‘Black Christmas’: A Slasher-Film Remake Updates Its Premise and Strikes Back

This remake of the holiday-themed horror movie updates things for 2019—and its righteous anger makes all the difference.
There’s a distinct daughters-of-Carol-Clover vibe in the new remake of Black Christmas that hits you almost immediately — a kind of knowingness with a serrated edge that’s different from the meta-winks of something like Scream, or the in-joke camaraderie that happens when horror franchise entries start getting into the double digits. It’s not just that its creators are familiar with the 1974 original, a proto-slasher flick involving a sorority house, a masked killer, the holiday season and a body count. (This vintage exploitation gem is also the answer to the question: What movie connects the director of Porky’s, an SCTV alumna, one of 2001‘s astronauts and Lois Lane?) Or that they’ve taken a few key moments from this landmark scary movie — like, say, a murder involving a plastic bag — and ingeniously referenced them in a way that the 2006 cover version of B.C. couldn’t be bothered with.
No, the sensation here is that director Sophia Takal (Always Shine) and screenwriter/film critic April Wolfe (who, full disclosure, has been a Rolling Stone contributor) are not just schooled in the history of horror movies but in the way these films work. They are aware of the pleasures of sitting in the dark and being terrified, and the pitfalls of codifying a genre around the evergreen notion of vulnerable females being systematically, brutally murdered. You can imagine them trading trivia over favorite kill scenes, and discussing the merits of The Slumber Party Massacre, the 1982 Golden-Age-of-Slasherdom classic directed and written by Amy Jones and Rita Mae Brown, over stiff drinks. And you can picture the beaming lightbulb that appeared over their heads when, in the midst of one of the most blatantly misogynistic moments of American public life, these fans first hit upon the notion of using an often misogynistic type of horror movie to strike back.