Black Christmas screenwriter defends the PG-13 rating of the remake

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Next month, Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures will release BLACK CHRISTMAS, the second remake of the classic 1974 slasher, but unlike the original film and the 2006 remake, this new version won't be rated R; Instead, Bloody Disgusting has revealed that BLACK CHRISTMAS has received a PG-13 rating for, "Violence, terror, thematic content involving sexual assault, language, sexual material and drinking." Of course, there have been plenty of fantastic horror movies over the years which have succeeded without an R-rating, but BLACK CHRISTMAS co-writer April Wolfe took to Twitter to explain what happened and to say that the remake will still be just as vicious.

You can get away with quite a lot under a PG-13 rating, particularly in regards to blood and gore, so I'm not particularly worried. The remake also looks to be going in a different direction than the original, which is how I like my remakes, so the 1974 film will always be there should this new incarnation fail to tickle your fancy. "My version of Black Christmas is about a group of women who are sorority sisters at a college who start to disappear one by one and the remaining sisters have to figure out why these women are disappearing and who’s responsible for it," BLACK CHRISTMAS director and co-writer Sophia Takal told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. "And eventually, once they figure out who the bad guy is, they have to fight for survival. The original Black Christmas feels so contemporary and modern for the time. I wanted to make something that reflected our time right now. For me, it was about, What does it feel like to be a woman in 2019?"

The official synopsis for BLACK CHRISTMAS:

Just in time for the holidays comes a timely take on a cult horror classic as a campus killer comes to face a formidable group of friends in sisterhood. Hawthorne College is quieting down for the holidays. But as Riley Stone (Imogen Poots) and her Mu Kappa Epsilon sisters—athlete Marty (Lily Donoghue), rebel Kris (Aleyse Shannon), and foodie Jesse (Brittany O’Grady)—prepare to deck the halls with a series of seasonal parties, a black-masked stalker begins killing sorority women one by one. As the body count rises, Riley and her squad start to question whether they can trust any man, including Marty’s beta-male boyfriend, Nate (Simon Mead), Riley’s new crush Landon (Caleb Eberhardt) or even esteemed classics instructor Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes). Whoever the killer is, he’s about to discover that this generation’s young women aren’t about to be anybody’s victims.

BLACK CHRISTMAS is set to hit theaters on December 13, 2019, and yes, that is a Friday.