatest horror films of the past hundred years did not have those things. The best piece of writing I have read critiquing this approach to viewing contemporary cinema is Henri de Corinth’s “Gentrified Horror”. In it, Corinth explains how the marketing of recent films by David Eggers and Ari Aster is attempting to make horror seem legitimate and classy, using the history of horror cinema as a counterpoint. Forget about old, crude horror cinema, companies like A24 say, these new films we are making are now respectable to like. Takal’s Black Christmas takes this approach as well, completely disregarding the original and its attention to pro-choice perspectives.
This approach is just one aspect of how the most recent Black Christmas is a down and dirty, modern day exploitation film. It tries to make itself appear “woke”, exploiting the current market of cinema audiences who are concerned with social justice issues. The speed at which it was produced amidst the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination and confirmation is a testament to this. Jason Blum of Blumhouse had great financial and cultural results a few years earlier when Jordan Peele’s Get Out galvanized conversations about racial justice in 2017. Black Christmas did not yield such results a couple of years later. This is partially due to the fact that the quality of the film is not on the same level as something like Get Out, but it could also have something to do with the misogyny of a large part of horror audiences.
When I watched Black Christmas just over a year after it was released, it almost seemed like it had been created in a different era, because in some ways it had. Covid is definitely a chronological dividing line. Seeing one of the boyfriend characters in the film say “I like beer” clearly referencing the Kavanaugh hearing, was like seeing a filmmaker trying to milk the contemporary headlines for maximum effect. This is exploitation cinema at its most feral. Not only is the facade of post-horror wrong in what it contends to deliver, it is actually just hiding the most typical of film production and marketing practices. Blumhouse tries to suggest a marker or quality with their big budget offerings, but films like Black Christmas (2019), The Invisible Man (2020) and Get Out (2017) are at their core, low budget films trying to bring in a box office many times their budget. I mean them know disrespect at pointing this out, but I just wish contemporary exploitation filmmakers and producers would treat themselves as what they are.
The original Black Christmas is a great example of a low budget horror film of a quality that guarantees its enduring appreciation. The budget of $680,000 would now be about equal to $4.2 million, comparable to the most recent remake’s $5 million. Jess and Peter are played by actors who also have legacies in more reputable genres/films. Before playing Jess, Olivia Hussey was Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Meanwhile, Keir Dullea who played Peter is best known for his role as Dave in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Director Bob Clark was able to put together an amazing cast that also included Margot Kidder as Barb the lush, Andrea Martin as Phyl, Marian Waldman as the secret-sipping house mother, and genre regular John Saxon as Lieutenant Fuller. The yuletide set design is cozy, and the sound design leaves a lot of latitude for Billy’s creative and sleazy phone calls. For the most part, the violence is quite muted, with only a couple of the deaths occurring on screen. The original Black Christmas is the kind of film that I want to rewind and watch again as soon as it is over.
I appreciate Takal’s attempts at feminist exploitation in the new Black Christmas, but it simply does not have the power of the original. At least 2019 BC is markedly more interesting than the 2006 version. The latter decided it would give us Billy’s back story, which no one ever asked for. There is no need to ruin the mystique of our antagonist, and by mystique I mean the identity of a sloppy, violent, mentally disabled pervert. Takal’s version gets rid of Billy entirely, turning the villains into a bunch of cloaked frat boys led by Cary Elwes as Professor Gelson. This switch begs the question--why bother calling it Black Christmas at all? This is the same question I asked about another unfortunate “remake”, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018). If these filmmakers wanted to do something derivative of the original works, while also going in distinctively other directions, they could have just come up with original titles. This wouldn’t have turned off the classic horror fans so much. That being said, Black Christmas 2019 and Suspiria 2018 both have strength, particularly in the new things they bring to the set ups. I am absolutely up for seeing the emasculation of frat boys, along with the supernatural twist seen therein. Instead of creating a failing goal of never living up to the original, why couldn’t films like this embrace their own originality instead? I just hope the film industry brings us feminist exploitation (femsploitation?) pictures in the future that are more extreme, regardless of quality.