Black Christmas

Black Christmas (2007)

Director: Glen Morgan
Starring: Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg and about 8 other 20 something cuties...and one very strange "woman" with a glass eye.

Remakes are odd for several reasons, the biggest being that it is perfectly acceptable to remake a movie, sometimes only a few decades after its initial “making” (for lack of a better word). This seldom happens with other artistic mediums; yes, occasionally an author will write a book that relies heavily on the work of an earlier author (I’m thinking of “Wicked” as a remake of L. Frank Baum's “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” which spawned two films that could never be remade: “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wiz”), or a character (like Jane Rhys, “Wide Saragesso Sea” gave voice to the importantly silenced voice of Bertha Moore from Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”), but these are more reimaginings of theme or character or situation…especially when they cross mediums, say from text to image, film, dance or music. They are not strictly “remakes” or revisions…although perhaps “RE-Visions.” Remakes in films, however, are often just that: re-makes. I am thinking specifically now of Gus VanSant’s remake of “Psycho,” which sometimes so exactly choreographed the scenes of the Hitchcock classic that it seemed obsessive. Despite the efforts to completely “remake” (to what ends, I always wondered?) the film, the result was disasterous: a remuddled mess far inferior to the charm, horror and intensity of the original (I’ll save this dissection for another day). That said, remakes are tricky things, especially when the film being “remade” is a classic. The original Black Christmas is a classic. Filmed in 1974 it did things no other film had done, and it was SCARY! Genuinely scary. Watching it now a person unfamiliar with the history of horror films might see it as cliché: a storm, a sorority house, a psychopathic killer lurking in the dark, phones, a killer cam; but, however cliché the result may seem to a modern audience, the fact remains that Black Christmas was never a cliché…it was, instead, the archetype. Why remake an archetype? Well, because modern audiences have never seen this film; it is, in all honesty, difficult to locate a copy at your local video store (thank god one of the video stores I lived near had a horror-addict manager). Who wants to watch an old movie? Well, I do. If it’s good.
On to the remake: You may ask, why even watch it? Well, because I didn’t know how the film makers would address certain issues about the original plot. I admit, I was curious, and yes, part of me knew it would be a disappointment, but I wanted to know how far the remake would go; what would they keep, what would they throw to the wayside? Without risking a spoiler here’s the deal: they had me going for the first hour…I thought, good lord, they’ve actually made it interesting and good…then…well…um. Perhaps Roy said it best when he looked at me from across the room and said: “Did that make ANY sense to you?” My answer then, as now, was: “No, no it did not.” It wasn’t just a bad remake it was almost an unmake, a reimagining of the original that confounded me, at least. As a result everything that made the first film scary and nightmarish was gone, replaced with um…well…I just don’t know. Oddly, I will say this, the special features of the unrated version serve an important purpose beyond just “added value.” The best scenes of this remuddle were, apparently, dashed to the cutting room floor. And alternate ending number one (of three…all of which were better than the ending that “stuck”) left me with an, almost satisfying, eeriness that was reminiscent of the original.

I’ll end with this: it wasn’t a case of I loved the original too much, for it too had problems; this is more a case of “What have you done?” Which is, incidentally, also the title of the featurette about the remake…ha! The movie wasn’t bad, necessarily, but it was confusing and its directors made very poor choices. If you love horror, it’s worth a watch, if only as a discussion topic. Please, filmmakers, remake the old movies, but do so in a way that adds, re-imagines and reformulates the original; don’t just sling together bits and call it something: that’s just remuddling.