Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't impervious to the
sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there's I Watched This
On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking
yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of
a real reward. And a good time.
Cultural infamy: When I first proposed a
Halloween-themed first-time viewing and write-up of the original 1980 slasher
film Friday The 13th, a great hue and cry went up around the A.V. Club production-meeting table,
as other people who'd never seen it, or hadn't seen it since childhood, argued
its merits or lack thereof. The issue: Should it be a Better Late Than Never
column? ("Oh my God no, it's supposed to be awful," Scott said.) Should it be
an I Watched This On Purpose column instead? ("But isn't it sort of a horror
classic?" asked Josh.) The confused consensus seemed to be that it probably
wasn't good enough for BLTN or bad enough for IWTOP, but no one at the table
seemed to know for sure.
That alone was enough to convince me that I had to
watch the movie, regardless of how we framed it. Here's the film that launched
a thousand sequels (okay, 10 sequels so far, with a remake scheduled next year,
directed by the same dude who helmed the 2003 Texas Chain Saw Massacre reboot) and a million
satires and parodies. It was the first slasher film released by a major studio.
It was an indie film that cost $550,000 to make and grossed $40 million. It
helped kick-start the age of the studio-bankrolled exploitation film, it was
one of the foundational pillars of today's thriving horror-film industry, and most
of the stalwarts in our little enclave of media oversaturation had never actually
watched it? That alone was an excuse to watch it on purpose later rather than
never.
Besides, I saw Nightmare On Elm Street back in the '80s, and I
finally watched John Carpenter's original Halloween for the first time last
year when the remake came out. It was clearly time to complete the horror-movie
franchise-starter trifecta, if only so Jason X—the one Friday
The 13th movie
I've actually seen—would make a little more sense.
The viewing experience: As it happens, Friday
The 13th
wasn't as bad as Scott thought or as good as Josh vaguely remembers from seeing
it in his misspent youth. It was made in 1980 as an indie movie over a few
weeks, and that shows throughout. It wears its influences
heavily—normally, when a nearly 30-year-old, highly influential movie
feels clichéd, it's because of all the followers that borrowed from it in the
interim. In Friday The 13th's case, it's because it was ripping off the
horror classics that preceded it. But we'll get to that.
The film's working title was A Long Night At
Camp Blood,
which would have been more accurate—for the most part, Friday The 13th feels like a long, draggy
day and a night as bored people sit around waiting for the killer to show up
and dispatch them already. And that killer isn't in any particular hurry. [A
note on spoilers; I'd never seen this movie, but I've known both of the big
twists for a decade now. I'm assuming readers do too, largely since without
getting into the killer's identity, there isn't a whole lot to discuss here.
Read on at your peril.]
The movie starts in 1958 at Camp Crystal Lake,
where a bunch of achingly wholesome, apple-cheeked counselors are having an
indoor sing-along around a fireplace.
Meanwhile, the camera is lurking ominously around
the sleeping campers in the cabins. Eventually, two counselors sneak off for a
makeout session—never, ever a good idea in horror movies, and this film
series was one of the biggest reasons that rule came into effect—and the
camera follows them. When caught, they seem to recognize whoever's confronting
them, but that doesn't do them any good:
Throughout most of Friday The 13th, a handheld camera stands
in for the murderer's point of view, creeping around the camp, watching the
characters from behind trees and through windows, and eventually facing them
down as they die. Director Sean S. Cunningham has said in interviews that this
style was inspired by Jaws, which also keeps the villain of the piece
largely hidden for most of the film, but Carpenter also used it effectively in
1978's Halloween,
another film Friday The 13th practically owes royalties. In theory, it's an
effective tactic that lets the audience feel the killer's power; the victims
are right there, practically within arm's reach, completely oblivious to the
doom that's examining them and planning exactly where to stick the knife, axe,
or arrow. In practice, though, it often means watching the victims doing a
whole bunch of nothing. Remember the long, talky, go-nowhere segments in
Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse entry Death Proof? This is the kind of
movie he was remembering. In the space between its opening double-murder and
the eventual kill-fest toward the end, Friday The 13th feels like one of the
slackest movies of the '70s slack era.
Cut to "Friday June 13—the present," when
porn-stached do-gooder Peter Brouwer is planning to re-open the camp for a wave
of inner-city kids, even though there's apparently no good way for them to get
there. In the nearest town, people shut up and stare ominously when the camp
gets mentioned, and it's clear that there's no transport to the area. Pretty
young camp cook Robbi Morgan marches into town toting a backpack and asks what
bus to take to Camp Crystal Lake; a waitress badgers a trucker into giving her
a ride halfway there, but before they can take off together, town crazy Walt
Gorney confronts Morgan and announces that if she's going to "Camp Blood,"
she'll never come back, because the place has a death curse. The trucker chases
Gorney off, but later, in a typically draggy, pause-filled conversation, he
offers up some doom-saying of his own:
Between her half-committed acting and his
overacting, it feels like the cab of that truck is about to give in to dramatic
overbalance and tip over at any second. Alas, the trucker drops Morgan off when
their roads diverge, and she hitches a ride from the traveling POV
killer-camera and never even makes it to the camp. Meanwhile, a bunch of other
counselors—including a larval, feather-haired Kevin Bacon—are on
their way to Crystal Lake, or have already arrived. There, Brouwer subjects one
of them to mild sexual harassment while shirtless and wearing weirdly porny
cutoff shorts, no shirt, a neckerchief, and matching socks. (For the most part,
the characters dress in pretty generic clothing, which means the film doesn't
look nearly as dated as many 28-year-old movies. But occasional style choices,
particularly in the hair, serve as a stark reminder that 1980 was practically a
closeout sale for '70s fashions.) Eventually, Brouwer heads off to town, and
the waiting begins. The counselors talk, swim, make dinner, and walk around in
the woods, oblivious to the killer camera. (In another '70s nod, one of them
dons a weirdly Godspell-influenced no-shirt, white-pants-and-red-suspenders outfit.)
