Sophia Takal’s “Black Christmas,” and the Producer Jason Blum on Horror with a Message
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
On a sound stage in Brooklyn, Sophia Takal is racing to finish her first feature film, in time for a December release. The film is a remake of “Black Christmas,” an early slasher flick from Canada, in which sorority girls are picked off by a gruesome killer. Horror “takes our everyday anxieties and dread and externalizes them for us,” Takal told WNYC’s Rhiannon Corby, “and allows us to witness a character going through it and usually surviving.” Takal brought a very 2019 sensibility to the remake, reflecting the ongoing struggle of the #MeToo movement. “You can never feel like you’ve beaten misogyny,” she said. “In this movie, the women are never given a rest. They always have to keep fighting.”
“Black Christmas” is produced by Jason Blum. Blum found his way to horror films almost by accident: his company, Blumhouse Productions, produced “Paranormal Activity,” which was made for a few thousand dollars and then earned hundreds of millions at the box office. He went on to make high-prestige projects, such as Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” which became one of the very few horror films to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Blum understands that a truly frightening movie needs more than good “scares.” “What makes horror movies scary,” he told David Remnick, “is what’s in between the scares,” meaning how it taps into the audience’s anxieties about issues in the real world. Having a message sells, Blum thinks.
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| 0:44.0 | Things people love. |
| 0:48.4 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. |
| 0:50.5 | On today's Politics and More podcast, we'll hear from writer and director Sophia Tachal. |
| 0:56.7 | Ticall's new film, Black Christmas, reimagines the slasher movie genre for the Me Too era. |
| 1:03.1 | Then David Remnick talks with the film's producer, Jason Blum, the founder of Blumhouse films. |
| 1:09.6 | Blumhouse is behind a slate of low-budget, socially conscious horror movies, |
| 1:14.4 | including Jordan Peel's Get Out. So let's keep rolling. Are you still rolling? |
| 1:21.6 | Lots of snow, please. All right, guys, let's cut. It looks great. It looks really beautiful. |
| 1:28.3 | All right, guys, let's shoot. |
| 1:30.3 | We're starting out today on a movie set, a huge soundstage near the waterfront in Brooklyn, |
| 1:35.3 | where a young director named Sophia Takal is working. |
| 1:39.3 | She's finishing up shooting her biggest project today. |
| 1:42.3 | And we're going to go, wait, Cat, we're going to go back to inside the car. |
... |
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