Watching Bob Clark’s 1974 original Black Christmas has become an annual tradition for me come December. It’s one of my favourite horror movies and one of my favourite Christmas movies (once you get past the murder and obscene phone calls, it’s actually surprisingly cosy). But this year, on the film’s fiftieth anniversary, I thought I’d expand the tradition and make it a double-bill, watching the 2006 remake for the first time.
It comes from a nasty, grim era of horror films, especially for remakes of 70s and 80s classics. It lacks the humour of the original (which was Clark’s last horror film before shifting to comedy), is darker and grimier, and takes a perverse pleasure in its brutal kills. It does a lot of things, in my mind, wrong. And yet it works more than it should and I actually rather enjoyed it.
The 2006 remake takes every single detail uttered, burbled, and ranted by Billy over the phone in the original and instead of seeing it as the nonsense ravings of a madman, actually weaves it into an elaborate backstory. Not knowing anything about the killer in the 1974 film is what makes it scary: an unexplainable, unknowable batshit killer with unclear motives who could come for anyone. The remake however explains everything, with a good chunk of the movie taken over by multiple flashbacks filling in decades of backstory. I appreciate a different approach but I can’t bring myself to care about Billy’s past.
John Carpenter’s Halloween owes a huge debt to original Black Christmas; this remake owes everything to Halloween. The 1974 film helped pioneer significant elements of the slasher format, including the famous shots from the killer’s POV, heavy breathing included. The 2006 remake, coming after decades of films in the genre, including eight in the Halloween series, feels like a pastiche of influences. The killer Billy is trying to get home for a specific holiday, the day on which he killed his family as a kid, but first has to escape the sanitarium he’s locked up in. Billy here is essentially Michael Myers, just without the mask. Yet the cycle of borrowing continues because I’m sure this remake went on to inspire the backstory-heavy reboot of Halloween by Rob Zombie the following year.
Yet while the film adds so much, somehow it’s still twenty minutes shorter than the original, with the credits rolling after just 75 minutes. It’s a lighting fast movie, which makes for entertaining viewing once the flashbacks are out of the way, but it also has no patience with its kills. The first girl at the sorority house is killed immediately, with little suspense. The film can’t even wait until Billy has broken out of prison. This seems incongruous at first but then it’s revealed the film has two killers! Bizarrely, the film manages to have its cake and eat it too. Billy can become an overly defined character with no mystery because there’s another, more enigmatic killer, too. His sister Agnes has been living in the walls of the house for a long time, not just breaking in that night, which is an unsettling update I enjoyed.
Also updated are the phone calls. They are deeply unsettling in the original and I think the update for the technology and how they are utilised in the story is done quite well. The killer(s) stealing the girls’ phones and using them to call the others, the caller ID being an omen of death, is quite clever. I only wish the calls themselves were disturbing. The remake doesn’t want to be so explicit but they aren’t effective enough in any regard. In every way but the level of violence, the original film still feels more subversive than the 2006 remake. The girls drinking, having casual sex, and planning abortions in the original is better than anything here, with a brief sex tape subplot lacking much of a point.
The remake is expanded in some ways but more contained in others. There’s no appearance from the cops, for example. The scope of the narrative is restricted, with the film wanting to keep everything in the same house, on the same night. There’s not a second of daylight. I like this in principle but the film doesn’t commit to it by broadening the scope in other ways. We get the flashbacks, which take place in the same location but also breaks up any tension. Then there’re cut aways to Clark Sanitarium and an extended finale in a hospital.
There are also fewer male characters in the film. Kyle, the one male student featured, feels like a cheap attempt at a misdirect that doesn’t really work. When the movie goes so heavily into Billy’s backstory and reason to kill, it’s hard to buy that this Kyle guy is actually the killer, so why waste time making him a shifty guy sneaking around? Instead of a girl’s father appearing, her older sister turns up looking for her, which is an update I liked. It creates a different dynamic in the group. Although introducing an older character with more knowledge of the past then makes Mrs Mac, who survives for much longer in this version, more redundant.
The film wants the theme to be these girls deeply bonding, that they go from antagonising each other to becoming a found family at Christmas, true sorority sisters. I like this in principle but not sure it works in practice when they all get killed off so quickly. There are very few meaningful interactions. Although it doesn’t help that I seem to suffer from acute 2000s cute girl face blindness. I could barely tell these characters apart, which is partly the script but also the casting. They all look similar with the same hair and same LA accent with the same inflections. I recognised Mary Elizabeth Winstead but she’s barely in it, obviously not a star yet despite being the best actress of the bunch.
I’ve been fairly negative about the film so far but, I swear, I did ultimately enjoy it. There are some good sequences once all the flashback nonsense is out of the way and it hones in on being a brutal slasher movie. There’s a particularly great scene where one girl is trapped between walls and has to break out before the killers, one above and one below, climb their way to her. I also found all the eye imagery very effective. There are eyes everywhere, peeking through floorboards or being gouged out and hung on a Christmas tree like baubles. The most famous image of the original is Billy’s eye seen through a crack in a door, and this remake takes that idea and runs with it.
I also found the film fascinating as a fan of The X-Files. The film’s writer/director Glen Morgan wrote some brilliant episodes of that series and his work there shares some DNA with Black Christmas. The film at times feels like a mixture of his two best episodes, Squeeze and Home. The killers don’t just walk around the house like the original but squeeze through crawl spaces in a manner similar to Eugene Victor Tooms. There’s also a liver connection: Tooms has to eat livers while Billy has a liver condition, giving him a sickly yellow complexion, similar to Tooms when he’s greased up with bile. The film also features a disturbing inbred family, similar to the one featured in notorious episode Home. Karin Konoval actually plays the incestuous mother in both, although she has all her limbs in the film.
The remake struggles to maintain a clear vision like the original Black Christmas. Produced by piece of shit Harvey Weinstein, the movie reeks of studio interference. So much footage from the trailers doesn’t appear in the film, and that’s because Weinstein had it shot specifically for the marketing to trick audiences. Then there are the four different endings, all found on the DVD special features, but the one glued on to the end of the film varies based on the country you live in.
Black Christmas (2006) is a real mixed bag. I went from strongly disliking it as it ruined the mystique of Billy, showing us every element of his life and backstory, to enjoying it once it actually got going and began throwing some new twists in. I doubt it’ll become a new holiday tradition for me like the original but it’s not a terrible way to spend a dark December night, especially for X-Files fans interested in some connections. Who knows, maybe next year I’ll work up the courage to watch the supposedly ghastly 2019 remake.
