Friday the 13th (

1980

) ½

In the past, I dismissed Friday the 13th as a cookie-cutter work of mediocrity, an incompetent knock-off of the better slasher films that came before. However, upon this re-watch of the initial entry in the series, I am ready to admit that I am guilty of being little better than a hipster who dislikes something simply because it is popular. Friday the 13th may not be on the same level as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Halloween (1978) but it is by no means a bad film. Indeed, on this viewing, I found myself consistently surprised by the overall quality of the movie. Sure, this is still the film that would inspire a metric fuck-ton of low-effort, low-energy ripoffs to flood the theaters and video rental shops of the world with lurid posters and promises of debauchery and deviance that simply didn't exist, but that doesn't do much to detract from Friday the 13th's overall quality. It's a film that's given a bad wrap because it was inspired by real giants, and gave birth to a multitude of crap, but when you strip away that context the film at the core of it all is nothing so terrible, indeed it can be a downright fun way to spend pass an evening under the right circumstances.

We open the film 22 years in the past with a lascivious young couple at a Summer camp being sliced up by a knife-wielding maniac hidden from sight by virtue of using a PoV camera. At this point in the film, I can forgive my previous self for dismissing this movie, as this is the same opening beat for beat as Halloween (1978) without the chilling stinger of realizing that the previously unseen killer was a mere child (Friday the 13th will save the reveal for much later). Moreover, all the cinematic tricks used here, the cold opening, the unseen PoV killer, the mixture of sex and violence were in use by better filmmakers for years before Halloween (1978) made them available to mainstream American cinema. It is nothing special, just a well-executed knock-off of a popular film. However, having watched several hundred incompetent knock-offs of successful films, I'm inclined to acknowledge that a functional ripoff is still an accomplishment of sorts.

The two young lovers murdered in the opening sequence of the film were counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, their killer was never caught and shortly thereafter the camp was shut down. 22 Years later, Steve Christy, the heir to the family that used to run the camp decides that it's high time to get the place up and running again. He's brought together a team of young adults to help him patch up the old buildings and get the campground in working order again before the season starts and the campers arrive. The locals think it's a stupid idea given the camp's gory history. After all who would want to send their kids to the site of a grisly murder when there are plenty of Summer camps without the sordid history of Camp Crystal Lake. One local in particular, an old geezer named Ralph, takes it upon himself to warn everyone heading to the camp that they are all “doomed!” Ralph is the first indication the audience has that anything is really wrong with the camp, and will serve as the film's primary Red Herring for the time being. However, he's not really suited for that, because early on we see one of the camp counselors get picked up and killed by a PoV murderer driving and jeep, and shortly thereafter it's revealed that Ralph relies on a bike for his transportation. Obviously, I wasn't surprised when it turned out that Ralph wasn't the murderer, but I was shocked when it was revealed that this crazy old geezer has a wife. This raises all sorts of questions that go unanswered throughout the film like, was he always so crazy or is this some kind of late-onset dementia that we're dealing with? Does he have some other attributes that make up for his obvious insanity, like is he an excellent cook or something?

Despite all the ill omens and warnings, a collection of young people gather at the camp and get to work fixing the place up. There's annoying prankster Ned, alpha male Jack, designated eye candy Marcia/Brenda, final girl Alice, and unremarkable guy Bill. They spend a bit of time frolicking in the woods and the lake before a storm blows in and Steve leaves in his jeep for the town to get supplies (incidentally, he's the only one with a car). At this point the killer starts to target the counselors, picking them off one by one. First up, mercifully, is the annoying Ned who is killed and dumped in the top bunk in one of the cabins. Jack and Marcia, by chance, slip off from the others and have sex in that same cabin, in the bunk right below Ned's bloody corpse (talk about situational awareness). After they finish, Marcia heads for the outhouse, while Jack reclines on the bed, only to get an arrow jammed up his throat by the unseen killer who was lying under the bed the whole time.

The post-coital murder by an arrow is significant both in terms of technical achievement, and purely academic reasoning. In terms of gore, it is a massive leap from the Slasher films that came before it. Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) both gave the impression that they were bloodier than they really were. When you think back on the films they leave a feeling of constant gore, but when you actually sit down and watch the films again you quickly discover that almost all the really nasty stuff is implied, happening off-screen or hidden behind careful cutaways. Certainly, films before Friday the 13th had put their gore front and center, like Blood Feast (1963) or Jungle Holocaust (1977). Indeed, these films had frequently been more shocking, more violent, and crueler in their execution than anything Friday the 13th or its sequels would ever aspire to. However, these films had limited commercial appeal, because there are only so many weirdos who go into a movie expecting to be clubbed over the head with atrocious onscreen gore. Friday the 13th managed to find the sweet spot between the artful implications of earlier slashers and the gross-out gore of the splatter and exploitation spheres. It was the kind of gore that was easy to replicate provided you had a competent special effects man on the job and wasn't so much that it would scare away general audiences.

