Friday the 13th

It’s October, which means Halloween is coming up in America – a time where people dress up like monsters, children roam the streets searching for candy, adults have parties where women dress like slutty cats and everybody gets drunk and in the interim everybody watches horror movies. We don’t celebrate Halloween in Australia – it’s not something that ever caught on. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the general attitude of the people, but besides some stores selling decorations that’ll never be bought or used there’s no Halloween spirit here. It’s a shame, because that means we tend to miss out on the best part of the holiday, the viewing of horror movies.

Well I’m not one to miss out on spooky nonsense, so for October (and possibly past it) I’ll be looking at horror movies. I feel like that’s something everybody with a poorly edited blog with zero views does at some point, and now it’s my turn. And what best way to do it than go directly for the series everybody already knows about? So I’ll be starting by reviewing the Friday the 13^th series, aiming to do one film every day. So here we go, starting with the first, the film that sparked a series that’s over ten films long. Here’s ‘Friday the 13^th’. 

This is the movie that started the massive franchise, and also had a big influence on the slasher film genre. Of course the movie itself took massive influence from an even earlier slasher, John Carpenter’s Halloween, but this still had a big influence on many of the tropes and conventions of typical slasher films. People tend to forget that this one is still a pretty effective slasher. It might be slower paced than some of the later films in the series, but it works well.

The story is simple, and is essentially the plot skeleton of almost every other F13 movie. A group of teenaged camp counsellors head to Camp Crystal Lake to prepare it for some fifty children campers arriving in the summer. When they arrive they learn Crystal Lake has a nasty reputation – known by the locals as ‘Camp Blood’, twenty years earlier a young boy had drowned there and a pair of counsellors were murdered the following year. While the teens fool around at the camp they begin being stalked by a killer who picks them off one by one.

The killer is revealed to be Pamela Voorhees, the former camp cook whose son, Jason, was the boy who had drowned twenty years back. She snapped, blaming the negligent camp counsellors who were having sex when they should have been supervising Jason, and killed them in revenge. Now, twenty years later and on Jason’s birthday, she’s returned to kill again. Surprisingly, these days some people seem to not know that Pamela was the killer - after all, Friday the 13th is pretty much synonymous with Jason Voorhees, but here, in the original, his mother was the killer.

 

Our heroine here is Alice, a nice, wholesome, completely forgettable girl (because they’re almost always nice, wholesome, completely forgettable girls). Actually one thing the film does well is portray the camp counsellors as actually potentially being camp counsellors. They still act like horny teens, and do the things we’ve come to expect – mess around, have sex, get high/drunk, wander around alone in the dark for no good reason, etc. – but I could see them as actual camp volunteers. They do all fit the traditional horror movie stereotype roles (like the goofball, the cool guy, etc.), something this movie, while not the first slasher, certainly helped solidify. Alice is the sole survivor in the film and manages to behead Pamela Voorhees in the finale after a pretty lengthy chase/fight.

The ending is iconic. After decapitating Pamela Voorhees, an exhausted Alice is in a canoe peacefully drifting in the middle of the lake when suddenly Jason, looking like a zombie, bursts out of the water and pulls her out of the boat. She wakes up in hospital with the police who saved her, who remark that they didn’t see anybody in the lake with her. It’s all just a dream though, but it’s still a freaky, memorable ending.

The film pretty much set the formula and structure the future F13 movies all basically follow from that point on – a bunch of teens go to Camp Crystal Lake, somebody will try and warn them off, somebody will mention the story of Jason Voorhees, they’ll mess around and have sex and then they’ll start getting killed off one by one until the survivor/s confront Jason Voorhees and seemingly kill/stop him.

The film is a bit odd in terms of how it handles its killer’s reveal though. You don’t know who the killer is until the end, but from the cast to that point there really isn’t anybody it could be – barring the few random townsfolk and the resident crazy guy who warns people not to go to Crystal Lake (a recurring character type in F13 movies, and far too silly to be the killer) there isn’t anybody else around. The only signifier of the killer is that they drive a jeep and a POV scene that shows they wear a large ring, so you absolutely never get the feeling that it’s one of the counsellors. It lacks that sort of ‘who could the killer be?’ mystery a lot of other slashers tend to have.

It’s what makes the Pamela Voorhees revelation both surprising and absurdly obvious – she shows up out of nowhere near the end after almost everybody is dead, talks at length about her son Jason who’d drowned at the camp and then suddenly she’s trying to kill Alice. She and Jason hadn’t been seen or mentioned in the film before then (there was only a passing mention of ‘the boy who drowned’), so her appearance at the very end is pretty strange, obvious and a bit blatant. It is a surprise to see what seems like an ordinary, seemingly nice little lady being the slasher though. Not many other slashers had done it, especially since then.

 

It’s a nice looking movie, and one of the best strengths is that Camp Crystal Lake actually looks and feels legit. The camp looks like a camp, complete with logging shed, cabins and an archery range, and the lake actually looks like a lake – it’s impressive in size and has dual jetties and a canoe shed and everything. These are things a lot of the sequels miss completely, and this is one of the rare times the camp has actually looked like a camp (it helps that it actually was filmed at a real-life summer camp). In terms of filmmaking, the most memorable stylistic choice was the scenes shot in the killer’s POV as they stalk/kill their victims. It’s wasn’t a new idea though. Halloween began in Michael’s POV as he killed his sister, but more importantly the Italian ‘giallo’ horror movies of the sixties and seventies employed that tactic all the time.

The gore and kills are simple but still hold up well, which makes sense since it was done by make-up maestro Tom Savini. A few throats are slashed, but more memorably a girl gets an axe in the face and Kevin Bacon gets an arrow through the throat. Those are some of the most iconic kills in the entire franchise.

 

There are some odd things in the script that don't quite work. The ‘Camp Blood’ stigma thing with the townsfolk doesn’t really work because the time period is way too long and the tragedy is way too minor. Twenty years is a long time for something as relatively minor as one drowning and two murders to cause a place to become ‘cursed’. While after this point the stigma will make sense (a whole lot of teens are going to be killed there from this point on), this time it’s pretty minor, especially since there were twenty years where nothing bad happened at all, so telling the kids they’re doomed because of something that happened two decades ago is ridiculous.

And that’s the first film, a slasher seemingly only made to attempt to follow on the success and popularity of John Carpenter’s Halloween that managed to be a surprising success of its own, spawning a massive franchise that has extended from films to books, a TV series (yes, it exists), comics and even videogames. While it owes a lot to films that came before it, (notably Halloween, but also others - scenes shot from the killer’s POV were a staple of Italian ‘giallo’ horror movies from the 60s and 70s), F13 offered its own mark on the slasher genre, helping to solidify the various tropes and elements the genre still uses to this day. It also helps that it’s still a fun movie. Next up we get the sequel, which capitalised on the success of the original by basically being the same.