Editorial: Revisiting a Supposed Horror "classic", Friday the 13th

In 1996, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson created Scream, a film that reinvented the slasher film and genre. The film's now famous opening scene involves Ghostface calling Drew Barrymore and forcing her to answer horror trivia in order to save her and her boyfriend's life. The most memorable question is Ghostface asking his victim: "Who was the killer in Friday the 13th?" Barrymore quickly responds with "Jason! It was Jason!!!!". Of course, as we die-hard horror fans know, Jason wasn't the killer in the first movie and Ghostface quickly dispatches of Gertie.

What's interesting about this piece of horror writing is that most common folks would have given Jason as the answer to Ghostface's question. The fact that this minor piece of trivia becomes so clever and powerful is that it first establishes that the audience has no earthly clue as to why Friday the 13th is famous in the first place while simultaneously reinforcing the notion that the film is known not for its quality, but for one character who doesn't appear in it until a 5 second "dream sequence" at the very end.

I'm going to take an unpopular stance within the realm of horror fans and supporters. I'm going to argue that Friday the 13th is no "classic". It's popularity and notoriety are due in large part to the series taken as a whole, 80's pop-culture factors, and an unwarranted reputation (extreme gore, sex, and nudity) that has become the stuff of pop legend. To say that Friday the 13th is a "good" horror movie requires one to suspend disbelief and sense, something horror fans have seemed more than welcome to do the past 25 years.

Let me first state that I like the F13 films. I have no inherent disdain towards the slasher genre. I consider Bob Clark's Black Christmas and John Carpenter's Halloween to be right up there in my top tier of favorite horror films. As far as I'm concerned, the F13 films are all fun in their own way, some way better than others, but I don't begrudge the notion that horror fans prop this series up on a pedestal. Jason Voorhees is an iconic horror figure, no doubt about that. Watching him spear, hack, and slice up one-dimensional characters never gets old. The sheer amount of movies in the series (10, not including Freddy vs. Jason, all released theatrically by major studios Paramount and New Line) is part of the appeal and something most horror franchises (other than that venerable Witchcraft series) can't match. The fun ofthe F13 series is in the idea, not the execution of the movies themselves.

So here we are, revisiting the film that "started it all", the original Friday the 13th directed by Sean S. Cunningham. To take a close and critical look at this movie requires a couple of things. First, you must divorce yourself from all the baggage associated with the rest of the series. There's been 25 years of hype to set aside and since the F13 films are one of the premiere "gateway" franchises for prospective horror fans, you've got to suppress any warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia. In effect, you've got to pretend that Friday the 13th is in a vacuum; that it's a stand-alone film and judge it on its own merits. When we do that, what do we get?

The plot of the film is about as simplistic as you can get: a group of teens restarting a summer camp get picked off one-by-one by an unseen killer. From the opening scene (a killer POV shot), it becomes clear that the film is a blatant knock-off of Halloween, a film that was released a couple years earlier and became the highest grossing indie film of all-time. There is no denying that the film is an attempt to cash-in on the sudden demand for slasher films that came with the success of Halloween. Interestingly, I've never heard a supporter of F13 do so because of the film's "quality". If you compare Sean S. Cunningham's direction against that of John Carpenter, you'll find no comparison. I challenge any horror fan to watch the two films back-to-back and find an area where F13 is superior. Understand that one's personal feeling's of preference or whether you "like" one over the other is irrelevant. I'm talking strictly on the cinematic level these two films have no comparison in terms of quality. F13 to Halloween is the equivalent of De Palma to Hitchcock. The divide is immense, measurable, and easy to see. It's just not in the same league.

Now, just because something is a knock-off of something better, doesn't necessarily mean that the movie is bad per se. After all, even De Palma put out some good films by plagiarizing Hitchcock, though to compare De Palma and Cunningham would be an insult to De Palma. So let's de-construct some of the reasons, and myths, as to why F13 works. Maybe then we can get to the heart of why it is considered a "classic".

1) The story is great, the setting is classic.

The story behind Jason Voorhees (drowned in Crystal Lake while the counselors were "making love") is one of the most recognizable in horrordom. It's become a mythology in its own right. But remember, we're just focusing on the first movie here, and pretending as if the ensuing 10 films never existed. The film opens in 1958 and then flashes forward to the present. We find out that the camp has been closed ever since the deaths of the two counselors who are making out at the beginning of the film. Sprinkled throughout the film are characters who show up to offer cryptic insights, but nobody ever explicitly implies that Jason is the character who may or may not be running around. I'd argue strongly that Jason is never made a threat and his presence is not integral to either the characters or the audience themselves. Instead, you have a pseudo-mystery (who's the killer?) involving an unseen killer (who seems to be recognized by a couple characters before they are offed...) hacking up teens in non-gory ways (more on this later). The back story is serviceable, but there is nothing more to it than something like Halloween and in the context of the film, it doesn't really strike fear into the audience. The setting itself is a good one (an isolated camp) but Cunningham never makes full use of the isolated nature of the camp and the visuals become too repetitive over the course of the film. The setting is just a variation on the standard formula, and one that is not supported to its full potential.

2) This film sparked the 80's horror boom!

