Not All Black Christmases

“Black Christmas was TERRIBLE. It was NOT a remake of the old film, it was a women’s empowerment movie. No thanks, that’s not what I want…Please keep social justice agendas away from horror movies because that movie was dog shit!”

“Black Christmas is 1000 times more ham fisted and over the top than I expected. Basically white men are evil…”

“Black Christmas isn’t a bad movie because it exhibits female empowerment. It’s just a garbage film.”

Scrolling through horror twitter after the release of Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas (co-written by April Wolfe), it didn’t take long to find negative comments about the film. In fact, I didn’t even have to search – they came to me. In droves. Peppering my timeline (and, no doubt, the filmmakers’ timelines and inboxes) with vitriol and rage.

A few days later I watched the film and enjoyed it. It was a smart, fun and thrilling seasonal horror with an important (if somewhat laboured) message for its audience. I felt compelled to write, but not to review the film itself.

This was not my movie. I am not its audience.

Instead, I wanted to write about the reaction towards the movie from a certain quarter and why, as much as twitter is a marketplace of ideas and comment, there are times when we need to just stop, listen, and consider another point of view.

It will not surprise you that the aforementioned comments all come from men. Now let’s look at some from women:

“Black Christmas was a perfect movie. I’ve felt kinda beaten down recently, and it reminded me that I’m proud to be a woman and I want to FIGHT!”

“It’s refreshing to see a slasher with a relevant topic at the core…the toxic masculinity and fraternity culture is not so far-fetched in this #metoo world.”

“One of the best modern slashers, with meaning and wit.”

“After watching Black Christmas - Me: Do you feel powerful? 12y/o niece: I AM powerful.”

Paints an entirely different picture, doesn’t it? When viewed through a female lens, this seasonal slasher from Blumhouse takes on a very different energy. It is, chiefly, a film that has had a very positive effect on its intended audience.

So let’s take a look at some of those comments (positive and negative) individually, and see what we can extrapolate from them.

“Black Christmas was TERRIBLE. It was NOT a remake of the old film, it was a women’s empowerment movie. No thanks, that’s not what I want…Please keep social justice agendas away from horror movies because that movie was dog shit!”

Okay, there’s a lot to dissect here. First, I want to talk about remakes. Since the dawn of cinema, there have been remakes. By 1920, there had already been no fewer than SIX adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Off the top of my head I can think of 50 films inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If John Carpenter hadn’t remade Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’ ‘The Thing From Another World’ in 1982, we would have been deprived of what is now considered perhaps the greatest sci-fi horror ever made. Ditto for David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly.

Remakes are as old as time, as filmmakers take recognizable properties and repackage them for new audiences. And that is the key here – for new audiences. The least impressive remakes are the ones that tread shot for shot in the footprints of the original (I’m thinking of the Psycho remake as a particularly pertinent example). The remakes that tend to be worth doing are the ones that find a new way to look at familiar material, to spread a different message, often for a different audience. Bob Clark’s 1974 Black Christmas was made for a specific audience: teen and young adult couples attending Drive In Theatres around north America. It followed faithfully in the footsteps of proto-slashers and drive-in horrors such as Psycho, Peeping Tom, Dementia 13 and Bay of Blood, and in doing so set the template for the (not yet born) Slasher subgenre of horror. Takal’s Black Christmas is clearly not that movie, but nor was it meant to be. Takal and Wolfe have crafted a PG-13 horror movie, aimed at a PG-13 audience…and largely a female one, at that. But more on that later.

Let’s move to the idea of keeping the social justice agendas away from horror. Nowadays, particularly on Twitter, it is not unusual to see ‘SJW’ used as a slur, dismissing the importance of any message that seeks to comment on equality, diversity, inclusion of any kind. But both the original Black Christmas and the 2019 iteration have a distinct moral message at their heart. 1974’s Black Christmas was created in the shadow of Roe V Wade, the landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the US protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. This decision caused uproar at the time, from the patriarchy, from conservatives and from many Christians in the US and beyond. Writer Roy a Moore infused his screenplay with a major plot element influenced by the Roe v Wade case and contributed towards the discourse.

In 2019, Black Christmas is made in the shadow of another case: People v Turner. Many of you will remember (and I’d imagine the women reading this article definitely will) the case of Brock Turner, the Stanford student athlete who raped 22 year old Chanel Miller while she was unconscious. Miller’s victim impact statement was so powerful it has been read over 11 million times. The attitude of the judge presiding over the case is remembered chiefly for its leniency, in both sentencing and in consideration that Turner’s promising swimming career was more valid than Miller’s unfathomable trauma and right to see justice done. Takal and Wolfe’s Black Christmas specifically riffs on what happened to Chanel Miller that night, referencing it in the plight of the film’s main character, Riley (Imogen Poots, in a powerful performance echoed by all of her female co-stars).

“No thanks, that’s not what I want” speaks volumes. It is not unusual for the fandom of a film to claim some sort of ownership of it. If this film catered to them, then all future iterations (whether sequels, reboots or remakes) must also cater to them. This in itself is a form of patriarchal privilege. When a male audience, that is used to getting what it wants, gets something it doesn’t want, it tends to react with vitriol. There is simply no need for this, and it deserves to be damned and ridiculed, frankly. If you want to see the 1974 Black Christmas, you can go see it. It still exists. It is still the same thrilling genre film it was 45 years ago, and every bit as entertaining now. It is highly likely that an independent theatre in your state or country is screening the film this season.

