Friday the 13th (1980)

Now we have come to the next franchise that we’ll be reviewing, the “Friday the 13^th” franchise, another fan favorite. Let’s take a look at the first “Friday the 13^th” movie, released in 1980.

James Kendrick started his review out by saying, “A self-consciously avowed knock-off of John Carpenter’s masterful nightmare Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th has always been a scorned and derided film, with its mixture of shallow characters, boogeyman clichés, and gory spectacle making it an easy target for middlebrow critics to tear to pieces while boisterous teenage audiences lapped it up and asked for seconds (and thirds, and fourths …).” Fair or not, the film’s legacy has it even more of a flick, as it was said for starting a apparently never-ending franchise of poorly made slasher movies that combined teenage love and violence with increasingly horrible style and also starting Hollywood wanting to make sequels, which is strange seeing that producer/director Sean S. Cunningham never saw the possibility of a sequel, or even a franchsie that has been going on for almost four decades.

Kendrick had noted, “Cunningham had always been an opportunist who was willing to work with any formula that might be popular; the films he directed prior to Friday the 13th were Here Come the Tigers (1978) and Manny’s Orphans (1978), both of which were kid-centric sports movies that were obvious attempts to cash in on the success of The Bad News Bears (1976). He had dabbled in soft-core sleaze during the “porno chic” era (including 1971’s Together, which starred Marilyn Chambers), although he is most notorious for producing the Wes Craven-directed The Last House on the Left (1972), one of the most shocking and talked-about movies of the early ’70s drive-in circuit. Thus, Cunningham knew the intrinsic value of controversy, and Friday the 13th, which he funded independently before getting a distribution deal with Paramount, produced it in droves, particularly when Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel made it his personal mission to destroy the movie, not only by lacerating it in his review and encouraging readers to write Paramount chief Charles Bluhdorn and star Betsy Palmer, whose addresses he conveniently supplied, but by joining with Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert on an all-out media campaign against the slasher genre.”

With the exception of a story set in 1958, every event in the film occurs over the course of one day, as a group of counselors (Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, and Laurie Bartram) arrive at Camp Crystal Lake to prepare for the summer, despite how they spend more time doing drugs, sneaking away to make out, and playing an adult version of Monopoly than they do actually working. Most of the counselors are played by complete new actors who are good enough but sadly their movie career went down, with the exception of Harry Crosby, who went nowhere but still is known for being Bing Crosby’s son, and Kevin Bacon, the only actor in the film to have a famous movie career (although “Friday the 13^th” is definitely the most useless film when playing “Six Degrees of Bacon”).

Although it’s compared a lot to “Halloween,” “Friday the 13^th” actually has more differences than similarities. Kendrick said, “The basic formula is the same, but screenwriter Victor Miller mixes Carpenter’s stalk-and-slash rhythms with an older tradition of rural isolation, thus turning the film into less of a suburban nightmare than a folkloric warning about not going into the woods alone.” Where the murders of “Halloween” are taken place in a small-town of Haddonfield, “Friday the 13^th” takes place at Camp Crystal Lake, which is a strange name for a deteriorating summer camp located deep in the ancient woods, where the nearest cross-street is 10 miles away, everyone in the closest town looks cared when the camp is mentioned, and there’s even a local insane, played by Walt Gorney, who makes proclamations of doom. “Halloween” takes its original sense of fear from what we know about Michael Myers; mainly that he is an unstoppable person who is unemotional evil in a way that the only explanation for his murders is supernatural. “Friday the 13^th,” on the other hand, stays in mystery, giving us a villain whose identity is not revealed until the last act, which gives the film’s one true moment of intelligence by reversing the “Psycho” complex in making the killer a mother who has embodied her dead son, rather than the other way around. Kendrick said, “This mystery element also reveals the film to be much more influenced by Italian gialli, or violent murder-mystery films, particularly Mario Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), a prototypical slasher film with 13 murders, several of which are copied almost verbatim in Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981).”

The similarities between “Halloween” and “Friday the 13^th” simply come down to the use of a terrifying memorable musical score (here done by Harry Manfredini, who completely rips off Bernard Herrmann, but should still be credited for the unforgettable sounds) and the villains point-of-view, which has been continuously overused as a means of making the audience identify with the villain. Kendrick said, “While such a critique holds true with some later slasher films, in both Halloween and Friday the 13th (as well as Bob Clark’s often undervalued but deeply influential 1974 film Black Christmas) it is clearly used as a means of concealing an identity, similar to Hitchcock’s use of the extreme high angle when Mother comes out of the bedroom to meet Arbogast at the top of the stairs.” Granted, Cunningham heavily using the POV as a way of keeping a sense of mystery eventually comes across as lazy, but it works in its own way and is complicated later in the film when he uses it almost mainly from the various victims’ point-of-view.

One other similarity is the use of the “Final Girl,” who is basically used by her intelligence, goodness, and originality and who regularly ends up taking down the villain, often with his (or, in this film’s case, her) own weapon. The Final Girl in “Friday the 13^th” is Alice, played by Adrienne King, and although she does smoke at one point, she stays exactly tomboyish and not touched by a man. Her final fight with Mrs. Voorhees (TV actress Betsy Palmer), the mental mother who has prevented the camp from reopening after her son, Jason (Ari Lehman), accidentally drowned chases to the edge of the camp before ending off with one of cinema’s famous decapitations, which, like every effect in the film works, was created by Tom Savini, then best known for his work with George A. Romero (especially 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead”). Kendrick noted, “Other films have certainly surpassed Friday the 13th in bloodshed, but Savini’s work here has a kind of roughshod ingenuity that can only be attained when working on the edges of current possibilities.” More clever than evil (note the lack of tiring suffering, which is so usual of today’s horror), the film’s different murders party in their “fooled you” moments, the most memorable being the famous case of indirection that makes Kevin Bacon’s arrow-through-the-through such a shocking surprise.

Kendrick said, “When viewed in comparison to the current state of horror movies as defined by the Hostel and Saw series, the original Friday the 13th seems downright tame, if not genuinely classical with its stripped down, campfire-tale aesthetic. And that is, ultimately, what the film is: a campfire boogeyman story designed to do little more than build tension and deliver a few well-timed shocks, which it does with precision and even a bit of artistry. It’s certainly easy to knock Friday the 13th for its various faults, but what those criticisms usually boil down to is an assault on its limited aspirations.” I know this film doesn’t do a whole lot, but what it does do it does greatly.

If you haven’t seen this film, you shouldn’t even be reading this review. Go out and see this film because it is one of the most memorable horror films ever made. I wouldn’t mind watching this again if I ever got the chance, even though fans who want to see the famous murderer would be disappointed that he’s nowhere, and Mrs. Voorhees is the actual murderer in here. But still, it’s one that should never be skipped.

Now with that lengthy intro completed, look out tomorrow when we look at the sequel in “Friday the 13^th-a-thon” in “Halloween Month.”