ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Emily Fear is a librarian by day, professional wrestling lover and accordion player in the band Bitter Whiskers by night. You can catch her as the co-host of Grit and Glitter on PWTorch and read her blog all about intergender wrestling, Boy Girl Party. She’s also recently conducted a class on the role of women in horror films.

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” – Margaret Atwood

The opening scene of Black Christmas intercuts shots of shadowy, conspiratorial hallways and the whispered oaths of men with the much less formal, more boisterous and loving revelries of a sorority house. In this home of women, there are drinks and “more cheese, bitches!” and music and a tender phone call between roommates implying the gift-giving of a vibrator.

The recipient of this thoughtful present is walking home late from the library, headed to a relative’s for the Christmas break. Walking alone in a dark campus emptied of others, she encounters two simultaneously jarring appearances: Ominous and threatening DMs from an anonymous account and a man, staring down at his phone, walking behind her.

She gets her keys out of her pocket and puts them between her fingers, a kind of makeshift Wolverine claw defense that so many of us know so well. It will not save her.

So begins Sophia Takal’s and April Wolfe’s staunchly feminist reimagining of the 1974 slasher classic Black Christmas, Bob Clark’s ode to the women who suffer because of the cruelty of men, be it in its most brutal, insane manifestation or in its more benign, condescending forms. The original film has been celebrated for its striking visuals, its wrenching tension and never-ending sense of dread and its performances, but in more recent years, the film has also seen a resurgence through feminist film theory, with many of these critics praising the implicit feminist themes in the movie.

Rather than strictly adhere to the original premise, Takal and Wolfe take those implicit themes and make them the core of the film. This Black Christmas is centered around the sorority sisters and fraternity brothers of Hawthorne College, which is just about to shut down for Winter Break. Riley (Imogen Poots) is a senior and MKE sister, still trying to recover years later from a sexual assault by AKO’s former fraternity president, Brian – who is back to observe the fraternity’s annual holiday talent show, which Riley’s sisters Kris, Marty, Jesse & Helena happen to be performing in.

Kris (Aleyse Shannon) is fighting her own battles, including convincing the college to remove the bust of the school’s founder, the infamously bigoted Calvin Hawthorne (“He owned slaves. IN THE NORTH.”) and petitioning to have Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes, perfectly balancing slimy and authoritarian) fired for failing to diversify his literature course beyond the canon of dead white men.

Kris is ardent about her campaigns, perhaps to an overwhelming extent as even her sisters are keen to distance themselves from some of her more passionate screeds. But when Helena has to leave the AKO party early, it is Kris that convinces Riley to reclaim her space and join the girls in the choreographed talent show number – which is actually, despite its sexy Santa trappings, a barbed parody shaming and ridiculing the fraternity’s rape culture, specifically directed toward Riley’s attacker.

Video of the performance goes viral, sisters start disappearing and, as Riley, Kris, Marty and Jesse prepare for a holiday dinner at their otherwise vacated sorority house, the looming threat of violence that these women live under becomes a direct siege, with an invasion of robed, masked men come to exterminate them through whatever means handy, be it a string of Christmas lights, a bow and arrow, or unimaginable physical power. Is that power sourced from something even more dark and sinister than insane rage or thirst for revenge? Well, the movie tells you pretty much from the start that it is.

Takal and Wolfe add a heavy dose of supernatural conspiracy to the original’s slasher concept and its effectiveness may vary for viewers, many of whom may be expecting the satire to still play more straightforward with the violence. However, in a horde of slasher movies each attempting to outdo the other ones in ostentatious displays of over-the-top gore, there’s something revelatory in a horror film that maintains tension without the need for constant blood and guts.

What will likely be harder for some of traditional horror audience to swallow is the intensely explicit feminist themes of the movie. Riley, Kris and their sisters are not hapless victims being picked off one by one, nor are they likable, plucky “Final Girls.” Rather, they are a flawed but bound army of resistance against an evil patriarchal force bent on eliminating whatever women cannot be forced to submit to its power. What the movie sacrifices in subtly, it makes up for in moments of rousing rebellion, or in the smaller moments of joyful, lived-in exchanges between characters, like when a scattered sorority sister begs Riley for a pad because she’s misplaced her Diva Cup. (“How do you lose a Diva Cup?” “With abandon!”)

Poots proves her mettle as a suspense thriller heroine once again, with Shannon an able and engaging support presence. The women’s performances overall fare better than their male co-stars who, Elwes aside, mostly blur together in a homogenous Caucasian blur of privilege and sniveling misogyny. Landon (Caleb Eberhardt) is more wholly defined – and in a movie about raging against injustices of supernatural extent, has maybe my favorite explosive moment when he sees what the way the irresponsible frat bros have destroyed his sound mixer – but still lacks depth in shading, which is particularly interesting when you consider he’s the only non-white male character in the movie. How privilege and power differ for him in contrast to his white cis male counterparts needn’t have been explored to great depth, but touching on it would have been a welcome note of intersection between the struggle against sexism and struggle against racism.

This Black Christmas is sure to be divisive for audiences, but if you’re into the idea of a suspense-filled horror satire birthed from the #MeToo moment, this is a very enjoyable hour and a half at the movies.