Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of camp counselors prepping a previously closed down summer camp are hunted down, one by one, by a mysterious killer.
About: Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham loved the title “Friday the 13th” so much that, even though he hadn’t made the movie yet, he put a giant ad in Variety with the title and the sentence, “The scariest movie ever made,” just to see what would happen. Everyone immediately started calling him, wanting in. He eventually made the film independently and Paramount bought it. They released the film in May of 1980 and the rest is history.
Writer: Victor Miller
Details: 95 minutes long
I’ve never seen a studio sneakier than Universal this weekend.
They made sure NOBODY on the planet knew that Halloween Ends was playing for free on Peacock Streaming. I follow this industry obsessively and I didn’t even know until I opened up Peacock and saw it there.
I think Hollywood needs to have a discussion with itself about these reboots. I understand rebooting a movie. That works for me. Especially if it’s happening after a long layoff and they bring back the characters from the original movie that we love. That makes sense.
I also understand that if a brand new movie does well, creating a trilogy out of it. Everybody likes to see those characters on the first movie come back for more adventures.
What doesn’t make sense is this trend of combining the reboot strategy with the trilogy strategy. The whole reason we were so excited to see the reboot was for nostalgic purposes. We wanted to revisit those beloved characters after 20+ years. That all goes away if you make a sequel to that reboot two years later, and another one right after that.
Even if you only brought back the franchise and not the original characters, like they did with the original Jurassic World movie, the nostalgia factor has been neutralized by the time the second movie comes out. Which means that the second and third films in the trilogy feel, not just unnecessary, but downright irritating. We’re sitting there asking, “Why are you still making us watch this?? There’s zero reason for it to exist!”
Ah, but then the market laughs at me, pointing out that Halloween 3 just made 45 million dollars. I don’t begrudge the series for making money. You get yours. Especially when you have a movie that’s named after a holiday and you debut it two weeks before that holiday. There may not be a surer bet in the business.
But I mean, come on. Halloween Ends looks so bad that I’m not even going to watch it for free on Peacock. My time is too valuable.
With that said, Halloween inspired this weekend’s Horror Re-Watch. Back in the day, there were two masked horror characters that ruled the roost. They were Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. I’ve already reviewed the original Halloween on the site. So I went back and watched the original Friday the 13th this time.
If you haven’t seen Friday the 13th, it takes place at a summer camp called Crystal Lake. A group of teenage counselors have shown up to help get the place in shape for the impending camp.
The group includes the smartest girl of the bunch, Alice. The wily Ned. The eager Annie. Kevin Bacon, who was in every single 80s movie ever made, plays Jack. You also have Marci, Bill, and Brenda.
The teenagers are really horny so they spend more time swimming in the river than actually doing work. Once the night comes, so do the hormones, and the group splits up to hook up.
That’s, of course, when things get ugly. A killer is walking around the premises, looking for excuses to use his knife. He usually stabs his targets but sometimes gets creative, going so far as to shoot them full of arrows. We never see the killer because we’re always in his POV.
Eventually, everyone’s dead except for Annie. And when the previous camp runner’s wife shows up (spoiler), Annie thinks she’s safe. Until the woman reveals that her name is Mrs. Voorhees and her son was drowned here 20 years ago because counselors were too busy having hanky-panky to pay attention to him. And now she’s here for revenge! Annie must fight the crazy beeeyatch off and escape Camp Crystal Lake.
The thing about Friday the 13th is that it was blatantly inspired by Halloween. Halloween had just come out in 1978 and was a big hit. Friday the 13th said, “We can do that.” And they were right, as the film was also a big hit.
How close were the two franchise in their battle for eyeballs? About as close as you can get. Halloween made 213 million dollars at the box office, adjusted for inflation. Friday the 13th made 216 million dollars, adjusted for inflation.
So what did I think of the film?
Man, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts.
What I loved about the movie was the spirit in which it was made. The original Friday the 13th is the definition of getting a bunch of people together and making a movie for no money, figuring out the myriad of production challenges along the way, and just getting it done no matter what.
The movie is stripped bare of any level of sophisticated production and it definitely hurts the final product. The acting is so stilted at times, you get the sense they only had time for one take with every setup.
I think the thing that most disappoints me though is the writing. I would go so far as to guess they didn’t have a screenplay. I’m not exaggerating. There was ZERRROOOOO story here. The only times when it felt like something was written was the beginning, when they got all of the characters to the camp, and the ending, where they had to wrap things up.
Let me tell you an easy way to identify when there’s no script. When you set things up that you don’t pay off. So there’s this scene early on where the guy who’s running the camp tries to convince Annie to stay on longer. He then touches her hair in a creepy way before she heads off to get her work done. This moment gets a lot of attention yet is never paid off at any point. It was just some random one-off moment.
From there, it was a series of scenes where you isolated characters and waited for the killer to strike. There was literally ZERO thought put into these scenes. It was shocking, to be honest. I thought, “Wow, they didn’t even try here.”
But then I put myself back into my 13 year old brain and realized why this worked. There were two lines of suspense pulling every scene forward. One, your inherent teenage desire to see nakedness. And two, waiting for the killer to strike. Every scene was pulling double duty in that sense and, although the strategy is simple, it’s a very effective strategy for a 13 year old audience.
There was one big creative chance the movie took which paid off. Friday the 13th looked at that classic opening Michael Myers sequence (where Michael, as a child, kills his sister in POV) and said, “What if we did that the entire time?”
So our killer is only presented in first person POV all the time. We never see him. And this was an effective way to deal with the killings. Because it didn’t just heighten the kills, it kept this mystery going. Who was the killer??
That leads me to the ending which was shocking for a couple of reasons. Spoilers, of course. For one, I couldn’t believe that Jason wasn’t the killer! That it was his mom! They went full on with their inspirations, as the mom is some weird half mom half version of Jason, who’s in her head or something, making her kill people for questionable reasons. It was like a reverse “Psycho.” I wouldn’t say I didn’t like the choice. But it’s hard to be scared of an older lady killer who probably couldn’t last seven minutes on the treadmill.
But the biggest shock was that there was no mask!!!!! There was no hockey mask!! I chose this movie specifically to see that iconic hockey-masked murdering psychopath and I didn’t even get the mask!
So, if anyone wants to add a new question to their movie trivia archive, that question is, “When was the hockey mask introduced into the Friday the 13th franchise?” The answer is: NOT IN THE FIRST MOVIE.
Finally, the film has one last stand-out moment. Our heroine, Alice, has escaped the crazed Mrs. Voorhees and paddled down the river all night to safety and the sun is finally rising and the safe music is playing and we’re finally able to breathe and then JASON FREAKING VOORHEES THE KID SHOOTS OUT OF THE WATER and grabs her, pulling her into the lake.
That moment brought me back to the first time I watched the film and I remember the visceral reaction I had to it. It helped make the movie memorable. But then it turns out it was just a nightmare. Which was not cool. I wish writers would stop doing that in horror films. Oh, that’s right. They didn’t have a writer.
Friday the 13th looks like it would’ve been a blast to make. Sometimes I think about taking a month off and just going and making a low-budget horror film because they look so fun. With that said, I can’t recommend any movie that doesn’t have a screenplay. This is a screenwriting site for Heaven’s sakes! To do so would be blasphemy!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Suspense is an extremely powerful tool in the horror genre. This movie, which didn’t even have a screenplay, spawned a billion dollar franchise. How did it do this? Behold the power of putting people in danger and drawing out the suspense of when the danger is going to strike. It’s such an effective tool that it alone was able to power an entire feature-length narrative.
