Black Christmas And Three Generations of Holiday Slasher Horror

Before the late director Bob Clark gifted us A Christmas Story (the definitive Christmas movie — FIGHT ME!) in 1983, he previously got in the holiday spirit with his foundational 1974 holiday horror film Black Christmas. Shot on a minuscule $686,000 budget in Canada (where the American-born Clark shot many of his films), the film is just one of several ‘70s chillers that adapted the “babysitter and the man upstairs” urban legend, where a teenage babysitter receives frightening phone calls from someone who is revealed to be — wait for it — inside the house!

In Black Christmas, a sorority house full of girls (including Romeo & Juliet star Olivia Hussey, a pre-SCTV Andrea Martin, and a boozy, cheeky Margot Kidder) are the ones receiving obscene, threatening calls from some “moaner” who calls himself Billy. During a Christmas party, the moaner slides into the house one night and makes himself at home in the attic, occasionally coming out to pick off the girls.

Considered one of the first slasher films, Black Christmas made $4 million worldwide and gained an obvious cult following. So of course, it’s subsequently been remade.

Actually, two Black Christmas remakes have been released over the years. The first one, which dropped in 2006, is disappointing as hell. This gross, skeevy revamp follows the general premise: Pretty young sorority girls (including Lacey Chabert, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead) get wiped out one by one by an attic-dwelling serial killer on Christmas Eve. (In this version, Billy returns to his childhood home after escaping from a mental institution.)

This Christmas is definitely one loose reimagining, giving fewer props and shout-outs to the original (Andrea Martin does appear as the resident housemother) and ripping off other slasher films receiving their own remakes in the same era, like Halloween and Friday the 13th. This time around, the killer is characterized more as a living boogeyman, a la Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. We also get a backstory, courtesy of flashbacks which include Billy watching his father killed by his mother, who would eventually lock the kid up in their attic. It gets even worse for the poor psycho, who gets raped by his mom and receives a new sister/daughter. It’s almost like the movie is more concerned with knocking Norman Bates off his throne as the most fucked-up mama’s boy in horror cinema.

Relying more on blood-soaked, macabre theatrics, the 2006 Black Christmas feels more like an elongated Tales from the Crypt episode. Fresh from helming the 2003 remake of the 1971, rat-crawling thriller Willard, director Glen Morgan got together with his old X-Files/Final Destination writing partner James Wong to make Black Christmas more like a pulpy, Val Lewton-style thriller, complete with low-angle shots full of contrasting light and shadows. And yet, there are also scenes so sloppily edited, you’d be hard-pressed to know what the hell was going on.

There is a good reason why this version turned out as a mess. Black Christmas was a Dimension Films production (aka Miramax’s genre division), which means that Morgan and Wong predictably butted heads with execs Bob and Harvey Weinstein on the movie’s direction and tone. The brothers wanted them to reshoot a different, more violent ending, along with shooting additional scenes that were only used in the trailer. The movie ended up getting released in two versions: a 90-minute North American cut and an 84-minute European cut. When it was all over, the Bush II-era Black Christmas grossed a modest $21.5 million against its $9 million budget.

The 2019 Black Christmas, meanwhile, produced by Jason Blum and his Blumhouse horror factory, is a straight-up reimagining of the original. It’s still about girls being terrorized by a killer, but for once the dude isn’t up in the attic. Rocking a black cloak and a mask, looking like he just left that orgy from Eyes Wide Shut, the killer is out and about, targeting college girls during the holiday season.

But the true villain of this movie is toxic masculinity. The girls are surrounded by men, from douchey frat guys to a snobby professor (Cary Elwes) who teaches a very non-inclusive literature course. One sorority girl (Imogen Poots) is already going through PTSD after getting date-raped by a frat bro who didn’t get reprimanded when she reported it.

Released two years after Get Out basically spearheaded the “woke horror” charge, this Christmas is all about subverting horror-movie tropes and adding a dash of satirical, social commentary, certain to turn off fanboys who just wanna see hot, hopefully topless girls get gutted. The dudebros predictably stayed away, as the $5 million film only made $18 million at the box office.

Director Sophia Takal (who directed a segment in the found-footage horror anthology V/H/S) and film critic-turned-screenwriter April Wolfe team up for an unapologetically feminist thriller that serves up not only a more multicultural collection of college girls (we’re talking gals of different skin tones and religious denominations here), but a strong sense of riot-grrrl solidarity. Even when it veers off into ridiculous, supernatural territory near the end, it’s kind of wild watching a slasher flick where the final girls simply aren’t gonna take it anymore.

Although the ambitious 2019 Black Christmas is a more fascinating watch than the lazy, by-the-numbers 2006 Christmas, I’m gonna stick with the original. This is probably weird to admit, but the original Black Christmas has become a holiday comfort watch for me. As much dread and danger as this film slowly-but-surely throws out there, Clark and screenwriter Roy Moore also added moments of tension-deflating comedy (mostly provided by Kidder’s dirty-minded drunk) and soapy melodrama (there’s a subplot where Hussey’s character struggles with getting an abortion). Yes, it has a madman terrorizing girls, but it also has hot lushes being smart-asses and paranoid yokels doing the most extra shit.

So, y’all can stick with It’s a Wonderful Life, Die Hard or whatever you watch this time of year. To paraphrase Donny Hathaway, this Christmas will be a very black Christmas for me.

Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.