Blumhouse’s Black Christmas is a fiercely feminist film

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Blumhouse and Universal's remake of Bob Clark's 1974 slasher classic BLACK CHRISTMAS (which was already remade back in 2006) will be fittingly hitting theaters this December. And today we have some interesting new insights into the film from NEW YEAR, NEW YOU and ALWAYS SHINE director Sophia Takal. Check them out below!

Takal says:

You know, this movie, even though it’s very, very loosely based on Black Christmas, I’d say the plot is extremely different. It’s more inspired by the feeling that Black Christmas made me feel watching it, this idea of misogyny always being out there and never totally eradicable. So that was the jumping-off point for how I came up with this plot. I’d compare it more to how Luca Guadagnino remade Suspiria than to a straight-ahead remake.

She continues:

I wanted to make something that reflected our time right now, drawing more from what the original evoked for me rather than great plot points. For me, it was about what does it feel like to be a woman in 2019?

Finally, she adds:

I feel like another part of why I kind of shifted the direction that this version took was because, in 2019, I didn’t just want to make a movie about a bunch of women getting slaughtered. It just gave me a pit in my stomach. This is not to say that a man might want to see that. I just think I felt very much a responsibility not to perpetuate this idea of disposable female characters, because of how it makes me feel when I watch that. I call this movie a fiercely feminist film…

Read Takal's full interview with EW HERE.

The new synopsis goes like this:

Just in time for the holidays comes a timely take on a cult horror classic as a campus killer comes to face a formidable group of friends in sisterhood. Hawthorne College is quieting down for the holidays. But as Riley Stone (Imogen Poots, Green Room) and her Mu Kappa Epsilon sisters – athlete Marty (Lily Donoghue, The CW's Jane the Virgin), rebel Kris (Aleyse Shannon, The CW's Charmed), and foodie Jesse (Brittany O'Grady, Fox's Star) – prepare to deck the halls with a series of seasonal parties, a black-masked stalker begins killing sorority women one by one. 
 
As the body count rises, Riley and her squad start to question whether they can trust any man, including Marty's beta-male boyfriend, Nate (Simon Mead, Same But Different: A True New Zealand Love Story), Riley's new crush Landon (Caleb Eberhardt, Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle) or even esteemed classics instructor Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes). Whoever the killer is, he's about to discover that this generation's young women aren't about to be anybody's victims.

Directed by Sophia Takal (ALWAYS SHINE) from a screenplay she wrote with April Wolfe, the film stars Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Brittany O'Grady, Caleb Eberhardt, Simon Mead, and Cary Elwes. Jason Blum produced the remake with Ben Cosgrove and Adam Hendricks, and Couper Samuelson, Jeanette Volturno, Greg Gilreath, and Zac Locke serve as executive producers. It hits theaters on December 13, 2019.