Black Christmas Parent Guide

While staying at Hawthorne College over the holidays, Riley Stone (Imogen Poots) has noticed an unsettling pattern. A number of her friends have gone missing, and the “Founders Fraternity” has become more active and aggressive. Worse yet, Brian (Ryan McIntyre), the man who sexually assaulted her at the school a few years ago has returned for the seasonal celebrations. As people continue to vanish and things get worse, Riley will have to rely on her sorority sisters Kris (Aleyse Shannon), Marty (Lily Donoghue), and a young man she met at the café, Landon (Caleb Eberhardt) to help her survive Christmas at school…

I’ve never been much of a fan of Christmas movies: when people ask what I watch for Christmas, my answer is The Shining and Die Hard. So the idea of reviewing some campy Christmas horror was not exactly the highlight of my week. Thankfully, this is not that. Black Christmas is a deeply political feminist horror flick, and I’m glad I saw it.

The film is centered around misogyny and sexual assault, neither of which is used for shock value or fun. These are the underlying factors that allow the usual horror movie slashing/stabbing/chasing/general mayhem to occur. The motivations are rooted in these real-world social and political crises, and the discussions the film has about violence towards women are serious and significant. Just as Get Out used the horror genre as a lens to talk about race in America, Black Christmas uses it to talk about sexual violence on college campuses.

Unfortunately, the political conversation isn’t always as well integrated into the plot as it could be and drags the pacing from time to time. On the other hand, the acting and writing are much better than average for holiday horror features. Cary Elwes is clearly having fun as a malicious professor, putting in some good work at being oily and self-absorbed.

I was very surprised when I saw that Black Christmas had earned a PG-13 rating, a rarity in the horror genre. Credit to the director, Sophia Takal, it comes in quite comfortably at this rating, even more surprising when you consider that the 1974 film of the same name was a “hard R”, a prototypical 70’s slasher, with the unpleasantly fetishized violence against women that typifies the genre. This remake has more sanitized violence, with the murders usually occurring off-screen. There is a lot of contextual significance and discussion about sexual violence, but nothing particularly explicit. The largest problem is profanity, with roughly seventeen uses of a scatological term.

It’s nice to see the horror genre, so comfortable with setting up cardboard female characters for brutal slaughter, forced to confront well developed female characters with a strong preference for not being murdered or objectified. This isn’t going to be a film for everyone, and certainly not for children, but teenagers willing to take a dash of gender politics with their Christmas butchery are in for a good time.