In academic terms, this scene is significant because, as near as I can tell, it is the beginning of the having sex = death trope of Slasher films. As I've mentioned in other reviews, earlier slasher films did not necessarily have virgin final girls. The final girl of Black Christmas (1974) was not only not a virgin but pregnant and considering an abortion to boot, and there was nothing to suggest that the final girl of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was a virgin. Only Laurie Strode of Halloween (1978) was explicitly said to be a virgin, though this was hardly the crux of her character. In Friday the 13th, the death of the two lovers immediately after their consummation makes narrative sense, as the killer has a stated reason for killing sexually active camp counselors because her son drowned on their watch. Academics are liable to push this interpretation to mean that the film, in general, is decrying premarital sex and longing for a return to a more conservative, stodgier time. However, that seems hard to square with the adolescent make-up of the film's target audience. Teens in 1981 were, for the most part, not particularly excited by the idea of rolling back America's sexual politics to 1957, especially if it meant that they themselves wouldn't have an opportunity to get laid. The nonsense about secret, anti-sex, pro-conservative messages in slasher movies is just that: nonsense. I've also heard it argued that sex and death are in such close proximity to one another because of budget and time constraints. Obviously both sex and violence are selling points for a horror movie, and the logic goes that the film needs to cram as much of them in as possible to fill seats. This reasoning falls flat when you look at the rest of the movie and see how little violence or nudity there is in all of it, countless minutes pass without anyone dying or getting naked. So surely, the placement of sex and death so close together is not accidental. The answer is obvious, or at least should be obvious, for anyone who was ever a virgin and in a position to lose their virginity. Sure, the moment is exciting but it's also one fraught with danger and fear. Rejection, humiliation, disease, and pregnancy are all on the table as possible consequences and while those aren't as scary as grisly death they are a source of considerable anxiety for lots of young people. Many in the initial audiences of Friday the 13th would have connected to this scene, and scenes in later films just like it. The connection of sex and death reflects the comparative youth and inexperience of the audience, not the reactionary sentiments of the times or the filmmakers.

In short order, Marcia, Bill, and Brenda are killed off by the same murderer who has been stalking the camp, leaving Alice to fend for herself before help arrives. She only really starts to panic when she starts turning up all the dead bodies that have been sprinkled throughout the camp at regular intervals. It gets downright comical at one point where Alice is fleeing from the killer only to continuously blunder into the mortal remains of her former friends and co-workers. In one screen she runs towards the camera only to recoil as a body falls into view from the top of the frame. There is simply no way that she could have not seen this body before it falls into shot; the jump scare is done solely for the benefit of the audience. Just when she's really scared though, a ray of hope arrives in the form of Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of the Christy's. The only problem is that Alice starts to learn pretty quickly that Mrs. Voorhees isn't exactly sane. Indeed, she's been the killer all along. She was driven mad by the death of her son Jason, who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake when his counselors were off making love. Now she's got a grudge against Camp Crystal Lake in general and any horny camp counselors who happen to be working there in particular, and she's planning to avenge her son by murdering any camp counselors unlucky enough to cross her path.

The killer's reveal is also handled with surprising deftness. Throughout the whole film, we've only seen the killer from her PoV, and all of the incidental evidence has suggested that it's a man stalking the campers. We know the killer wears heavy work boots and drives a jeep, and consequently, we expect her to be a man (not to mentioned the gendered expectations that cause us to assume all murderers, and indeed all violent criminals, are men until proven otherwise). So when we finally get a glimpse of Mrs. Voorhees, we can't help but be surprised by the sudden reveal that our killer is not some hulking brute, but a harmless-looking middle-aged woman. Indeed, like Alice, we for a moment fail to recognize that Mrs. Voorhees is the monster (amusingly, even modern audiences can make this mistake because most first-time viewers come in expecting Jason to be the killer here like he is in the sequels). We gradually realize just how crazy Mrs. Voorhees is, and how much of a threat she is to Alice by her erratic behavior and strange dialogue. It's a great way of putting us into the shoes of the character and learning, as she does, just what a desperate situation she's in. This whole reveal could have fallen on its face were it not for the unhinged performance of Betsy Palmer as Mrs. Voorhees, as her character is by definition, not physically intimidating. Fortunately, Palmer delivers a truly creepy performance, especially when she adopts the voice of her long-dead son and urges herself to “kill her mommy, kill her!”

The movie falls flat when it comes to its characters, unlike Halloween (1978), there is nobody there for the audience to really latch onto and project themselves into. Alice is a non-entity, who the only real information we get about her is that she has some unstated business to take care of back home, and is considering leaving the camp at the end of the week. She's not even given the common final girl archetype of the virginal good girl, as she readily joins the others for a round of Strip Monopoly. While she never has sex during the course of the film, I find it a little bit difficult to believe that she's a virgin just because of that. Indeed, all the girls seem to have the same personality, that of a young woman; all their lines and scenes could be re-arranged and I doubt that I'd be able to tell the difference. Jack and Ned fair better, one being a cool guy and the other being an obnoxious dweeb, but are still hardly anything unique or interesting. Indeed, Mrs. Voorhees and Ralph are the only figures that stand out in any significant way from the rest of the herd, being homicidal and delusional respectively.

Friday the 13th begins to shine through just as the lights start to dwindle. Much of the film is outdoors, in the natural gloom of a forest's night, which gives it a look similar to The Blob (1958) where brightly dressed characters float in a sea of darkness. The film deftly plays with the darkness, seldom does it get in the way of understanding the actions of a scene and frequently it is used to great effect. In one memorable moment, the camera holds steady as a figure emerges from the shadows as he walks through the darkness of the woods. The filmmakers are careful to give everyone a brightly colored poncho lest they fade into the darkness, and when more than one character is present they make sure that they are wearing distinct colors so we know who is who even when the hoods and darkness would make it otherwise impossible.

The soundtrack consists of constant wailing string instruments that try to capture the frenzy of Jaws (1975) or Psycho (1960) but generally fall short of either iconic soundtrack. Tellingly, the only bit of music that became iconic from this mess was the synthetic hiss that plays when the killer is stalking his victims, this would eventually become the mainstay of the series.