Men, Women, and Phone Calls
I was surprised to see the abortion plot in Black Christmas (1974) before I realized when it was made. My immediate thought was about people in 1974 thinking this was too political. At its most basic level this film is about, like the Takal remake, the mistrust of women’s voices. It also is one of the only slasher films I’ve ever seen where the women are all fully developed characters (a.k.a., real people), and the relationships between them are as important to the film as the violence surrounding it. Black Christmas is a disturbingly great hangout movie. The sorority house actually feels like a home, like a safe space, far away from the “Terrible Place” described by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws (31). Even when the creepy phone calls start coming in and the horror elements come to the surface, it’s still fun to watch Margot Kidder get drunk and yell at men.
The real horror of the movie is the trivial dismissal of women by almost every male character. When they go to the police about Clare, the cop dismisses their worries by saying she probably ran off with her boyfriend, acting only when a male friend steps in to express his worry. Jess’ boyfriend can’t accept her desire to get an abortion; the liberal college student facade drops in favor of a domineering misogynist. On the surface this movie is about abortion rights, but at the core it’s about a very small feminist victory resulting in a tightening of male control. But what’s so horrifying about this, is the film is still a great hangout movie. The sexism faced by the women throughout the film seems so natural that sometimes you don’t even see it, you’re lulled into a trance by it, comforted by it. Normality is integral to the horror genre. Without it there would be nothing to transgress. In Black Christmas, and in real life, “normality” is built upon inequality, privilege, and oppression. In this way the horror of Black Christmas is ubiqitous—it exists beyond the confines of the plot. The best example of this is the conclusion of the film: Jess kills her boyfriend. The police, who dismissed her throughout the movie, show up to say she can rest easy, and the audience can rest easy too. And then the phone rings.
The film is as timeless as the sexism it presents. I think the biggest reason is because, as an early slasher, it’s not so beholden to the typical slasher tropes. In fact, in re-reading Clover’s chapter “Her Body, Himself,” it is almost like Bob Clark knew what the slasher genre would become and decided to subvert every trope. I already mentioned how the safe space represented by the sorority house is a drastic shift from the usual “Terrible Place.” Clover also argues that, “In the slasher film, sexual transgressors of both sexes are scheduled for early destruction” (33). In Black Christmas this couldn’t be further from the truth. Men are allowed sexual transgressions, it is only the women who are punished for “transgressions” in the eyes of men. Most notably, the film subverts the trope of the final girl. Here’s Clover’s description:
The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine—not, in any case, feminine in the ways of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself (40).
The beauty of the movie is you can imagine a different version of the film for every woman in the house. Jess only becomes the main character because she gets the phone calls; this movie could have just as easily been about Margot Kidder’s Barb, who is equally as developed a character as Jess. There’s also the obvious fact that Jess does not suffer from “sexual reluctance.” Instead, she is punished for wanting an abortion, something misogynists would see as quite the opposite. Compound this with the fact that Jess probably doesn’t survive the end of the movie, and Bob Clark has basically found a way to subvert every trope outlined by Clover. He even does this with names: Clover discusses how most Final Girls have masculine or unisex names, the women in Black Christmas are Jess (not Jesse), Barb, and Clare to name a few. If the original Black Christmas is a subversion of slasher tropes and a subtle exposing of everyday misogyny, Sophia Takal’s remake embraces the tropes and burns down subtlety, while staying true to the political ambitions of the original.
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Remakes are a tricky thing. I scoured my brain for remakes I think are good and had a hard time coming up with many, especially in the horror genre. I do like Zac Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, although it’s clear the only thing Snyder took away from the original is that it would be cool to live in a mall with guns. Remakes are tricky because you somehow need to balance making a movie “in the spirit”—a phrase that is probably meaningless but still important—of the original while making it its own thing as well. I think Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas does this wonderfully.
Like its predecessor, Black Christmas contains copious shots of phallic imagery. My favorite example of this is the first kill. It’s beautiful–one of my favorites from recent slashers– and it immediately lets you know that Takal is making a movie “in the spirit” of Clark’s original. The killer yanks the icicle off the roof and plunges it into Lindsey’s chest, Lindsey then starts waving her arms like she’s making snow angels, until the killer drags her body off-screen. The camera cranes up and we get a clear shot of the giant snow penis left behind by the carnage. Like in the original, the police do nothing but dismiss the women who try to report Lindsey missing. The beginning of the movie hits a lot of the same beats as the 1974 version, but then the anger starts boiling to the surface.
Takal takes all of Bob Clark’s subtlety and throws it out the window. The scene where the friend of Riley’s rapist comes to the coffee shop just to assert himself is the biggest example. As someone who worked with survivors of sexual assault I know that this sort of thing happens regularly, they always come to places (like work or class) where the woman can’t really react in any way without getting in trouble or drawing unwanted attention. Takal takes instances like this that may seem small or insignificant to outsiders and exposes their violent nature. Bob Clark portrays sexism as dangerously quotidian, while Sophia Takal connects the seemingly small microaggressions to a larger rape culture.
I mentioned earlier that Takal is embracing some of the slasher tropes that don’t exist in the original Black Christmas. One example is the names: Riley, Kris, Marty, Jesse (not Jess), Fran, Lindsey. Takal’s characters mirror the names of the slasher heroes outlined by Clover: “Stevie, Marti, Terry, Laurie, Stretch, Will, Joey, Max” (40). This is clearly a conscious choice. In fact, I’d assume Takal read the same Clover article when she studied film at Barnard. The question, then, is why? I think Takal’s goal was to create an army of Final Girls, because there really isn’t one that stands out. Riley is the obvious choice. Due to her traumatic experience she does exhibit some “sexual reluctance,” but more characters survive than most slashers. It’s like Takal is telling us there doesn’t have to be just one: the girls band together, and then they fight back. You can also have, “smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters,” (like Lindsey who immediately knew to run and knock on doors) and still fall to the killer.
Like the phallic symbolism and the slasher tropes, the film’s political vocabulary is very blunt and over-the-top. A lot of critics didn’t like this aspect, which I understand, but I found it to be an honest portrayal of modern feminism. It’s not perfect—I knew a lot of college feminists and none of them talk like the characters in this film—but I think Takal does a great job of incorporating the anger and pain of #MeToo without it feeling too much like bourgeois tee-shirt feminism. If the message of Clark’s film is, “look at the sexism women deal with every day,” Takal’s message is, “women aren’t going to stand for it anymore.”
Viewing Takal’s film in 2024 feels different. Joe Biden ending #MeToo means 2019 feminism has left a bad taste in my mouth. Neither of these things are Takal’s fault; neither is it her fault that the film’s PG-13 rating robs the characters of the gory justice they deserve. While she manages to capture the politics of the time, she does not manage to make a film as scary, funny, cutting, or hopeless as Clark’s original. Conclusions were never really my thing, so I’ll leave anyone who made it this far with this: after directing one of the greatest films of all time Bob Clark went on to direct Baby Geniuses 2 and something called Karate Dog. The people in charge of movies are so stupid.
