"We will never bow down!”: How Black Christmas subverts the tropes of the slasher subgenre and offers a possibility for feminist filmmaking

The aim of this paper is to reclaim the slasher film as a positive space for feminist politics to be explored and to reframe the subgenre through a feminist perspective by analysing the woman-directed Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019), the second remake of the same-titled 1974 proto-slasher. It will analyse how Black Christmas subverts the tropes of the subgenre and offers a twist on the final girl, the avenging superego and the abjected woman.
The textual reading will be twofold: first, I will turn to an aesthetic analysis of the appropriation of ‘the look’ by the female characters in the film to explain how Black Christmas constructs female agency, especially when contrasting it with the two prior Black Christmas films (the 1974 and the 2006 remake). This analysis will also look at how the camera works in favour of the female characters instead of oppressing them with neither a sadistic-voyeuristic look nor a fetishistic-scopophilic look. Secondly, this analysis will be underpinned by a theoretical analysis of the narrative through psychoanalytical lenses to challenge rather than further cement long-standing assumptions of the subgenre as well as question Freudian and Lacanian theories by using Susan Lurie’s feminist theory of the castrated woman to explain the misogyny in films.
By doing a narrative and an aesthetic analysis of Black Christmas, this paper aims to offer a feminist reading of a slasher film that allows its female characters to be themselves without justifying the male aggression towards them.