‘Black Christmas’ confusing

McKayla Clarksnodgrass, Junior Print Editor in Cheif

With almost every Friday the 13th, a new horror movie comes out to scare viewers. “Black Christmas” attempted to do that but was disappointingly not scary at all.

The movie is a recent slasher film, a subgenre of horror movies, that follows Riley (Imogen Poots) and her sorority sisters. Throughout the movie, some of the characters leave for the holidays, but the ones who stay have their lives threatened by local fraternity brothers. 

The main takeaway of the film appears to be a “girl power” message. The way the movie got to that was through having a couple of the fraternity brothers demanding things go back to a time when women and men had very unequal rights. The women in the film were attacked by the fraternity and decided to fight against the sexist cult by killing them instead. 

The movie appeared to mostly be social commentary on some issues people are faced with in this time period but it wasn’t depicted the right way.  

There was a lot happening in the movie. There were a few subplots that didn’t necessarily fit in with the main plot. The fraternity brothers were brainwashed using goo from the statue of the founder, which gave them superhuman abilities and made them soldiers. Several details in the film seemed to be just randomly added in, such as brainwashing and magic, which the screenwriters seemed to be trying to force to fit in with the rest of the movie. 

Other than showing the cult behavior and members of the cult being sexist, the movie never really explains much about the fraternity and how it became the way it was.

The movie went from being a slasher film to being about the lives of the women to being a slasher movie again and suddenly it became an action film. The cult and magic aspect of the film was completely random in the whole thing and could’ve made sense if the rest of the movie didn’t keep changing what it was about. The first half of the movie was good even though it didn’t include much of the killing you expect from a slasher film, but as the movie got closer to the ending, it stopped making sense. I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything that happened.

The resolution of the film was kind of disappointing and definitely could’ve been better, especially if brainwashing and magic wasn’t involved. The film also could have been more scary. The jump scares only worked because of the sudden sound in the film whenever you were supposed to get scared. There were only a few jump scares during the movie but without the sound being there, those moments wouldn’t scare you.

I thought I would love the movie, seeing as I enjoy watching slasher films, but that was not the case. This is probably one of the few movies I won’t watch a second time. If you’re looking for a nice scare, look somewhere else because this movie won’t scare you.