Setting Up for an Extended Payoff: Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th

Film critic Alex Jackson suggests that the Friday the 13th series, as a collective whole, is one of the great cinematic experiences. This certainly came as a shock to me, as I have always been of the popular mindset that if you've seen one Friday the 13th movie, you've seen them all. Aside from that, it's not often you look at a horror series and are able to appreciate it as a large body of work. For instance, the Halloween series simply has good and bad entries, as does A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. Sure, we could watch the whole series and separate the good from the bad, but I don't think I could step back and say the Halloween series is a great or even good cinematic experience. Collectively, it's decent at best.

Having not seen any of the Paramount Friday the 13th movies in many a moon, I decided I'd rise up to Jackson's challenge and see if I can share (or even detect) his enthusiasm for the series. The first picture, shot in 1979 and released in 1980, was Sean S. Cunningham's attempt to make his own version of Halloween. Having worked with Wes Craven on Last House on the Left, Cunningham wanted to put that experience behind him and make a straightforward popcorn movie. It's hard to know for sure if he planned on there being a sequel from the start. Naturally, the picture ends with an obvious opening, but the screenwriter, Victor Miller, didn't plan on the movie developing into a franchise. In fact, he was quite upset that Jason Voorhees became the killer in the future installments.

It makes sense the movie spawned a sequel; for it to have stood alone would have been really cheap, since the first picture feels like nothing more than an extended set up with no real payoff. Had Jason not been brought in as the basis for the next movie, the last third, in which his mother finally reveals herself to be the killer, would have come across as a hurried and tacked on plot device. That's the way it feels while watching the movie, anyway. The first hour and ten minutes basically consists of a group of teenagers getting killed off by an unseen killer (the POV technique from Halloween is clearly ripped off). When there's finally one potential victim left, the killer's identity is revealed, as is her motivation.

While her motivation would seem fair in a serious minded movie, Friday the 13th is only interested in making Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) batshit crazy. The twenty plus years since her son's death have driven her mad, and she acts as if his voice is driving her to kill anyone who sets foot on Crystal Lake. If the camp never opens again, it will keep another innocent child from drowning due to the careless and horny counselors. Even though she tragically lost a son, Mrs. Voorhees is never a character we can sympathize with, mostly because the movie portrays her as a campy villain. She screeches alot and talks in Jason's voice, both of which provoke laughter. It makes you wonder if this was the filmmaker's way of trying to keep the audience from taking her seriously.

Poor Jason is never seen sympathetically either, by the characters or the filmmakers. The only survivor, Alice (Adrienne King), dreams that he pops out of the water and turns over her canoe, automatically making her believe he's as loony as his mother when the bottom line is he was a defenseless child who unfairly lost his life. In return for his mother's actions, Jason is forced to spend eternity killing anyone who comes to Camp Crystal Lake. He is, at least in the beginning, seeking revenge for his mother's death, just as she was seeking revenge for his. But we'll get into that more as the series progresses.

Friday the 13th took a cue from Halloween in regards to its characters. Like the previous movie, this one involves a series of cardboard cutout teenagers who are not interesting and basically are alive just so they can get put on the chopping block. The movie plays a bit of a trick on us early on by killing its most likable character first. When I saw Annie (Robbi Morgan), who gets the obligatory warning of staying away from Crystal Lake, I was sure she'd be there until the end. But no, she turns out to be so happy and naive that it quickly gets the best of her. It's as if the movie is saying that anybody worth caring about needs to disappear as soon as possible.

Alice, the only one to make it out alive, is definitely drawn from the same cloth as Laurie Strode. She seems shy, is probably a virgin, and has a talent other than smoking pot and getting drunk. The movie establishes early that she will be the sole survivor by giving her and only her an actual admirable quality: she can draw. Another clue she will prevail comes during a game of strip Monopoly. When it is finally Alice's turn to remove her shirt, the game is ended due to bad weather. There are four or five other teenage characters, and we never even learn that much about them. The others, in fact, are practically indistinguishable. Interestingly, the picture opens in 1958, but the counselors shown look exactly like the ones in the present day. If the difference in the time period had not been noted, we never would have been able to tell them apart.

The violence in the picture is certainly more extreme than that of Halloween, but even still, it's not particularly shocking or scary. Most of the murders happen offscreen and we are only shown the aftermath (courtesy of Tom Savini). There is nothing overly brutal about what Mrs. Voorhees does; in other words, her goal is not to make the victims suffer. She just wants them to die as quickly as possible. For this reason, all the murders are inflicted to the neck or face of the victim, with Mrs. Voorhees getting it the worst (Alice lops her head off with a machete!). Part of the reason the murders are not effective is because the filmmakers are too eager to let us know we're looking at some fancy make up.

What hurts Friday the 13th the most is that its repetitive and boring. It's not appealing to look at (save a scene where Alice hides in a closet), the characters each make excuses to go off by themselves to get killed, and the finale overuses the old killer-that's-not-dead routine. It's strange how the movie is able to make us feel when its over as if nothing has really happened at all. And yet, it came out when the slasher genre was hitting its peak, so it went on to gross a then stellar $39 million domestically. It's not without areas of interest, as noted above, but the real sense of fascination will be to see how many of this movie's conventions and patterns follow through to future installments.


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