Friday the 13th (1980) Review

Friday the 13^th (1980) Review

 

It’s been a while since I first wrote about Friday the 13^th, so what better day than today to finally review the original film? Even though most people have heard of the Friday the 13^th franchise whether they’ve seen any of the entries or not, many have misconceptions regarding what the first movie is actually about and how its exploitative nature led to so many sequels.

The story begins in the 1950’s with a couple of teenage counselors being murdered by an unseen killer at Camp Crystal Lake. It zooms in on the girl’s face frozen mid-scream, then the title comes zooming in with such force it shatters a pane of glass you didn’t even know was between the screen and the logo. What follows is the latest attempt to re-open the camp, but as one counselor learns from some locals, the camp is supposedly cursed, and she, too, becomes one of the latest victims of the still unknown killer. The other teens don’t realize the danger they’re in until it’s too late, and the final girl is the only one to live to tell the tale.

There are some gory kills and suspenseful scenes throughout, but there is also a lot of bullshit, with the counselors swimming and playing strip Monopoly and wandering around at night when they should be in bed. I think one of the reasons this movie is so fondly remembered by the young generations who saw it when it first came out is because of its depiction of teenagers and how much it shows them. Even though it can seem a bit dull in between moments of murder, the teens are shown just hanging out and having fun and I’m sure real teens in the audiences enjoyed seeing attractive people their age doing things they liked to do during the summer. Of course, that relatability is also what made the scary parts even scarier. The kills are set up well, none of them feel too repetitive, and it never feels like the director held back. I find it interesting than producer/director Sean S. Cunningham directed the first film and remained on board in varying capacities for every sequel that followed, but he never again directed a Friday the 13^th which is yet another element that makes the original unique. 

I think my favourite part of the movie is the music by Harry Manfredini, because it’s so overdramatic that it’s almost funny at times, but it definitely gives the film an unnerving energy it would have been sorely lacking without that score. The makeup effects by Tom Savini are also quite good, especially for how low the budget was. It’s easy to forget that Friday the 13^th started out as nothing more than a way to capitalize on the success of Halloween two years earlier. Halloween delivered the first true slasher film, creating a template even more defined than what was set up with earlier proto-slasher films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Psycho, but I think Friday the 13^th should really get the credit for starting the slasher craze of the 1980’s. It copied a lot of what made Halloween scary and did it all on a similarly low budget, then there was a bidding war for distribution rights, and it became a huge financial hit, proving that Halloween wasn’t just a fluke and prompting others to exploit the success as cheaply and as quickly as possible.

One of the biggest differences between Halloween and Friday the 13^th is the slasher villain star. We know just enough about Michael Myers to be afraid of him from beginning to end, but the audience doesn’t know who the killer is in Friday the 13^th until the final act. All we get are indeterminate glimpses of boots or a hand, but many of the characters do see who it is before they die. There are multiple times when we see from the killer’s POV (another trick copied from earlier horror successes) and the victims look right at the screen, which still works to make the viewer uncomfortable. The characters aren’t very interesting and the acting quality ranges, but it’s good enough to hold you there until the big reveal. We discover the killer has much more back story than may have been expected: it’s Pamela Voorhees, who was a cook at the camp in the 50’s when her son drowned due to neglectful counselors, and she is avenging his death by making sure the camp never re-opens and killing anyone who tries to do so. Having a female killer was (and still is) uncommon in a horror flick, and she wasn’t masked, making her less like a purely evil Boogeyman a la Michael Myers and more like a mysterious psychopathic killer a la Norman Bates.

The reason there was a bidding war over Friday the 13^th was because the studios knew the filmmakers had made something with big potential, and that potential really came down to the ending. Tom Savini suggested they needed one last scare after Mrs. Voorhees was decapitated with the machete by the final girl Alice, and the character of Jason, who had only been mentioned by name for the first time mere minutes after his mother was revealed to be the killer, seemed like a good candidate to deliver that scare. The only problem? He had drowned long ago, so they decided to make it a dream, which makes it yet another example of copying from an earlier horror success. Savini has said he got the idea after watching Carrie, but for what it is, the scare of a zombified Jason leaping out of the lake and grabbing Alice is even scarier than Carrie’s final scare because it comes out of nowhere and it isn’t as obvious that it’s a dream until after it happens.

The effort to create that final scare is what made Friday the 13^th grow from a simple idea for one movie capitalizing on the success of many other better horror movies into its own huge franchise. The sequels focused on adult Jason, putting the machete his mother had wielded into his hands, giving him a hockey mask to turn him into a proper masked slasher villain, and eventually pulling him away from Crystal Lake in order to have him kill teens in new locales and even fight Freddy Krueger. The goriness of the original had to be topped with each new entry, and this is why the original is so misremembered today. For the time, yeah, it was pretty explicit with its violence, but compared to what would come later, it’s almost disappointing—if all you want to see is Jason dismembering people, that is.

I don’t think Friday the 13^th is the best entry in the whole series, but it is still a slasher classic. If you haven’t seen any of them before and wonder if you should, watch this first one to find out. Even though it’s different from the sequels in a number of ways I think it’s still a good litmus test, and the best of the sequels never strayed too far away from the look and the vibes of the one that started it all.

Related: A Brief History of Cinema Issue #1: Friday the 13^th series: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-brief-history-of-cinema-issue-1.html