1980: "Friday the 13th"
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Friday the 13th, an indie slasher film released in May of 1980, continues to be seen as low-brow trash. A runaway cash grab that gave birth to eleven more cash grabs in the course of nearly forty years. The franchise became both an icon of the genre and a giant joke. Most critics won't admit this but.....they're secretly glad these movies exist. They're entirely necessary in the grand dialogue of film. It has become the standard for bloated franchises. How often do you see a franchise reach twelve movies (well, Halloween just reached eleven, if you count the Rob Zombie remakes)? That kind of avarice is a sort of unintentional artistic statement, an eternal story that remains static in its premise and filmic goals.
And yet, Friday the 13th, the original, is often considered the ugly duckling of the series, primarily due to the fact that there's no bemasked behemoth, to quote Mayor Vaughn, "injuring a few bathers." Camp Crystal Lake (a perfectly apt name for a camping site in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, though it's shot in New Jersey) is firmly in place and there's a killer, but the killer is Jason's mother, who kills camp counselors in retaliation for neglecting to save Jason from drowning in the lake. Camp Crystal Lake is a holy shrine for Pamela Voorhees, a devout Catholic we presume, and eradicates any sex-deprived nubile who spoils the purity of this sacred place. Once Alice murders Pamela Voorhees, it releases Jason from his watery grave, like a rotting, indestructible golem from Pamela's psyche. It has all the dramatic heft of a mystical Greek tragedy. It could be read as how one's madness can be passed down from generation to generation, like Ari Aster's Hereditary. It certainly could if you dig through the layers of apparent smut. It's really just an sloppy inverse of the Psycho twist. But no matter. Friday the 13th was immune from the redundant criticisms of film purists and became its own entity. But....is the movie actually good?
Despite its seminal status, it's an entry that's, in my estimation, under-appreciated as a fairly adequate thriller. The most surprising aspect on upon rewatching it is how low-key the film's tone is when compared to the gonzo, campy tone of other slasher films that followed. It's often been called dull, but I found it to be a patient film and I think a lot of that is due to Cunningham's workmanlike direction. Working under horror maestro Wes Craven, Cunningham seemed to have the discipline and the right trained eye for this type of material. It's well-photographed (using handhelds to convey the killer's POV and to add naturalism to the scenes) and effectively lighted. The cabins, believe it or not, are a key success to the film's creepiness. They have a perfect old decaying grunginess. You can almost smell the moldiness and the hemp.
The characters, though not three-dimensional, are naturalistic and refreshingly mundane. They are not the ravenously sex-charged idiots that later entries fostered. There are no male gaze shots. There's only one sex scene between Kevin Bacon and Jeannie Taylor, and that's it. And even then, the sex never seems like a tired trope but a natural occurrence between two teenagers dating. There's a couple of teenagers playing a round of Strip Monopoly, but it stops short before it goes too far. Laura Bartram stops the game so she can return to her cabin and check to see if her window is open during a rainstorm. She then brushes her teeth, puts on her pajamas, and reads a book. Even the peripheral characters in the neighboring town have authenticity. There's a refreshing quaintness to these characters and makes the film all the more grounded.
Harry Manfredini's score is a big strength to the film as well, even if there are strains of Bernard Hermann's Psycho score, with its vicious tempo and screeching violins. And it's never overly intrusive and it strengthens the film's mood. Tom Savini's gore effects, though shocking at the time, is fairly tame by today's standards (though the kill scenes are edited; still wasn't enough to make the Siskels of the world pissed off).
Pamela Voorhees is the weakest aspect of the film. It's a disappointing payoff to such a deliberately paced set-up. Betsy Palmer puts in a perfectly fine performance but her character is never set up or introduced and makes the plot twist all too obvious. Its not even a twist, really. Its more of a reveal that the killer is not what the audience would typically expect (i.e. a short 54 year old woman as opposed to a strong, masculine type). Of course it's hard to buy that this elderly woman has the agility or strength to kill all these campers in one night. It also doesn't explain why she's so broodingly silent throughout, yet sweet and docile when she meets Alice.
The jump scare in the denouement is just as cheap as you'd expect. In a "dream" sequence, a zombie child, presumably Jason Voorhees, leaps out of the water and attacks Alice in a rowboat. It's the moment that spawns the entire franchise. The entire franchise spawned by a joke. A cheap jump scare that would be repeated in two more films (the jump scare was perfected in Part II, which we'll get to at some point). We all have Tom Savini to thank for that.
Its financial success and impact is still, to this day, rather baffling to people. Any film could have begat the slasher film glut of the eighties. When you step back, Friday the 13th is a rather unremarkable independent slasher, with no real selling gimmick or big-name actors. Why couldn't it have been Halloween? Why couldn't it have been Black Christmas? Probably because Friday the 13th did a better job of promoting itself, what with an early poster of the film that brazenly advertised itself as "THE MOST TERRIFYING FILM EVER MADE!" even though the script was not even finished, much less thought out. Halloween became popular through word-of-mouth rather than heavy promotion. However, there were a lot of independent slashers that came out that same year, like The Boogeyman, Christmas Evil, He Knows You're Alone, New Year's Evil, Maniac, Terror Train, To All a Goodnight, Prom Night, and so on. Though you have to take into account that Friday the 13th was an independent film that happened to be bought by Paramount and widely distributed.
It's widespread success was not because it was such a critical, iconic hit but as a result of a cumulative snowball effect. Halloween got the ball rolling two years earlier and Friday the 13th happened to be a bankable mound of snow that got the ball even bigger. It's really as simple as that. Friday the 13th was, ironically, lucky to be in the snowball's path. And....Friday the 13th, believe it or not, is not that bad. In the grand scheme of countless slashers (and I've seen plenty and they are, to put it crudely, shit), it's perfectly acceptable. Between great and terrible, it lies smack in the middle. With decent direction, effective atmosphere, and a moderate amount of cheap thrills, Friday the 13th managed to appeal to low to middle-brow tastes. And the young teens, of course, ate it up. It managed to pass a litmus test for the longevity of the slasher film genre in the eye of general moviegoers: "I loved Halloween, and I liked Friday the 13th enough that I'd be perfectly okay with watching more of these." It's the perfect low-risk horror rip-off to launch an entire sub-genre for public consumption, to the chagrin of film snobs.
And that being said, I'm glad it exists.
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