Friday the 13th
The late 1970s were an angry, uncertain time in American history. In the last troubled years of his administration, Jimmy Carter gave a famously pessimistic speech about the recession, speaking as if he was Schopenhauer almost, and that was before the Iranian hostage situation. Ronald Reagan emerged to reaffirm a patriotic luster and hope to many who felt unmoored, and his election ushered in an age of prosperity and greed, decadence and fundamentalism, the end of the cold war and the beginning of a culture war we are still enduring today.
It was in this odd climate that the slasher movie was born and died. It’s curious thing I have never heard satisfactorily explained, but when Republicans are in office and the culture leans conservative, movies tend to have a lot of graphic violence and nudity. Conversely, look at the 90s, when Bill Clinton reigned supreme and political correctness ran rampant: with a few exceptions, nudity and gore – compared to the glut from the 80s – was increasingly rare. Of the many slasher movies I’ve seen, I can only think of one from the 1980s – Happy Birthday to Me – that doesn’t have nudity, whereas I would have to think long and hard to find a 90s slasher movie that does.
Nudity and gore in horror, particularly slasher movies, might seem tangential, but in fact expresses the heart of the culture in which the slasher was most at home. I don’t have any sources to cite, but it seems that when the culture is Puritanical on the surface – the 1950s and 80s in America, the Victorian Age in Britain – underneath lies more promiscuity and decadence than when the culture is progressive. The reason for this, I believe, is that people are publicly dishonest creatures. When the bandwagon is religious conservatism, people proclaim it publicly while having multiple affairs and snorting cocaine in private. Conversely, when the culture is progressive – whatever in fact that really is -- people become more conservative with sex.
Anyway, back to slasher movies. The Friday the 13th franchise is undoubtedly the most successful of them all, spanning decades and twelve feature films. The first movie is unabashedly a rip-off of Halloween, although the movies have little in common outside the basic formula. Once the formula was perfected, the producers of the franchise stuck to it with dogged determination, at least until the early 90s when the franchise began to unravel into absurdity. This is to be lamented, but the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween franchises had unraveled long before, and in the words of Gibbon on the Roman Empire, we shouldn’t be sad that the franchise crumbled and fell, but rather amazed that it lasted as long as it did.
The original movie involves the murders of camp-counselors at Camp Crystal Lake by Mrs. Voorhees. She initially murdered two counselors in the 1950s – Barry and Claudette – as straight-up revenge for the death of her son Jason, whom she feels drowned on account the counselors not watching him sufficiently. This is projection, of course: what business does a boy like Jason have at a summer camp, where multiple other things could have killed him besides? It is Mrs. Voorhees, rather than the counselors, who shrugged off responsibility for her son and is ultimately to blame for his death.
She returns when a new head counselor – Steve Christy – is about to re-open the camp. The odds of another handicapped child drowning or dying by other means are low, but not low enough for Mrs. Voorhees, who goes on a killing spree in order to prevent the possible death of another kid. The disproportionate tragedy of the potential death of a hypothetical kid on the one hand and the actual deaths of seven or so counselors on the other doesn’t seem to bother her. There’s obviously a lot of projection and displacement going on with Mrs. Voorhees’s psychology, and she has what criminal profilers would call an anger-retaliatory motivation – which usually results in overkill and there’s plenty of that – because she perhaps knows the she is in fact responsible for Jason’s death and that her compassion for a hypothetical victim is merely an excuse to assuage herself from the guilt of knowing she neglected her son quite literally to death.
The first and second act alternate between animal-comedy set-pieces and stalking sequences punctuated with the occasional murder. The kids goof off and smoke pot, while Mrs. Voorhees stalks them with POV shots. With Christy gone and the local police proven inept, the kids are left vulnerable, which gives the goof-off scenes an underlying menace.
The first to die is the prankster, Ned. He pretends to drown, which is probably what caused his doom – pretending to drown being an undoubted trigger for Mrs. Voorhees. The goof-off-stalking part of the movie ends with a strip-monopoly sequence that runs parallel with Kevin Bacon and his girlfriend Marcie getting murdered after they have a particularly feisty sex scene.
After the monopoly game breaks up, the next counselor to get killed is Brenda, who has an off-screen death but will reappear as mutilated dead body later when Mrs. Voorhees throws her through a window. The remaining counselors, Alice and Bill, go on a search for the others, which leads to Bill getting in a more gruesome manner than the others, which makes one wonder. This tips Alice off to the presence of a killer, so he barricades herself in a cabin. Then Mrs. Voorhees appears.
