Black Christmas (

2006

) ½

When remaking a classic, it's of vital importance that the new film establishes its own identity. If you're just going to recreate the original beat-for-beat (or even shot-for-shot like Psycho (1998), a film I'm convinced was created just to serve as the ultimate example of a pointless remake) then why wouldn't audiences just re-watch the existing film. A lot of remakes fail to understand this basic point, so you get tons of mediocre reworkings with no real identity of their own. Of course, some manage to do it right, and those are generally considered to be the “good remakes.” The Thing (1982) took the premise of The Thing from Another World (1951) of an alien invader at a remote Arctic research station and turned the monster into a shapeshifter (like he was in the original novella). This transformed a straightforward conflict into a paranoid game of cat and mouse where the heroes have no idea which one of them has been compromised and replaced by the titular thing. Films like The Magnificent Seven (1960) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964) borrow their stories and characters from Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961) respectively but place these core stories into vastly different genres and settings. Just having your own identity isn't enough to make your remake a good film, see Suspiria (2018), but it gives you a chance. Today's film illustrates that principle quite nicely, even if the end result is a film that is nowhere near as good as the original it's adapted from.

We know that the Black Christmas remake will be quite a bit different from Black Christmas (1974) almost immediately. As you may or may not recall the chief identifying feature of Black Christmas (1974) was the fact that its killer was entirely offscreen and completely mysterious. We don't even know his name, though his crank phone calls do frequently reference someone named “Billy.” Indeed, most of the plot hinged on discovering the identity of this unseen crank-caller/murderer, only for the characters in the film to finger the wrong guy. The twist revealed as the credit roll and we see the almost empty sorority house and hear the ring of a phone call, knowing that it is the mysterious killer on the other end and that our final girl, Jess, is in greater peril now than she was at the film's apparent climax. It works both on a meta-textual level, effectively describing the transition from the Giallo killers with their mundane motivations to the early slasher killers with their inscrutable madness, and a purely functional spine-chilling level.

The new Black Christmas establishes its own identity immediately by not only telling us the killer's name is Billy Lenz but by giving us an exhaustive backstory that explains how he was abused/neglected as a child and eventually went on to have a daughter through an incestuous relationship with his mother. One Christmas Billy snapped, killed his mom, cut her skin up into the shapes of Christmas cookies, and washed them down with a big bloody milkshake. Now every year at Christmas he tries to escape from his cell in the local asylum and go back to his home, which is now the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house. Not only does the film immediately show Billy to the audience and explain his entire history, it even goes so far as to give him a peculiar deformity, jaundice yellow skin, so we'll be able to recognize him on sight. Now, I know what you're thinking, SC all these changes from the original Black Christmas (1974) sound like they would make the film considerably less frightening, unique, and interesting. And you know what? You're absolutely right, Black Christmas' remake is a much less impressive film on the whole. But by going in a completely different, albeit much dumber, direction Black Christmas 2006 avoids having to compete directly with the original Black Christmas (1974), which is a sound decision because that is a competition that the new film wasn't going to win.

The other thing that has changed is that events and locations have been compressed, whereas the original took place over several days in locations all over the university campus, this film will unfold in the space of a single night, Christmas Eve, and a single location (well almost but we'll get to that later on), the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house. This has the advantage of keeping the action tight and focused, while also keeping production costs down. It also scores points with this critic because I grew up with the old Hitchcock single-location thrillers like Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1954), and have a lingering soft-spot for single-location thrillers. This change does come at a cost, by isolating the girl in a single location with an ice-storm keeping them stuck inside, we lose the brilliant ploy of the original where when a girl was murdered everyone just assumed that she had left for Christmas break. Still, in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, I'd say that nu Black Christmas comes out ahead.

In any event, there are a surprising number of sisters who are passing their Christmas break (especially considering that the entire rest of the campus seems to have all either gone home or skiing). There is the designated final girl Kelli who doesn't have much in the way of personality but seems nice and is the only blond so you know she'll probably be alright. Then there is the pseudo-goth Melissa who has a morbid interest in true crime and her BFF Lauren whose job in the film is to get totally smashed and give the patient viewers a brief and blurry shower scene (were they trying for a PG-13 rating?). There's also Dana who the other girls mock as a daddy's girl and Heather who were informed is a southern belle, which is a good thing because she doesn't have even a trace of an accent. The token homely girl in the sorority is Eve, whose a weird girl that doesn't talk to the others much and just so happens to live in Billy's old room. Lastly, there's Clair, whose trying to mend her relationship with her estranged half-sister Leigh, though we don't get to spend much time with her as she is killed off in the film's opening. The girls are watched over by their house mother Barbara (played by the same actress as Phyllis from Black Christmas (1974), though from her name I'm assuming they wanted to get Margot Kidder for the role).

