The original Black Christmas, made in 1974, was one of the archetypal slasher flicks - a sort-of contemporary of Halloween, and one has to wonder if it's any coincidence that we got two movies wreaking bloody havoc over highly targeted consumer holidays in the midst of the biggest economic slump between WWII and a month ago, but that's a different essay. As were all the proto-slashers, Black Christmas was low-budget, sparse, and effective as much for what it didn't show as for what it did.
The remake, naturally, is slick, highly produced, and well-lit, so of course everyone hates it. That's not a totally unreasonable stand to take, but I'm here to put forward a radical notion - the reason other reviewers hated it is that they're applying the wrong criteria. Black Christmas '06 isn't a classic horror movie; it was just marketed as such because Madison Avenue lacks imagination. If you review it as a critical commentary on modernity, it's both a more interesting story and, frankly, a more credulous review.
The plot doesn't take much explaining, but here it is in a nutshell: a traumatized kid grows up to become a psycho with woman issues and a peeping fetish, and one Christmas he escapes the asylum to return to his family home; since his family home is now a sorority house, you can probably guess where all this is going. With a plot like that, what could it be if not a slasher in the classic vein? Let's look at the charges against:
1) The sorority sisters are essentially interchangeable. Yes, this is pretty true - all the girls are basically bitches to each other, all of them are shallow, and we don't really get to know any of them before they start dying. This makes it difficult for the audience to connect with the protagonists or particularly care when they get offed. Fine, but compare that to watching the nightly news and ask yourself how much you care for the faceless strangers you hear about having been run over by trains or gunned down by gangs.
But it goes further than that. Consider, for example, any season of America's Next Top Model - do those girls each portray a distinct archetype? No, especially as the end draws near, they're basically interchangeable - aside, I suppose, from how their eye and hair color sets off the fabric of whatever bizarre catwalk fetishwear they happen to be selling that day. Consider also the central characters in Mean Girls, Clueless, or hell, even Jawbreaker - the same sort of interchangeability transpires among the the collective groupings of high-fashion anti-heroines. For better or worse, entertainment has evolved since the 70s, and the update of Black Christmas insists only that the slasher genre evolve to pace.
2) The killer's backstory humanizes him. The '74 killer, like most proto-slashers, had no reason for his acts; he just shows up and kills teenagers in what is apparently an existential nod to Descartes (Contrucido ergo sum - I slaughter many, therefore I am). 32 years later, Billy is a messed up cookie who spent his formative years locked up in an attic, spying on people with a telescope and fathering his own sister (in, I will grant, the movie's biggest WTF? moment). Some people say these scenes are overwrought and unnecessary, doing nothing but reducing the splatter per minute ratio; I say they're put in for anyone who watches Lost and is annoyed by the smoke monster.
This, in many ways, is the corollary to the point above - just as entertainment itself has evolved, so too has the audience consuming and interacting with it. Starting arguably with Hill Street Blues in the 80s, television plots have become more and more complex, and movies have had to rise in density to keep pace; even the smugly self-aware Scream had to turn not having a motivation for its murders into yet another cliché to be riffed. If this seems contradictory right after having dissected the genericness of the girls, consider that we know as much about them as we need to - we know the different reasons they're staying in the house, we know their relationships to one another, and we know the kinds of people they are as much as they'll let anyone else know, either. Their only purpose, ultimately, is to be slaughtered; Billy's purpose is to serve as both deus ex machina and metaphor, so a deeper exploration is required.
3) There's no tension. The scars left on my forearms by my girlfriend's fingernails beg to differ. Nonetheless, one of the hallmarks of Christmas horror movies (and this trope was used, albeit with a different intent, in the original as well) is the blasphemous tarnishing of nuclear family togetherness into a portent of unspeakable horror. This is not a haunted house on a lonely hill on a dark and stormy night with a full moon and howling wolves; this is brightly lit, comfortable territory - and despite that you still aren't safe, even if you have a coterie of shallow, self-interested "friends" to back you up. Indeed, one might even see it as a commentary on the lack of modern community - if all you have to count on is friends who don't think about anything but themselves, and then only in vague notions, how can you hope to stand against unstoppable forces of nature?
So we're left with a 94-minute meditation on the futility of modern individuality, the inevitability of death, and the illusory nature of safety. And we get several good death scenes and a few breasts along the way. Starlet Michelle Trachtenberg sums it up: "Merry Christmas, motherfucker."
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