Well, we’re flying through 2017 like Luke Skywalker through the Death Star trench, and here it is already Halloween time again! I LOVE Halloween y’all! It’s one of my favorite times of the year. I hate the fall and winter, but Halloween serves as an exceptional consolation for all of the cold weather and short days. I love horror films, and candy, and costumes… It’s just my sweet spot of holidays, pun absolutely intended. So imagine my excitement when I realized that I’d get a friday the 13th in October! Not only do we get to start looking at some great Halloween movies, but I get to review Friday the 13th on friday the 13th! And let me tell you, I’m stoked. We’ve got some great stuff to reminisce about today. That said, let’s get down to it! (You’re welcome.)
For any of you who may not be aware, Friday the 13th was released in 1980. I could be wrong on this count, but to me, this film along with classics like Halloween, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre really played a big part in defining the modern slasher film as we know it today. And you can see that in all of the imitation films that followed shortly after, and even into today. However, in my opinion, these original films really set the bar for fun slashers. Friday the 13th tells the tale of Camp Crystal Lake, where in 1957, Jason Voorhees died as a young boy from drowning. The assumption, at least from Mrs. Voorhees perspective, is that a couple of counselors who were too busy coupling at the time were the cause of his death with their inattentiveness. So in 1958, two counselors who were also in the middle of coupling are murdered, and the camp closed. However, in 1980, a man named Steve Christy sets out to reopen the camp. To that end, he’s hired a handful of teenage camp counselors to help him finish some last-minute refurbishing in preparation for opening day.
That’s the stage upon which this film is set. From the very beginning of the movie, the locals are warning the camp affiliated folks that the camp is cursed, and telling them that their best course of action would be to go home. Sure enough, the one adult associated with the camp goes on a hardware store run, and pretty much immediately, everything starts going to pot. The teens all start dropping like flies, and some in some pretty spectacular ways. By the end of the film, seven of the eight people who worked at the camp are dead. It’s just a delight to watch! I’m going to focus more on the abstract feely aspect of this movie, and my observations of the technical aspects of the film because if you don’t know the story by now, there’s a good chance that you’ve been living under a rock the last 40 years. The story is pretty straightforward is what I’m sayin’. Teenage camp counselors start gettin’ frisky, and then they start dyin’. Pretty cut and dry. We will look at the end of the movie once it become prevalent to the conversation though because that absolutely warrants attention.
Okay, so having grown up several years removed from the release of this movie, I remember all of the tropes that it birthed even from a young age. However, hard as this may be to believe, I was far too naive and out of touch to put together what actually happened in the movie. I didn’t really get there until I watched the movie for the first time as an adult, ergo, it’s a little bit like I saw it spoiler free. I’m really impressed with the fact that I can rewatch this movie over and over again, and still jump during the jump scares. I realized when I was watching it for this review why that is. There’s a lot of mundane kind of ‘dead space’ filler action that happens throughout the film. Someone sets up archery targets, someone else is hanging a drain gutter on a building; things like that. They’re not exciting, they’re probably not entertaining in their own rite, and they may not do anything directly to move the plot, but the are a necessary component of the film, and here’s why: I realized that every aspect of the movie services the suspense. There’s an ebb and a flow to the how the movie unfolds, and that ebb and flow is the rhythmic rise and fall of the suspense that the film creates. The music serves the suspense, the pacing serves the suspense, the lighting serves the suspense, all of it serves the suspense. So when you’re watching and one of the characters is nonchalantly preparing for bed, and you’re wondering what point this scene serves, the point of the scene is that it’s psychologically providing your fight or flight response with a slight reprieve in preparation for the next thing that’s going to set you off. I saw it a ton as I watched, and I loved it! I’m not sure if the writer went in with that goal in mind, but I did an awful lot of slow clapping.
There’s another aspect of the film that helps to effectively scare the viewer, and that’s the fact that the thing doing the killing isn’t revealed until the very end of the film. This is something that I’ve been harping on for years! Modern horror films have an affinity for showing us everything! But think about the films that have left you feeling truly unsettled. I’m going to hazard a guess that those movies relied on what you couldn’t see as opposed to what they showed you to instill fear. In today’s CGI laden landscape of second-rate, soulless movies, Hollywood has forgotten that the reason we keep going back to the same things is that they work! This concept is no different. If you leave the terror unseen by the viewer, then the work of scaring the viewer falls on the viewer’s imagination, and that’s a really powerful tool. Once you show the viewer the thing that’s supposed to be scaring them, suddenly it can be identified, quantified and otherwise categorized, and once that happens, even if it’s a gnarly wall of teeth seething with blood and gore, the viewer has no reason to be scared because they can reconcile that threat and forget about it. It’s basic psychology, y’all. You’ll get a more effective scare out of the unknown than you ever will from the known. And this movie gets that! And that makes it a real treat to watch, again pun totally intended. Every death leaves you feeling a little more unsettled, and a little more unsettled, not just because the movie is building suspense in the background, but also because you don’t know what’s killing people. It’s extremely effective.
Famously, Joel Siskel just eviscerated this movie. He went so far as to publish the addresses of several individuals associated with the film with the suggestion that folks send hate mail. He hated it that much. I don’t know the context under which that all transpired, but one of his main complaints against the film is the ending. I gotta tell you, I love this ending, y’all! It just continues what the entire film has already done so well. You’re amped up because the bodies are stacking up. You’ve seen pretty much all of the teens get murdered, and you’ve seen the owner get shanked, but then a Jeep pulls up, and the last character standing, Alice, is supremely relieved because she thinks that Steve has returned to save her! Then she goes to meet him, but it’s not Steve. Oh no! Instead, it’s a kind looking middle-aged woman who has the sweetest, most disarming demeanor about her. You want instantly for her to be the savior of the film. Alice is rambling about all the other counselors being dead, and so the nice lady starts poking around and trying to get a bead on what’s happened. Then it starts… The lady starts acting a little… off… And this divergence in her demeanor just starts to snowball until you finally realize, THIS IS MRS. VOORHEES!!!! RUN ALICE!!!! That realization sinks in, and your heart sinks just as quickly because you just know this is going to end badly. That transition from kindly to killer is quick, but again, really effective because you don’t know from the beginning who did the murders in 1958 so this nice looking woman isn’t even a potential suspect if you’re uninitiated, and even if you are, she sells the kind older woman bit so well.
At this point, you start thinking that you’ve got thing all figured out, but Friday the 13th has one last treat for you. There’s the obligatory struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist. At the end of that, things are left ambiguously unresolved, and we see Alice in the morning rays of the sun floating in the center of Crystal Lake in a canoe. There’s relieving music, with a slight twist, and police officers are moving to rescue Alice, and just when you think that everything is going to be okay, the most grotesque child I have ever seen emerges from the water and drags Alice under with him! It’s fantastic! And I jump at it every stinking time despite having seen the film quite a few times. After that, Alice awakens in the hospital, the sheriff and doctor are providing her with an after action report, and then it’s over…
It’s truly is a great ride, y’all. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this movie high brow, but it really does deserve its place in history as a classic. It really understands the psychology of fear really well and it uses all the tricks it knows to keep you off guard, and on high alert. I have seen a ton of horror films in my day, and I have to say, this one ranks among the best. I give it an enthusiastic endorsement! Oh! Kevin Bacon is in it! If that’s not reason enough to watch, I got nothing else, except to say, stick around for Holy Halloween, Batman! We’ve got a great line-up ahead!
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