‘Black Christmas’ (2006) remake is somehow both stylish & soulless

Editor’s Note: The following essay contains massive spoilers for the 2006 horror remake, Black Christmas.

The stigma surrounding the term “remake” is not altogether unwarranted.  From 1998’s Psycho to Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) and Friday the 13th (2009), many modern visions of what have become horror classics are often devoid of heart or style and sucked completely dry of the special ingredients that marked their originals as truly groundbreaking marvels. Bob Clark’s grotesquely-unnerving 1974 slasher prototype Black Christmas ⏤ which explores such complex themes as male aggression and female power ⏤ wasn’t able to escape the remake craze. The first attempt arrived in 2006, and a recent rewatch elicits both exasperation over untapped creative possibilities and squeamish nausea from its sickening, eye-popping imagery.

A screenplay written by Glen Morgan, whose most notable work then was the 2003 remake of Willard (first released in 1971), Black Christmas attempts to over-explain the killer Billy Lenz’s upbringing, one wrought of emotional abuse and rape, and under-utilize even our main protagonist. Katie Cassidy (Arrow) emerges as our heroine Kelli Presley (taking up the mantel from Olivia Hussey’s Jess Bradford), and while her acting chops are sharpened to perfection, broad character strokes and a generally paper-thin script fail to endear her to the audience, and she simply fades into a sea of pretty faces. So, what results is an overly ambitious but somehow soulless slasher that relies predominantly on its many kills to chill and thrill you. The cast wrangles other such prominent names as Michelle Trachtenberg (EuroTrip, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Lacey Chabert (Mean Girls, Party of Five, Not Another Teen Movie), Crystal Lowe (Final Destination 3), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Wolf Lake, 10 Cloverfield Lane) and Oliver Hudson (Rules of Engagement, Nashville), who plays opposite Cassidy as the archetypal scumbag boyfriend.

Original player Andrea Martin returns, this time turning in a solid performance as the house mother named Barbara MacHenry. Her inclusion here is a lovely thread line to the ’74 benchmark, in which she played sorority sister Phyl Carlson, and it’s a shame her talents are wasted in what is an otherwise startlingly ho-hum feature. Even her death, which might seem pretty gnarly on-paper, feels misused and misplaced; hoping she would at least get the chance to go toe-to-toe with Billy in the final act, she gets an icicle to the head.

“I wanted to deal with some of the family thematics or elements,” Morgan said in the “What Have You Done? Remaking Black Christmas” featurette. He goes on to cite serial killer Edmund Kemper, whose own mother locked him in the basement, as a significant influence on digging into Billy’s freakish backstory. He continues, “Now, [Edmund] had these feelings of guilt for feelings that he didn’t really have but then he had them. He had hate and arousal and everything just mixed together down in the basement. They cooked a serial killer. Ultimately, he attacked his mother and ripped out her larynx or something and put her head on a mantel and threw darts at it for three days.”

Akin to Zombie’s Halloween, which came out the following summer, Morgan’s Black Christmas examines a killer’s traumatic childhood in a way that only makes you feel sympathy when you should feel absolute disgust. Subsequently, when events inside the sorority house ramp up, you’re just waiting for the blood-soaked payoff and how and when the girls will die. Hudson’s Kyle Autry is supposed to be a red herring, yet there doesn’t appear to be any attention given to a motive or intent. But that’s par the course for the film’s many character contrivances ⏤ sorority girl Eve Agnew, as played by Kathleen Kole, is outlandishly out of place, while Kristen Cloke’s (Final Destination, Lady Bird) Leigh Colvin feels shoehorned into the mayhem simply to bloat the cast even further.

The kitchen sink is literally thrown at the wall to see what sticks, clanging and scattering undercooked and overwrought plot points, stereotypical character beats and other nonsense into 90 minutes. Instead of something that could have been cool, gruesomely dark and shocking, we are left holding Santa’s lumpy knapsack of coal. In part, each component had great potential to be a promising reinvention, but in whole, they’re all just random leftovers from other failed ideas. The prank calls are frankly not terrifying; there’s little tension or mood to immerse the viewer; and the kills are certainly rather grisly, yet they don’t have much emotional punch. Furthermore, the third-act reveal of the second killer ⏤ Billy’s sister-daughter Agnes has been the one mounting slow, calculated destruction the entire time, leaving Billy to have very little impact by the time he arrives ⏤ twists the corkscrew of mediocrity even further into our heads. Conceptually, such a bold swerve could have worked in underscoring the many psychological implications, but the “my daddy’s here” line leaves such a sour taste that it completely derails what was already an unfocused story, at best.

That being said, there are some truly wondrous and inspired pockets of cinematography, courtesy of Robert McLachlan (Game of Thrones) ⏤ particularly when stings of colorful Christmas lights are used to light scenes, some off-kilter camera angles to crawl under your skin and the all-too-brief explanation of occult rituals in holiday imagery (Lowe’s monologue is unexpectedly memorable). While there is a bit too much polish smothering the film, by and large, there is evidence the filmmakers were attempting to construct a rather stylish and lavish interpretation of Clark’s classic story. The final scene, in which Cassidy’s Kelli tosses Billy over staircase in the hospital, his body spiraling downward and impaled by the Christmas tree, the flickering of his lifeless body’s shadow above her head is an unforgettable, perhaps fleeting, bookend.

Still, that doesn’t absolve the rest of the runtime for being terribly pedestrian. Katie Cassidy, Kristen Cloke and Andrea Martin deserved much better.

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