This is rather a lot of characters, to keep track of, and the film isn't even done adding them yet. There's also Kelli's boyfriend Kyle, who is sneaking into the house to swipe his old sex tape before Kelli can find it and start asking unpleasant questions. About a third of the way into the movie Clair's sister Leigh turns up looking for her, presumably because the actress playing her is married to the director and he couldn't think of another way to get his wife into a movie that is almost exclusively about teenage girls. With all these characters running around, I was actually surprised when the film managed to give all of them at least the basic semblance of a personality. Even the less developed ones, like Heather and Dana, were at least distinct from the herd of other moderately attractive 20-something brunettes in the cast. Moreover, their limited development is handled quickly and efficiently, so as not to distract from the real reason we're here: The periodic gruesome murder.

In that department Billy gets to work with admirable enthusiasm, killing his first victim before the opening credits and piling up additional bodies at a steady pace. First, he carves through some nameless guards and orderlies at the asylum, before he returns to the sorority house and begins to chip away at the main cast. Billy also has an impressive variety in his murder techniques. Usually, they have a festive twist like gouging out somebody's eye with a candy cane or strangling a girl with a string of Christmas lights. Others, like the glass unicorn he uses to disembowel one of the sorority sisters, are a reference to Black Christmas (1974).

The murder of Lauren deserves some additional consideration because it adds a sexual dimension to Billy's spree killings that comes out of left field. After getting shit-faced on wine and tequila, Lauren crashes early. We see her sleeping comfortably, only for a pair of arms to slip under her covers and begin to grope her unconscious body. Gradually, Lauren wakes up and slowly realizes what is happening to her. Obviously, this scene is terrifying, in no small part thanks to the way it invokes real-world fears of date rape and molestation. However, it's a case of how a good idea can be skillfully executed but still detract from the overall quality of a work if it doesn't work in context. Sure, the scene is frightening, but it also raises the obvious question: why doesn't Billy do this to any of the other girls? Are they just not his type? If the director wanted to make Billy into a sex fiend in addition to a cannibal murderer he really should have established it first and had it be relevant for more than a single scene. It's a shame too, because this is a story direction that could be interesting to explore, had the film bothered to explore it.

Bizarrely, the film tries to pretend that there is some mystery about who the killer is despite showing Billy escape from the asylum, explaining his entire backstory in nauseating detail, and having plenty of shots of him actually committing the murders. When mentioning Billy's sister/daughter for the first time, the film cuts suspiciously to Eve, who's bathed in yellow light giving her a distinct resemblance to the sallow killer. Why does the film do this? Hell if I know; Eve isn't any relation to Billy, a fact that should be obvious if you just glance at the timeline of events. She is way too young to be his sister/daughter. Once people start to disappear the survivors become instantly suspicious of each other and any new interlopers who have shown up like Kyle and Leigh. This makes logical sense but in a film where we all know who the killer is and what he's doing it doesn't make narrative sense.

Narrative cohesion is obviously a secondary concern for black Christmas, the real goal here is to craft a visually compelling horror film. Director Glen Morgan must fancy himself an heir to Alfred Hitchcock and Brian de Palma because the camera is constantly tilting, canting, panning across the room, and contorting itself into unnatural angles. You will either find these antics amusing or aggravating, depending on if you read the cinematography as a fun way of creating tension or pretentious mental masturbation. Personally, I find this sort of thing to be quite fun, especially when it's embedded in a sleazy horror movie, and as a result, I was having a great time for the first seventy-five minutes of Black Christmas' run-time.

Towards the end though, Black Christmas falls apart completely. For starters, the decision to add a second, hitherto unknown and unseen killer, Billy's sister/daughter Agnes, to the film for the climax was pointless. Had it been one of the girls in the house, or one of the unexpected Christmas visitors it could have added a nice twist to the proceeding. A moment where viewers could say either “I knew she was in on it all along” or “I can't believe that she was really the killer” depending on how much attention they paid to the film. However, since this new killer is nobody we've met before, it's just a surprise without any setup. It also doesn't serve much purpose as this new killer provides nothing that Billy doesn't already do. As it turns out, this was the result of studio meddling, as the higher-ups at Dimension films wanted a second killer to give the film a nice twist, as the original's twist (the calls are coming from inside the house) would have been cliché to the point of hilarity in 2006. There is potential for this decision but unfortunately, it was implemented poorly. I suspect because Glen Morgan wasn't happy with the way the executives had meddled with his script.

Of course, the studio meddling did not end there, the original ending of the film had Leigh and Kelli recuperating in the hospital when they receive a phone call from Billy. This would have been a nice homage to the tense uncertain ending of the original Black Christmas (1974) but it didn't jive with producer Harvey Weinstein's sensibilities. So, in-between molesting naive actresses, Weinstein had the original ending scrapped and replaced with an extended case/showdown between Kelli and Billy that ends with the latter impaled on the hospital's Christmas tree. The whole sequence is more than a little dumb, and nowhere near as well done as the rest of the film. Again, I suspect that Morgan's heart was simply not in the enterprise and this lack of passion results in an overall inferior product.