Margaux and I take a look at the truly crazy remake of 1974’s Black Christmas.
Trevor: Black Christmas is a crazy-ass movie in a lot of ways, not the least of which is its bright yellow killer, which is presented in a matter-of-fact fashion, then immediately glossed over. Which is only one of the weird decisions this movie makes. I didn’t love it, but there were some parts where I admired its balls-to-the-walls attitude. It definitely earns its R rating; this is impressively gory at times. And unnecessarily confusing and muddled at others. What did you make of it?
Margaux: To borrow terminology from one of my favorite podcasts, Who? Weekly, Black Christmas is a them horror movie remade with a bunch of whos. Now I understand that sentence will be easily lost of 99% of people reading this, but the original Black Christmas is not only one of my go to horror movies, it’s also my preferred Christmas movie. In a lot of ways, I appreciate that Black Christmas didn’t go the Van Sant Psycho route with a shot-for-shot recreation of its predecessor, instead, this version could almost act a sequel to the original. On the other hand, this Black Christmas actively works to go against everything that makes the original so terrifying. It worked for me in the sense that it really laid into the slasher aspect that was so prevalent in the early-aughts horror genre, but so much of it was plainly gratuitous and flat out gross.
Trevor: Oh yeah, hard yes to that one. This movie is gross as shit. Even beyond the kills, something as simple as eating was disgusting to watch, as killer Billy Lenz shoved chicken into his mouth with maximum ick factor.
Margaux: I mean, did we need to see SO MANY eyeballs ripped out of heads and then eaten? We got it the first time.
Trevor: One thing that surprised me was how much I liked the cast. The bland killers notwithstanding, the core group of women boasted actresses I like, such as Andrea Martin and Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michelle Trachtenberg. Even Katie Cassidy, so shrill on Arrow, was borderline likable here. If nothing else, it made the movie a little easier to watch.
Margaux: Andrea Martin is a national treasure and the way she totally buys into and believes this myth that you have to leave a present under the tree for lil Billy every year to keep his spirit away, like an evil Santa Claus, is fucking crazy (and a testament to her skills as an actress). Beyond that, how on earth are you going to refurbish, for a lack of a better term, A MURDER HOUSE into a student housing and act like that’s totally normal? How does anyone even join that sorority knowing someone killed and ate their mother in that house? In addition to all the other untold horrors of incest and variations of child abuse.
Trevor: Yeah, I gotta be honest, this movie was kind of confusing at times. And it shouldn’t have been; if ever a film should be straightforward, it’s a remake of a slasher movie. The time jumps didn’t help, and the lighting certainly didn’t help. Black Christmas is a pitch-black movie, with occasional splashes of lurid primary colors, to the point that it beggars belief. There are two hospitals in this movie and both of them are almost completely dark. The sorority house seems to be lit only by natural light, The Revenant-style. This was clearly a stylistic choice by director Glen Morgan, but I have no idea why. It made a lot of things, including and especially the flashbacks, hard to follow.
Margaux: Well, not to be a purist about the whole thing, but what made the 70s Black Christmas so scary was you knew nothing about the creepy voice, and the increasingly menacing phone calls that are coming from inside the house. You also didn’t really see anyone die, they just kept disappearing one by one as you got to know the remaining sorority girls left to their own devices in the middle of a snow storm.
Trevor: I’ve never seen the original, but your pitch for it is way more interesting than the remake.
Margaux: I didn’t appreciate the fake out with Eve, being led to believe she was really the Agnes although you figured out pretty quickly, once the confusing flashbacks and flash-parallels, end you realize there are two killers. And I have a real problem with the way the mental hospital (and the regular hospital too, but we can get to that) is portrayed. Not like I turn to slasher-horror films for a prescient look into mental health facilities, that being said, there is not a criminally insane mental hospital in the world that would let you have candy canes for you to suck on and sharpen to murder an orderly with, let alone Joyce Byers-level holiday lights and a rocking chair.
Trevor: I had the same objection to that. I also don’t go into movies like this looking for 100% verisimilitude, but even then, I shouldn’t be rolling my eyes at minute 5 and saying “Oh, come the fuck on.”
But I want to back up to what you said about Eve, because I too thought she was Agnes for a bit, seeing as how she shows up, delivers the prime murder weapon, and then…disappears. We see her again later, decapitated. So why the hell was Eve in this movie at all? Why did the movie go to such lengths to paint her as an oddball who any viewer would think was the killer? I mean, obviously the movie wants us to think that Eve is the killer, but it’s so up-front about Billy that it just seemed unnecessary. And I want to add, once again: Billy is bright yellow and no one gives a shit. This movie came out eleven years ago and I’ve never once heard of “the horror movie with a bright yellow killer.”
