Black Christmas gives SJWs the male revenge porn they’ve been looking for since Brett Kavanaugh escaped their grasp
The new Black Christmas eschews the traditional slasher tropes by putting a sorority into violent conflict with a rapey cultic fraternity. The end result is a politically correct disaster that is neither scary or entertaining.
The original Black Christmas, a small Canadian film from 1974, went on to not only create but define the slasher genre. To this day it remains a powerful film and one of the best examples of horrific cinema. The main thing that makes it so successful is ambiguity. It’s a joyless tale of darkness set during the Christmas season, with no real heroes and a villain whose identity is never revealed. Real fear comes from confusion and the unknown and the greatest horror films are always a deeply restrained exercise in misdirection.
The basic premise of the original was a group of sorority sisters terrorized by a serial killer. The remake retains only the sorority sisters and a thin veneer of slasher genre tropes. Aside from that. it has done everything possible to separate itself from the original. There is no ambiguity, no darkness, no horror and of course it’s no good. Obviously great remakes don’t retread, they make new more creative paths. But usually those paths are in a similar direction. Why the radical departure? Political correctness of course!
There was a time that slasher films could be defended by the feminists. The original 1979 Alien is a not so subtle parable about rape and the “horrors” of pregnancy. Most slasher films have a “final girl,” usually the smartest and most virtuous character in the film who either defeats or outlasts the slasher. These themes have been continually revisited in more powerful and clever ways over the decades but apparently they’ve finally become passé. Apparently now the only permissible thing to put into a “horror” film is very obvious female empowerment vis a vis woke identity politics.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good sermon as much as the next person I just prefer my sermons to be in church and contain content derived from sacred scripture instead of the grab bag of ever changing ideological nonsense that passes for contemporary leftism. Because make no mistake the new Black Christmas is not a horror film. It is woke porn designed to “deconstruct toxic masculinity” and prove to women that someday, if they kill enough rapey frat boys like Brett Kavanaugh, they can be president or have their name on the $5 bill or some other equally vapid measure of gender equality.
The original Black Christmas was considered politically incorrect for its time. The American vision of Christmas is the apotheosis of bourgeois life, completely whitewashed of its creepy pagan Germanic roots. Even the English ghost stories on Christmas Eve and drunken carousing (real merrymaking) are completely scrubbed off. So to set a horror film (from Canada) during this most clean cut of seasons was almost certainly seen as an assault on decency itself. And it’s a very indecent film. It portrays grisly deaths and hedonistic college girls behaving badly. It could never have been made under the old Hays censorship code, which had been dead for twenty years at that point. It also deals openly with the then new ideology of unrestricted abortion rights for women. This is why political correctness is such an invidious concept. It never lasts. It’s a standard based only in the farts of Jacobins, wherever the progressive winds blow so does political correctness. And today, just as in the past, they are blowing down good horror. The original was taboo and interesting but the new one is boring because it’s about social “justice.”
The new Black Christmas is entirely too predictable. Classic horror films like The Thing or Halloween work well because it isn’t clear who will survive. They are tense because we aren’t sure who is being protected by the screenwriter. But in this film if you’re a white male your chances of survival are virtually nil and if you’re female they go up considerably. But being black seems to be the surest way to survive. And this is never really in question. It seems clear from the beginning who is gonna live and who is gonna be decapitated.
But the body count for the bad fraternity boys, who are clearly Brett Kavanaugh stand ins, is in the dozens. The main heroine was date raped via intoxication and no one believed her. This sin of course gets relayed onto all the white dudes in the film even prompting a pathetic discussion about sexual politics that ends with a black character screaming “did you just not all men me?” It feels more like a cartoon than a film. When the sisters finally get caught up in the cliche slasher violence it’s revealed that the evil rapey fraternity is literally being run by black magic churning out misogynistic zombies. Lazier writing would be hard to fabricate. And the irony of a slasher film where the feminist heroines literally go on a male witch hunt seems completely lost on the filmmakers. The final result is an utterly forgettable attempt to recapture the Supreme Court justice that got away.