Sort of untrue depending on how you look at it. The reality is that Friday the 13th was just one of many that were jumping on the Halloween success train. Other slashers released the same year included Tourist Trap, Terror Train, Mother's Day, De Palma's Dressed to Kill, and even Carpenter's ghostly slashers in The Fog. There had already been a strong trend towards these films when Friday the 13th came along. Where F13 gets props is for being the most successful of the bunch, grossing about 40 million dollars. However, grossing that much money doesn't necessarily mean people liked it. The sequel released the following year (and other than the first 15 minutes, a clearly superior film than the original in almost every respect) only grossed half that amount showing that audiences had a decided lack of enthusiasm to the original film. It took word of mouth, the introduction of Jason Voorhees, and the novelty of "the final chapter" for 3 and 4 to make some bank. But the fact that the original film had such a drop-off in audience in comparison to the sequel is very telling in my opinion. I think it shows a direct correlation between the success of the character of Jason Voorhees, rather than the success of the film itself. In other words, the series started getting its love not from the original film, but from the accumulation of all the films together and the character of Jason Voorhees. Did F13 lead to the 80's horror boom? It had an impact on subsequent slashers in that they all wanted to mimic the formula to gain the same amount of success, but to say it began the 80's horror movement is giving it far too much credit. There were many other factors for that, not the least of which was home video.

3) The sex and violence are awesome! Long live Savini!

This is probably the most overrated aspect of F13 and not surprisingly the fall back position for every supporter of the film. F13 is one of those films that seems a lot more violent and racy than it actually is. This is not a new phenomenon. TCM is considered by many to be one of the goriest movies ever made even though it has less than a single bottle of Karo used throughout. Same goes for Halloween, which is incredibly light on gore and T&A (girls frolic around in their underwear a lot, but even the most famous scene, P.J. Soles's "see anything you like?" is no payoff). To illustrate this, I'm going to go through the numerous kills in the film. To be fair, F13 was allegedly butchered by the MPAA, but we can only go based off what we see in the film. Maybe it would have been more impressive without the censorship, we'll never know. So, here's the kills. I'll let you be the judge of how graphic they are:

1. counselor holds bloody stomach. stabbing is not shown.
2. counselor screams, freeze frame, opening credits.
3. counselor's throat slit. Shown for less than 3 seconds before fade to white.
4. counselor shown with throat slit on top bunk, killed off camera
5.Kevin Bacon's famous "throat scene", lasts 6 seconds.
6. counselor gets axe to the head. impact not shown. shot lasts 2 seconds.
7. counselor killed off camera
8. lead counselor killed off camera.
9. counselor killed off camera, later found to have arrow in his head and torso. shot lasts 3 seconds.
10. decapitation of Mrs. Voorhees. less than 2 seconds.

As for the T&A, only one couple actually has sex in the film. During the sex scene, no nudity is shown other than Kevin Bacon's ass. In fact, the only time you see a boob (and it's only one, funny enough) is after the sex has taken place and even then, only briefly. So what you have here is a film that has reached legendary status for how gory it is and for how much nudity is has, when in reality it doesn't have much of either. The funny thing is that this is probably one of the tamest films Tom Savini has ever done. Dawn of the Dead is an example of something far gorier than this.

So what you have is a film that is 95 minutes of plodding, uninteresting buildup and less than 20 seconds of actual violence and nudity. I wonder if anyone has ever stopped to think about that for a second. You've got a film with no characters of any discernible interest, whose only saving grace is supposedly the villian, Mrs. Voorhees...

4) Mrs. Voorhees is the shiznit!

First off, the idea that Jason's mother is the killer and not Jason himself is a great one. The few scenes where Betsy Palmer goes a little off her rocker are awesome. But a couple shots do not make a great villian. In reality, the last 20 minutes of the movie is a plump old woman chasing a young girl around the woods. They slap each other around a bit. They sorta "throw down", but in a "we don't want to get hurt making this low-budget movie" kind of way. It's really a pretty pathetic sequence when you really think about it. The character of Jason's mother has become iconic, but it's noteworthy that the character is more recognizable as a rotten head surrounded by candles .

If you really sit down and watch Friday the 13th you'll realize very quickly that as a film, it's almost nonexistent. It's got a clever title, a reputation that is more myth than reality, and frankly isn't even the most entertaining or well-made film in the series. Over at Deadlantern.com, my friend Jeff posted his top 10 in the series and listed this as #1. One of his reasons was because "it laid the foundation for one of the most enduring franchises in horror history". That's true, but that has nothing to do with the movie itself. If F13 were released today, it would be ridiculed for its terrible pacing, uninspired one-dimensional characters, lack of gore and sex, as well as its lame direction. It's amazing what 25 years can do to a film...

And ultimately, that's all I'm saying. I'm not knocking Friday the 13th so much as I'm trying to show that the credibility it has accumulated over the years is not the result of the film itself, but the entire sum of the series and everything that sprang forth from the series.. Just like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees became a pop-culture icon in the 80's (I was Jason for Halloween one year, Freddy the next). The horror industry turned its boogeymen into merchandise. An R rated horror movie became a video game for kids to play on their Nintendo. Jason was elevated to something above cult status and became a household name. Tons of sequels were released, each more ridiculous than the last, and I think the original film became lumped into the frenzy that came about because of it. People have a natural inclination to prefer the "original" over what comes after, but a strict reading of the original film shows that the legend doesn't live up to the reality.

If you do not let the other films influence your viewing experience, you'll find that Friday the 13th is an incredibly overrated film. One that does not hold up upon repeat viewings and one that's more notable for what comes after it than for what it itself is.