Margaux: Yes, it really is unforgivable Billy is Simpsons yellow for no reason other than he’s evil, I think? All I know is it doesn’t make him scary, it makes him borderline laughable. I mean, in his baby flashbacks, they talk about how he’s atomic yellow and this repulsed his mother, but isn’t that just untreated jaundice?! Wouldn’t that fall under parental neglect? Again, all this backstory does the movie a real disservice as the more we learn the more you’re befuddled and grow to root for Billy to be dead either way.
Trevor: I don’t know a ton about jaundice (although I watched all of Scrubs, so I’m kind of a medical expert), but I thought it happens gradually. If that kid was born yellow, then his liver was fucked up in utero, and he should have been way more sickly. So basically it was a healthy-seeming baby with the external symptoms of an extremely sick baby, all for the purposes of making him…bright yellow. And the lighting was so damn weird that I thought Agnes was yellow too, at least for a while there. And if Billy’s mom just shunted him off to the attic, what did she think was going to happen? Did she think Agnes wouldn’t hear Billy? The house was pretty small, and Billy was very audible. Gotta say, poor planning on her part.
Margaux: Truly, the most unnecessary part of the movie was to make Billy Agnes’s brother-father. Like, what do we do gain from that? We already know Billy’s mom is literally the worst mother on earth, we didn’t need the gene pool to get smaller to really drive that point home.
Trevor: It’s pretty emblematic of the kitchen-sink ethos of this movie. It’s just more, more, more, all the time. And did you notice how many bare feet there were in this? I honestly don’t think more than 2 or 3 characters even owned shoes, let alone wore them. Glen Morgan’s foot fetish puts Tarantino’s to shame. Normally I don’t notice or care about that stuff, but at a certain point it becomes weird.
Margaux: Well, in the bathroom scene, where the drunk one (formerly played by Margot Kidder) gets in the shower and we see Billy’s eyeball (again, obsessed with fucking eyeballs this movie!) poke through the tiles as if the guy from Porky’s also worked on this bathroom. Of course it was supposed to be explicitly voyeuristic, but all I could see were fucking feet! Feet and eyes, that’s Glen Morgan’s thing. Another head scratcher character choice, everyone giving Kate Cassidy a hard time for being an only child. Anytime she does or says anything, someone starts in about how she wouldn’t understand because she’s an only child. Look, she had no control over whether or not she had siblings, but it doesn’t mean she lacks empathy, she’s not the serial killer here!
Trevor: Yeah, any time the sisters turned mean, the movie threatened to become more interesting, because interpersonal tension could add a lot of drama to an already stressful situation. But Morgan wasn’t really interested in that, which is weird, because on its surface Black Christmas is all about family: you have a bunch of unrelated sisters, plus a killer whose catchphrase is “She’s my family now.” But I don’t know what, if anything, Morgan was trying to say. Is it that family is what you make of it? I already knew that, dipshit. (Although, cards on the table, I thought Katie Cassidy and Kristen Cloke had good chemistry together, and I liked their scene in the hospital.)
Margaux: Do we need to touch on the sex tape and Oliver Hudson’s tour de force as a bitter townie slut?
Trevor: Black Christmas certainly didn’t care about it, so why should we? The lighting was so dim, and the actresses so similar, that I was genuinely unsure of who he was with in that tape.
Margaux: Fair enough. Want to skip to the end? Because I do. Why are all attics in horror movies basically a Rube Goldberg machine of inanimate objects that would merely inconvenience you if you weren’t fighting off a killer? From the baby carriage, to the tinsel tree, and naturally, the candles, I could not get a handle on that domino effect going on in there.
Trevor: Which brings me back to the goddamn lighting! This shouldn’t have been as hard to follow as it was. And even though the tree was decorated with gore (how did Billy and Agnes decide which eyes to eat and which to use as decoration?), I didn’t feel any horror or tension, because, once again: bright yellow killer. Also, how did Billy and Agnes coordinate all this? Not to mention Black Christmas uses one of my least favorite tropes: the killer who won’t die. I’m pretty sure that climax in the hospital only existed so we could see more feet.
Margaux: I think you’re onto something! Because that third act in the hospital did not need to happen. What hospital secures a Christmas tree to ensure a 6’3, 200 lbs murderer can correctly impale himself and die upon? You guys working with some 2×4 and bolts over there? Safely I assume, since you’re a hospital and all.
Trevor: So many questions. At the end of the day, Black Christmas is a largely unnecessary remake with some mildly impressive parts and a gonzo attitude I reluctantly admire. You wanna give it some coal?
Margaux: Even though Black Christmas leaves us with more questions than answers, it was so thoroughly batshit crazy, I couldn’t help but have fun watching. It was, oddly, the perfect palate cleanser from Pottersvillie. It was brazenly insane, and you kinda gotta give it props for that.
2/5 lumps of coal
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