Friday the 13th In Review

Spoilers for a 40-year-old movie contained below           

           When you read as much horror journalism and scholarship as I do, watching well-known horror films is often an exercise in confirming what you think you already know. Notice I say well-known and not well-liked because, while its pop culture influence is undeniable, no one, not even fans, are under any delusions that Friday the 13^th is high art. It has its disciples, sure, but is also generally acknowledged as the lowest in quality of the classic slasher franchise-starters. Having watched it, I can confirm that to be true.

            Friday the 13^th was among the glut of movies replicating the formula of Halloween in hopes of replicating its profitability, and is more or less interchangeable with any of them. While it’s nice to imagine a blockbuster franchise growing from, say, Maniac or Prom Night or the Driller Killer, we live in the Voorhees timeline. The most interesting thing about Friday the 13^th isn’t anything about the film itself, but the enthusiasm and ire it provoked in equal measure.

            The film boasts some lovely location shots of the New Jersey summer camp that stood in for the famous Camp Crystal Lake, and plenty of period twee that will tickle fans of summer camp parody films like Wet Hot American Summer. It also boasts a complete failure of characterization, long lags between action, and a serious lack of tension. Maybe I’m spoiled by the escalated pace of more recent slasher films with more to say (I’m thinking of Cabin in the Woods here), but the teens simply take too long to realize they’re in danger, and their lack of fear squashes the chance for suspense. It’s movies like these that make you appreciate just how good their Carpenter- and Craven-made cousins are because, turns out, it isn’t actually that easy to make an effective slasher film.

            The best characterization goes to Annie, a sweet and starry-eyed line cook who brushes off the local harbingers of doom and chats with dogs. Robbi Morgan doesn’t play her with finesse necessarily but with a genuine innocence that’s quite charming. In the film’s most effective scare, she’s dispatched before even reaching the camp after hitching a ride with the killer, and with her gone the film gives way to anonymous youngsters who are hard to tell apart and, with the exception of the prankster, not even granted the dignity of an archetype.

            So without the effective suspense and compelling characters that breathe life into a Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, what does Friday the 13^th have to offer? In my opinion, were it not for the persistence of the producers in making sequels consistently enough for Jason and his hockey mask to become part of American iconography, this would be no more than a particularly profitable ‘80s slasher. I also think the sequel model worked well because what Friday the 13^th does have is a basic structure that rings true like an old campfire tale, made to be told again and again. It may be horror, but with its predictable, transgression-punishing kills, it makes for comforting viewing. The folkloric elements of Friday the 13^th are strong: the secluded and cursed location where tragedy repeats itself, a location likely familiar to viewers and heavy with memories of childhood or adolescent adventuring. It boasts a generation gap between the optimistic teens and foreboding adults that must have appealed to the movie’s young audience. And best of all is the ending, poached from many a giallo, in which the unseen killer is revealed as a sweet, cardigan-wearing old lady. Betsy Palmer’s high camp performance as Mrs. Voorhees, punctuated with the deliciously cheap gotcha scare of Jason lunging out of the lake, give an otherwise drab film an effective stinger and probably make the memory of the movie stronger than the movie itself. Maybe that can account for the high box office returns.

            Speaking of Mrs. Voorhees, it’s a crying shame she didn’t stick around for the sequels. The revenge killer in the body of an auntie would have made for a refreshing contrast to the mute, lumbering Jason, who imo could never much distinguish himself from Michael. But I do like the theory, based on certain original cast/crew members’ insistence that Jason died in the lake, that the guy in the hockey mask isn’t Jason Voorhees at all. So who is he? An Earth-stranded Predator? A sex-hating demon? A creature conjured by campfire spook stories? Is his tenuous association with Mrs. Voorhees only a feeble human attempt to use storytelling to explain why such evil can exist? Regardless, I think the mystery makes the prospect of sequels much spookier, and to whoever is going to inevitably reboot this franchise as soon as the rights get sorted out, I hereby submit this as my pitch.

            While audiences clearly responded to the movies, not everyone found it to be good clean fun. Friday the 13^th became a focal point for the American branch of horror-related outrage in the’80s. Gene Siskel even went so far as to proto-dox some of the folks involved in production. In this movie you will see a woman take an ax to the face, a man suspended to a door by arrows, and the murderess herself decapitated, but even for the times this tale is relatively light on gut and gristle. Giallo classic The Bay of Blood, which also features murders around a lakeside resort and a far grislier decapitation, was almost a decade old. Had this movie been made in Italy, it would have looked as tame as a Universal monster flick in comparison to its Eurotrash neighbors. Even American cinema had far surpassed this in terms of gruesome level, with independent films like Last House on the Left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre released eight and six years prior respectively.

            But perhaps this isn’t a fair standard. Overseas fare and indie nasties didn’t have the same cultural reach as a film franchise that stretched on and on with no end in sight. And the independent American films had a certain auteur cache and cinematic quality – Roger Ebert gave positive reviews to both Last House and TCM. Maybe horror violence only offends the reviewers taste when the movies lacked the artistic merit to justify it, and Friday the 13^th’s ubiquity in the decade to come and its flaunted teen appeal made it the most obvious target for moralizing parents. Regardless, there’s certainly not much here to shock a modern viewer, unless you’re watching it while drifting over a lake at summer camp in the middle of the night.

            This is a movie not best seen but whispered about, summarized by friends who lean into its campfire story roots, embellish the scares, and personalize the story, the way my friends and I would talk about horror movies in middle school. I can imagine a word-of-mouth appeal building around this movie in 1980 like an urban legend. If you hit that jackpot, oh happy producers, it doesn’t matter how good the movie is. It’s just a story.