BLACK CHRISTMAS (2019)

 

(Director/co-screenwriter: Sophia Takal. Co-screenwriter: April Wolfe.)

This feminist PG-13 reimagining─not a remake─of Bob Clark’s 1974 masterpiece was not well-received by critics or filmgoers when it came out last year. I get why, given how hyper-focused filmgoers─especially horror fans─can be with their genre expectations.

Good, effective PG-13-rated slasher films are rare, with good reason: the genre is inherently suffused with darkness, blood and violence, which─to seem realistic and traditional on multiple levels─demands an R rating. For the most part, a less-than-R rating suggests a lightweight cheat of a movie, one aimed at a younger or horror-lite audience (and an insult to those who consider themselves “serious” horror fans).

Not only that, CHRISTMAS is a radical rework of a sacred beast. This reimagining, which is a hybrid genre work, emphasized its feminist values in all aspects of the film─structure, characters, dialogue and action, supplanting the usual slasher elements which largely appeals a masculine outlook.

According to its co-screenwriter April Wolfe, this 2019 version was written for young women who do not identify as horror fans but might come see the sometimes-suspenseful film anyway. (Wolfe said this in the January 2020 issue of FANGORIA magazine, in her article “It’s Black Christmas Time Again.”) Unfortunately, those young women did not fulfill Wolfe’s hopes, and viewers trashed the film for not being what they expected.

The film runs thusly: on the Calvin Hawthorne College campus, the fraternity sisters of Pi Kappa Sig (ΠΚΣ) begin receiving creepy texts on the night another sister (Lindsay) is killed by a gold-masked, black-robed assailant. The creepy texts continue peppering the ΠΚΣ sisters’ cell phones, including Riley’s (played by Imogen Poots), who was drugged and raped by a ΔΚΟ frat brother the previous year. Riley, still reeling from the assault, reported it, causing her popular attacker (Bryan Huntley) to be kicked out of Hawthorne. A backlash resulted, much of it from the male student body and administration (especially the high-profile Professor Gelsen, house father of the ΔΚΟ fraternity, played with sarcastic relish by Cary Elwes). This is not surprising, since Hawthorne, a tradition-heavy school, was founded by a notorious sexist and slave owner.

More creepy events and odd disappearances start adding up, especially after Riley and her ΠΚΣ sisters update a traditional college song with anti-rape sentiments during a winter show performance─while it’s a liberating, giddy moment for Riley and her fratmates, it’s incendiary to others, particularly the ΔΚΟ brothers who witness it.

The creepiness and attacks intensify. A black oozing sludge has replaced the blood of the killer (or killers), adding to the mystery, which is somehow connected to a bust of Hawthorne that has been relocated from a main hall to the ΔΚΟ frat’s ritual chamber after a public outcry against Hawthorne’s worldview.

Tightly written, shot and edited, BLACK deftly balances slasher flick elements, overt social progressivism, and character development, making for a film that should be not viewed as a slasher film but a hybrid, offbeat entry in the horror genre, one that is not a remake of the classic original 1974 version,

The identity of the killer (or killers) is easy to figure out, but that is partly due to the anti-toxic masculinity politics of the film, which consciously tips that hand to keep with its theme and storyline. Does this render the easily sussed-out identity issue moot? That’s up to each viewer. It did not take anything away from the film for me, but then I did not watch this expecting a mystery element in it.

Bottom line: Viewed as a horror-lite/PG-13, sometimes-suspenseful social drama with black ooze, solid acting and a willingness to try something different, it’s entertaining and effective─not the best film ever made, but well-made, given the filmmakers’ intentions. If you view this as anything else, you’re likely to be disappointed.

There’s an R-rated version of this that sports a slightly different ending, one that suggests all men are bad. If you want a more balanced and less clichéd finish, stick with the PG-13 version.