By JOEL HARLEY
Author Armando Muñoz is quickly becoming the go-to guy for screen-to-page adaptations of ’70s and ’80s cult horror. Having made his novelization debut with My Bloody Valentine in 2023, followed by versions of Silent Night, Deadly Night, Happy Birthday to Me and Basket Case, the author is back with his fifth (!) book for publisher Stop the Killer Games. And it’s a doozy.
While My Bloody Valentine and Silent Night, Deadly Night are minor classics, BLACK CHRISTMAS is… well, it’s BLACK CHRISTMAS – the granddaddy of all slasher films, inspiring not only John Carpenter’s Halloween but a whole subgenre to come.
Nearly a decade after its release, Bob Clark’s BLACK CHRISTMAS was first novelized in 1983. Written by Lee Hays, it was a faithful translation of Roy Moore’s screenplay, giving the characters a bit of extra dimension and exploring the history of the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house.
In addition to being the first slasher film (depending on where you want to put Peeping Tom and A Bay of Blood), BLACK CHRISTMAS was also ahead of its time as a feminist horror film – at its core, a home invasion movie about the invasion of female spaces by men. Since then, there have been two more cinematic versions of the story – a maligned 2006 remake, which misses every single one of the original film’s themes but is pulpy good fun, and an even more maligned one in 2019, which got the themes but missed the mark on everything else. (And yes, that makes this column a piece by a man covering a book written by another man, adapting a film from two more men about the invasion of female spaces by men. So maybe don’t be so quick to dismiss BLACK CHRISTMAS 2019 – it’s the only BLACK CHRISTMAS actually made by women, after all.)
Whether it’s the hider in the house, the toxic boyfriend or the concerned father, the men of BLACK CHRISTMAS are almost all out to control the women of Pi Kappa Sigma (not all the men – Claude the cat is a good ally). For the missing Clare Harrison’s father, it’s about retaining control over his daughter’s “purity.” For Jess’ highly-strung boyfriend, Peter, it’s Jess he feels entitled to, enabled by the growing fetus in her womb.
Even those with more honorable intentions aren’t really listening. Having been portrayed in the film by the mighty John Saxon puts police Lt. Fuller ahead of most men, but Muñoz doesn’t absolve the well-meaning but incompetent police force or forgive them for leaving Jess alone in that house as the end credits roll.
Billy’s motivation is altogether more clear-cut. He hates women, and he wants them to suffer.
“I’m going to kill you.”
As in the 2004 remake, Muñoz features Billy more prominently than Clark’s film. This includes several sequences from the killer’s perspective as he sneaks about the house and makes obscene phone calls to the women within. Those who prefer the killer as an elusive bogeyman may be put off by this approach, which does away with the unknowable killer for a thorough interrogation of Billy’s murderous misogyny. In modern parlance, he’s an incel, and since YouTube hasn’t been invented yet, obscene phone calls and murder are his outlets of choice.
In contrast to Billy, the women as originally played by Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin and Lynne Griffin (the latter of whom provides the book’s foreword) were never interchangeable slasher cut-outs. BLACK CHRISTMAS retains the film’s sharp sense of characterization. As he did with the teenagers of Happy Birthday to Me, Muñoz brings a depth of character to the sorority sisters, complete with inner lives – all beyond the scope of what we saw on screen.
It was evident then, and it’s even more so now; There’s clearly something going on with Barb, and this book gets under her skin to explain some of the trauma behind her hard-drinking, foul-mouthed exterior.
New characters and kill sequences are added to tighten the pacing, and Muñoz intersperses invented scenes with familiar ones, subverting the story and its characters to put a new spin on a horror classic. The kills, which mostly transpired offscreen, come to the fore, bringing a new sense of barbarism to each of Billy’s murders. At the same time, the character work remains wickedly funny, and the biggest laughs still come from the screenplay such as Mrs. Mac and her hidden bottles of booze, the incompetence of desk Sgt.t Nash and Barb cracking open a can of beer at the police station.
Like Sophia Takal’s in-name-only remake, Muñoz’s BLACK CHRISTMAS is more on-the-nose than the original film ever was, finding context in the feminist revolution of the 1970s and the enactment of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Elsewhere, it reserves the bulk of its ire for ill-tempered boyfriend Peter, trading in the ambiguity of his potentially being the killer for a very different kind of evil – and the victim-blaming, slut-shaming police force.
In the book’s final act, an unenviable balancing act is required – putting a fresh spin on the final girl’s showdown with Billy, without losing sight of what made the film so terrifying in the first place. While it’s a far cry from the stark, ambiguous BLACK CHRISTMAS of old, it’s the right ending for Muñoz’s modernized take in which we know what the next 50 years have in store for women. The calls are still coming from inside the (White) house!
If it feels heavy-handed, maybe it needs to be. BLACK CHRISTMAS was released in 1974, and not only has the world changed little, it has regressed. As an adaptation of a stone-cold classic, this book could never hope to trump the original work, but it finds fresh purpose in the moaners, creepers and lurkers of our own time, not to mention an abiding empathy for its characters and their ultimate fates. The core message remains essential – listen to women.