It doesn’t take Mrs. Voorhees long to out herself as a crazy-eyed killer, and a long, long chase sequence follows that ends deliciously in a full-on decapitation that no kid in 1980 had ever seen the likes of before. And thus ends Mrs. Voorhees, but the movie has an additional stinger that remains one of the best jump scares in horror history. Alice wakes up in a boat, stunned but unharmed, and she plays the water for a bit before Jason himself – a rotten corpse – jumps out of the water like fucking Jaws and attacks her.
Friday the 13th is a pretty tight whodunit thriller, with sympathetic characters and a balls-to-the-wall killer, plenty of gore, and well-done ending that earns the movie its deserved place as one of the best horror movies of the time. It does however suffer from logistical problems. There is slim chance that Mrs. Voorhees can be in all the places she is supposed to be without either an accomplice or supernatural abilities. For example, she murders Marcie early in the movie, then puts her in a jeep, which she leaves somewhere while going about her murders. At the end of the movie, she throws Brenda through the window, then appears within seconds in her jeep, which means she either teleported to where the jeep was, or had been teleporting back to it after each murder and moving it around within the camp for no apparent reason.
Another oddity is that, in the middle of her spree, she walks to the Camp Crystal Lake sign for no reason, where she conveniently runs into Christy and kills him. There’s several other problems, such as how she cleaned Marcie’s crime scene while simultaneously moving Ned from one location to another, and then goes back to get the axe she killed Marcie with to put it randomly on a bed Alice and Bill just happened to find.
In other words, while the structure is pretty tight, it’s not flawless, and proves how difficult enough it is to handle so many murders and clean-ups and body disposals will stalking future victims that it serves as fine discouragement to any would-be copycat. Of which however there were nonetheless several, Jason himself being the most spectacular.
It’s a great movie, but has been spoiled of its suspense by its very popularity. Like Psycho, we know the plot twists before watching it, which forces the movie to rely on its murders and goof-off comedy for entertainment, and they don’t always hold up. It’s better seen as prototype for what would come later. The real value of Friday the 13th comes from its substantial box-office success, a success that ushered in a wave of slasher movies and established one of the most enduring and popular genres in film history.
The late 1970s were an angry, uncertain time in American history. In the last troubled years of his administration, Jimmy Carter gave a famously pessimistic speech about the recession, speaking as if he was Schopenhauer almost, and that was before the Iranian hostage situation. Ronald Reagan emerged to reaffirm a patriotic luster and hope to many who felt unmoored, and his election ushered in an age of prosperity and greed, decadence and fundamentalism, the end of the cold war and the beginning of a culture war we are still enduring today.
It was in this odd climate that the slasher movie was born and died. It’s curious thing I have never heard satisfactorily explained, but when Republicans are in office and the culture leans conservative, movies tend to have a lot of graphic violence and nudity. Conversely, look at the 90s, when Bill Clinton reigned supreme and political correctness ran rampant: with a few exceptions, nudity and gore – compared to the glut from the 80s – was increasingly rare. Of the many slasher movies I’ve seen, I can only think of one from the 1980s – Happy Birthday to Me – that doesn’t have nudity, whereas I would have to think long and hard to find a 90s slasher movie that does.
Nudity and gore in horror, particularly slasher movies, might seem tangential, but in fact expresses the heart of the culture in which the slasher was most at home. I don’t have any sources to cite, but it seems that when the culture is Puritanical on the surface – the 1950s and 80s in America, the Victorian Age in Britain – underneath lies more promiscuity and decadence than when the culture is progressive. The reason for this, I believe, is that people are publicly dishonest creatures. When the bandwagon is religious conservatism, people proclaim it publicly while having multiple affairs and snorting cocaine in private. Conversely, when the culture is progressive – whatever in fact that really is -- people become more conservative with sex.
Anyway, back to slasher movies. The Friday the 13th franchise is undoubtedly the most successful of them all, spanning decades and twelve feature films. The first movie is unabashedly a rip-off of Halloween, although the movies have little in common outside the basic formula. Once the formula was perfected, the producers of the franchise stuck to it with dogged determination, at least until the early 90s when the franchise began to unravel into absurdity. This is to be lamented, but the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween franchises had unraveled long before, and in the words of Gibbon on the Roman Empire, we shouldn’t be sad that the franchise crumbled and fell, but rather amazed that it lasted as long as it did.