2019’s Black Christmas is not that film. It is directed by a woman. Written by women. Starring an ensemble of women actors. It is rated PG-13, which is clearly the most telling aspect.

This is not your movie.

This is a movie aimed at teenage girls and young women, in the US and beyond, because it needs to be. And in examining some further quotes, we’re going to talk about why.

“After watching Black Christmas - Me: Do you feel powerful? 12y/o niece: I AM powerful.”

The above is the quote that really hit home for me. A 12 year old girl comes away from the experience of watching this film, knowing she is powerful. She has worth, has value, beyond that prescribed by men.

In a few years time, this 12 year old girl will likely be in college herself. She will likely have to face, at some point or other, the Brock Turners of this world. Shouldn’t she be empowered? Shouldn’t she grow up not resigned to the fact that, as rape prevalence among women in the US is in the range of 15-20% (according to different studies), it is a hazard of life? That only 34.8% of rapes are reported to police, and that less than 1% of those result in a conviction, for today’s young women, being raped IS a hazard of life. It is disgusting and abhorrent and it has to stop. But men won’t stop, not in a society that does not punish them for it, that closes its ranks and protects them when they attack a woman and traumatize her in the worst way imaginable.

“Black Christmas is 1000 times more ham fisted and over the top than I expected. Basically white men are evil”

Given the stats in the previous paragraph, don’t we think that the message in films like Black Christmas needs to be over the top? That it needs to be overt, hammered home, so that every young woman in those audiences leaves the theatre knowing they are going to be at risk, likely for their entire lives, and that society isn’t going to fix the problem for them. They shouldn’t have to be alert to this stuff, but the fact remains that they do. Women need to be vigilant, to know their power and their worth, and yes, they need to think twice before trusting men.

“Basically white men are evil”

This is where all of us that aren’t rapists and molesters, that consider ourselves good guys generally stand up and cry “Not all men! I’m not like that! I am not a rapist!”. Well you know what, good for you. I’m not being sarcastic. In a society that programs you to believe that you are in every way superior to women, that they exist for little more than providing us with sex and children, it is all too easy to fall into believing it. We do have to deprogram ourselves from something that is constantly reinforced by society, and it isn’t necessarily a simple thing for us to do by ourselves. But this is on us, not the women. We may feel generalized, demonized, tarred with a brush we don’t deserve, but this is not women’s fault.

It is men’s. It is the patriarchy we all grow up in and are all, in one way or another, victims of.

And here’s the thing about the bad ones, the rapists, of which they are many: they don’t all announce themselves. They don’t walk into the room, cackling and twirling their moustache and saying “I’m going to get you, my pretty!”. Only 26% of rapists are strangers. The rest are current or former intimate partners (26%), friends or acquaintances (38%), or relatives (7%). They announce themselves as nice guys. And many of them are nice guys. Until they are not.

And women can’t tell. Bad Men can be really convincing. So, for now, maybe the default does have to be all men. Maybe the girls need to be suspicious of every single one of us, in order to stay safe from the bad ones. Is that really so unreasonable?

What does it mean, for, you know, us? The good guys.

Well, it means that we have to work harder to prove ourselves trustworthy. That we have to keep working at it, throughout our entire relationships with the women we love, the women we care about and the women we fancy having a good time with. It means that we have to consider that, just because we find a girl attractive doesn’t mean we are automatically deserving of her attention. It means that if a girl decides we are not deserving of her attention, she isn’t a bitch or a prude or a tease. She is just someone who either doesn’t trust us yet, or who simply wants to be left alone. And we need to recognize the value of that. We need to abide by it.

If just one fewer girl or woman is raped next year, either on campus or elsewhere, doesn’t that have a higher value than the extra effort us guys will have to put in to prove we are trustworthy and approachable?

If that 12 yr old niece, who right now is saying “I AM powerful” never has to say “I AM a victim. I was RAPED” isn’t that worth it? Wouldn’t that make us, as friends or acquaintances, current or former intimate partners, relatives or heck, even strangers, proud? Proud to know that our women are that little bit safer in this world?

If your answer is anything other than yes, then you are not one of the good guys. If it IS yes, then great. Well done, but you don’t need to shout about it right now. The women don’t need to hear any buts or ifs, they don’t need to hear us declare we are one of the good guys. They’ll figure that out for themselves. They just need us to keep doing what we are doing, keep being human beings that they can come (in their own time) to trust, to count upon, to call friend or even more.

So let’s enjoy our Christmas, watch the movies we like and let others watch the movies they like. And let’s ensure everyone stays safe.

The son of a VHS pirate, Matt Rogerson became a horror fan at a tender young age. A student of the genre, he is currently writing his first book (about Italian horror and the Vatican) and he believes horror cinema is in the middle of a new golden age.

TWITTER

Have you listened to our podcast yet? It’s Beyond The Void Horror Podcast. You should! We do Reviews of new/old movies, Horror Themed Shots, Trivia & we even make up horror movies on the spot for our segment called GravePlots. It’s a lot of fun. Join us. Check it out! Listen on iTunes Here or on Spotify here! OR anywhere you listen to podcast.