[Interview] Director Sophia Takal Shares Her Thoughts on the Other ‘Black Christmas’ Remake

A lot of people are talking about the new remake of Black Christmas, and that means that they’re also talking about Bob Clark’s classic original film, which came out in 1974 and helped lay the foundation for the whole slasher genre. But there’s another Black Christmas that’s getting overlooked in the conversation. Or should we say a… Black X-Mas?

The director of the new Black Christmas remake, Sophia Takal, has been quick to credit the original film for her ambitious new film. But in a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, we asked whether the new film would pay homage to the first attempt at a remake.

And her response was genuinely surprising.

“Can I just say one thing about the 2006 movie? Because everyone, including myself, calls it a remake but it’s really a sequel, and for whatever reason, I just started thinking about that this week,” Takal laughs. “I just really want to talk about that, that it’s a sequel, not a remake. For whatever reason, I feel like that’s an interesting and important point.”

But whatever her opinion about the film’s categorization, Black X-Mas had a perspective that didn’t speak to her when it came time to create her own remake.

“I guess what I would say is that I feel like, spiritually and tonally, my movie – even though the plot is different – has a lot more in common with the original than the 2006 version. So while I see the value of the 2006 version, in terms of for entertainment, I don’t feel like it grapples with women’s issues in the same way that the original did,” Takal says.

“So it was really important to me to take what was so striking about the original, and so unique, and I kind of feel like if you look at the trajectory of the slasher the second Black Christmas kind of fits… I dunno, to me there’s something interesting. I feel like the original Black Christmas created the genre, or was one of the first slasher movies, and then by 2006 so much had happened within the subgenre that movie almost feels – and I don’t want to say anything bad about the movie because I feel like it’s hard to make a movie – but that movie feels like so many things I don’t about slasher movies, in some ways.”

“The violence just feels so… the women’s bodies just feel so expendable in that movie, to me, and the characters don’t feel as real,” Takal elaborates. “They feel more like the type of sorority sisters in movies that I grew up watching where they were very two-dimensional, or the relationships between them were reductive.”

“So again, in terms of what I was trying to do with this movie, April [Wolfe, co-writer] and I not only wanted to move the conversation forward in terms of what we were trying to explore about women but also the form itself. And that because the original Black Christmas was so innovative we wanted to try to be innovative within the genre as well,” Takal says.

“Because to make a movie that was just a straight ahead slasher movie, like the 2006 version, felt unnecessary at this point because it’s kind of been… I just feel like the subgenre has been kind of explored all the way through,” Takal adds. “Like, Scream was a meta-slasher narrative. So it was important to us to try to move the dial forward in terms of what it is to be a slasher movie.”

You can see that dial move forward in theaters now, where Black Christmas is currently playing.