The original movie involves the murders of camp-counselors at Camp Crystal Lake by Mrs. Voorhees. She initially murdered two counselors in the 1950s – Barry and Claudette – as straight-up revenge for the death of her son Jason, whom she feels drowned on account the counselors not watching him sufficiently. This is projection, of course: what business does a boy like Jason have at a summer camp, where multiple other things could have killed him besides? It is Mrs. Voorhees, rather than the counselors, who shrugged off responsibility for her son and is ultimately to blame for his death.
She returns when a new head counselor – Steve Christy – is about to re-open the camp. The odds of another handicapped child drowning or dying by other means are low, but not low enough for Mrs. Voorhees, who goes on a killing spree in order to prevent the possible death of another kid. The disproportionate tragedy of the potential death of a hypothetical kid on the one hand and the actual deaths of seven or so counselors on the other doesn’t seem to bother her. There’s obviously a lot of projection and displacement going on with Mrs. Voorhees’s psychology, and she has what criminal profilers would call an anger-retaliatory motivation – which usually results in overkill and there’s plenty of that – because she perhaps knows the she is in fact responsible for Jason’s death and that her compassion for a hypothetical victim is merely an excuse to assuage herself from the guilt of knowing she neglected her son quite literally to death.
The first and second act alternate between animal-comedy set-pieces and stalking sequences punctuated with the occasional murder. The kids goof off and smoke pot, while Mrs. Voorhees stalks them with POV shots. With Christy gone and the local police proven inept, the kids are left vulnerable, which gives the goof-off scenes an underlying menace.
The first to die is the prankster, Ned. He pretends to drown, which is probably what caused his doom – pretending to drown being an undoubted trigger for Mrs. Voorhees. The goof-off-stalking part of the movie ends with a strip-monopoly sequence that runs parallel with Kevin Bacon and his girlfriend Marcie getting murdered after they have a particularly feisty sex scene.
After the monopoly game breaks up, the next counselor to get killed is Brenda, who has an off-screen death but will reappear as mutilated dead body later when Mrs. Voorhees throws her through a window. The remaining counselors, Alice and Bill, go on a search for the others, which leads to Bill getting in a more gruesome manner than the others, which makes one wonder. This tips Alice off to the presence of a killer, so he barricades herself in a cabin. Then Mrs. Voorhees appears.
It doesn’t take Mrs. Voorhees long to out herself as a crazy-eyed killer, and a long, long chase sequence follows that ends deliciously in a full-on decapitation that no kid in 1980 had ever seen the likes of before. And thus ends Mrs. Voorhees, but the movie has an additional stinger that remains one of the best jump scares in horror history. Alice wakes up in a boat, stunned but unharmed, and she plays the water for a bit before Jason himself – a rotten corpse – jumps out of the water like fucking Jaws and attacks her.
Friday the 13th is a pretty tight whodunit thriller, with sympathetic characters and a balls-to-the-wall killer, plenty of gore, and well-done ending that earns the movie its deserved place as one of the best horror movies of the time. It does however suffer from logistical problems. There is slim chance that Mrs. Voorhees can be in all the places she is supposed to be without either an accomplice or supernatural abilities. For example, she murders Marcie early in the movie, then puts her in a jeep, which she leaves somewhere while going about her murders. At the end of the movie, she throws Brenda through the window, then appears within seconds in her jeep, which means she either teleported to where the jeep was, or had been teleporting back to it after each murder and moving it around within the camp for no apparent reason.
Another oddity is that, in the middle of her spree, she walks to the Camp Crystal Lake sign for no reason, where she conveniently runs into Christy and kills him. There’s several other problems, such as how she cleaned Marcie’s crime scene while simultaneously moving Ned from one location to another, and then goes back to get the axe she killed Marcie with to put it randomly on a bed Alice and Bill just happened to find.
In other words, while the structure is pretty tight, it’s not flawless, and proves how difficult enough it is to handle so many murders and clean-ups and body disposals will stalking future victims that it serves as fine discouragement to any would-be copycat. Of which however there were nonetheless several, Jason himself being the most spectacular.
It’s a great movie, but has been spoiled of its suspense by its very popularity. Like Psycho, we know the plot twists before watching it, which forces the movie to rely on its murders and goof-off comedy for entertainment, and they don’t always hold up. It’s better seen as prototype for what would come later. The real value of Friday the 13th comes from its substantial box-office success, a success that ushered in a wave of slasher movies and established one of the most enduring and popular genres in film history.