Saturday the 13th
It took about two-and-a-half Friday the 13th movies at my new stomping ground the Rollberg to ascertain that I was in fact surviving the correct horror movie marathon. Before that there were more pressing doubts, such as: “Really? 24 hours after International Women’s Day?” And, “Am I really cancelling all my other plans, many of them sports-related, to go watch a bunch of kitschy horror movies from the 80s?” The answer to all of these questions was an entranced ‘Yes!’ at the gall of the concept, and I wound up having — I do not speak this lightly — literally the most fun I’ve ever had in a movie theatre.
The original Friday the 13th movie sets up a template for the next three, where an unsuspecting collection of cheerful youths settles into a camp or cabin in the woods — the perfect retreat from whence to smoke grass, shotgun beers, and most (importantly) fool around without even the remote prospect of parental intervention.
Each of the first acts, especially watched in quick succession, creates a kind of comfort zone that is soon righteously plundered. We get to compute the faintest echo of class disparity, identify who’s got the weed or the most passable fake ID, and also get acquainted (quickly) with the sexual dynamics of the group. Who’s already, foolishly, plotting their wedding day and who’s competing for the opportunity to pop their cherry. By the time most of this has been determined, the camera has already panned out several times — so we can view all the youthful excitement from over the shoulder of our killer, who’s lurking in the woods. A quite camp echo effect repeats the refrain kill kill kill in diminishing volume; and even after the first gruesome murder, the deal is we’re allowed to roll our eyes.
The last mile or so of the road trip over has already informed us there isn’t a gas station, let alone a phone line other than the one cord that will surely be scissored, for miles. I brought up class a little prematurely just now. The real disparity is not between any of these youth, who for the most part are each other’s neighbours, school-mates, and also always blissfully white — it’s between their giddy arrival in the wilderness and these silent eyes amongst the trees. It’s in the idea that hapless city kids are crossing a dangerous (and more or less economic threshold) into a strange and calculating heartland. Therein lies a clear and dubious moral divide. Judgement is meted out, kill-by-kill, as an implicit form of punishment for all the free-wheeling on display. When Jason begins his night march, he is the God good Christians wish would strike all the hippies down.
This got me thinking about where Hollywood was, and where America was, when people went to see these films fresh in the theatre. I don’t have much in the way of evidence but I’ve got to start from somewhere … In Slouching Towards Bethlehem Joan Didion depicts the city of Los Angeles as though it were some kind of stalking, conniving beast, in near-perfect anticipation of the real-life shock-and-awe of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Even after the perpetrators were apprehended, Charles Manson, his vile commune, and additional sculptors like the Zodiac Killer cast a ghostly pall that I wish to believe haunted California for at least another two decades — causing the movie business to pivot from monsters who were unknown, mysterious entities from abroad (aliens, or that illegal immigrant Dracula) to ones that might follow you home from the grocery store.
The coast must have felt clear in or by the 1980s, and with that must have come a kind of bull market for make-believe serial killers. In the Friday the 13th movies, you’re in on the joke of it all — of people’s Christian parents potentially murdering them for waltzing into sexual debut, especially high on drugs. (This could never have been you, because your aesthetic consumption was at least re-enforced by personal values and political struggle.) Even in 2024 this is quite a fascinating way to satirise an endless, globally familiar culture war; even if the allegory is done away with quickly so we can get right to the bloodbath.
You don’t actually see Jason as history has canonised him now for two entire movies. In the original Friday the 13th, his mother explains Scooby-Doo-villain style that her son Jason Voorhees drowned at the bottom of Crystal Lake — because a pair of irresponsible teenagers couldn’t hear him calling for help as they, well, boinked their summer away. In that sense, its big reveal is as much a disappointment as its technical deficiencies. The killer is just some dude’s crazy-ass mom, and her executions are slowed down, freeze-framed even, to help us comprehend where all our shock and dismay is supposed to go. I dozed off a couple times because I’m at that point in my mid-30s where capitalism impedes even on my free time in the city. But kudos to horror movies from the 80s for startling me awake every time the music or a piercing scream produced another body. My heart threatened to pole-vault right out of my chest each time, but was calmed down immediately by the giggles of my fellow patrons.
The 2nd and 3rd movies, the best ones, were both directed by Steve Miner — but in such a manner that homage was paid to Sean S Cunningham’s devices from the first whilst valuable lessons were learned and applied. A new group of eager young people visits Camp Crystal Lake, and this time a visibly masculine figure with a sack over his head emerges from the deep to slaughter them all. Jason still isn’t wearing his mask but he has at least begun to craft his timeless logo: a clear marker for both the audience and that one last survivor that death is coming.
In my early teens, purposely shitting myself on Halloween, Scream and a slew of campus-based slasher flicks, I chose to see beauty in those horrific masks. It was easy enough if the director decorated their arrival in the shrill tones of a working violin, and if the frames were sliced as gloriously as they are occasionally in Friday the 13th Parts 2 and 3. We don’t just peer from over the monster’s shoulder now; the beast steps directly into the scene or his last victim bolts through the woods towards us. I’m pretty sure the bit where Ginny darts across the darkness, with only her hair aglow, and Jason pursues, with only his mask aglow, was the sort of trial-and-error genius you arrive at by trying some shit in the moment. I genuinely felt like I was at the movies for once, suspended in fantasy, and that a film-maker was giving me everything they had — like their life depended on it.
I wish The Final Chapter hadn’t played out as woefully as its title did, because personally I could have done without a) worrying whether we were gonna knife an actual child here, guys, and b) said child undoing seven hours of somewhat coordinated adult violence, and also c) ending such a nostalgic evening with a cold reminder of what the movies do now: land endings wherever the hell the surface is flat enough. I’m from 1986 so I was a little late for it all but man — what I’d do today for something untested and risky and adventurous to crush a bunch of popcorn to.