The killer still hasn't shown up. The characters
freak out when a snake gets into one of the cabins; the actors do actually hack
it apart onscreen. One of the counselors (Mark Nelson) plays obnoxious pranks
on the others, and in the process becomes the only one with a noticeable
personality. A cop arrives, acts like a cheap stereotype, and leaves. Gorney
appears, says God sent him, tells the counselors "You're all doomed!", and
bikes away. (He was likely meant as a red herring whom audiences would suspect
was secretly the killer.) The counselors mess with the generator. Larval Kevin
Bacon and his girl have a weird talk about a recurring nightmare she has, which
proves to be non-startlingly non-prescient, as it really has nothing to do with
her impending death.
[pagebreak]
And so on and so on, as if everyone's watching the
clock, waiting for the film to hit feature length. At times, it feels like a
loosely observational film, but since there's nothing terribly interesting
worth observing, it's mostly just draggy. As it happens, by this time,
characters have already started to die, but none of the living ones are aware
of it yet, because half of Friday The 13th's killings occur offscreen, or look like
that opening clip, where the camera looks away as soon as the fatal blow is
struck. Cunningham focuses on bloody, mangled corpses—the shots of
carefully posed counselors found later with bloody implements stuck though
their heads recall 1977's Suspiria, among other things—but not so much on the
actions that made them corpses in the first place. Only a couple of the
killings happen onscreen, and they're both very brief shocks, without the
loving looks at rending flesh and spattering gore of today's movies. Probably
the most gruesome one occurs when a post-coital Kevin Bacon gets an improbable
arrow through the throat while lying in bed.
One of the most interesting things about Friday
The 13th
for me was that the movie doesn't focus much either on the violence or on the
victims' fear, the two main foci of horror features today. Most of the murdered
counselors get a moment's warning at most that the axe is about to fall; others
are dead before they know it. Only the final survivor, Adrienne King, really
winds up with enough time to understand what's going on and try to save
herself. The focus is more on audience suspense, as we sneak around the camp
inside the killer's head and try to figure out who's going to die next. The
camp counselors having tame, fakey sex? Top priority. The ones playing a
PG-rated game of strip Monopoly? Don't worry, they're on the list. Brouwer and
his awful '70s porn-stache? Eventually. Apart from slack plotting and the fact
that the characters feel interchangeable—and, sadly, just as disposable
as the killer decides they are—Friday The 13th feels like it wants very
badly to be a Hitchcock film. It isn't about sudden starts and shocks and
bangs, it's about the audience anticipating and dreading the inevitable,
deliberately foreshadowed horror.
Unfortunately, it's also about the filmmakers
putting it off for so long that some of the tension defuses. When Bacon's
girlfriend Jeannine Taylor heads off to the bathroom in her underwear and
spends what feels like an hour alternately doing her Katharine Hepburn
impression into the mirror and just standing around, the film loses any
semblance of the life that would make her death seem remotely real. What
real-life person—particularly one largely defined by a scary dream about
raining blood—stands around alone and mostly naked in a strange, cold
place, in no particular hurry to get back to her lover no matter how many
strange noises or unsettling movements tip her off that something's going on?
Most tellingly for the cheapie Hitchcock knock-off
argument, Friday The 13th tries to rely on psychological motives and a twist
rather than garden-variety hack-n-slashy psychopaths. When the killer finally
shows up, it isn't the hockey-masked, machete-wielding, indestructible hell-monster
Jason, who later became the series' icon. It's his mom, Betsy Palmer, a polite,
matronly lady in a sensible sweater and a dykey haircut. She actually attempts
to befriend King and chat her up before dispatching her. She even sort of tries
to explain her motives before the act of talking about it seems to bring back
all her frustration and send her off into the kill-zone. It seems that back in
the '50s, her young son Jason drowned in the lake because the counselors were
"making love" rather than keeping an eye on him. Clearly, since then, Palmer
has hated the camp, or counselors, or sex, or all of the above. While telling
this story, she apparently remembers she's at the camp and talking to a
counselor who may have had sex at some point in her life, and she goes berserk
again.
For a heretofore omnipotent, invisible,
super-strong villain, Palmer proves disappointingly ineffectual once she shows
up onscreen. When she corners King, she dispenses slaps instead of
throat-slittings, and the two of them repeatedly wind up rolling around on the
floor, fighting for the upper hand, or control of a weapon. The extended chase
gets fairly silly; apparently the one power Palmer didn't sacrifice by becoming
visible is the power to magically appear wherever King goes. At one point,
gripped by madness, Palmer snarls in Jason's little-boy voice "Kill her, mommy.
Kill her. She can't hide. Nowhere to hide." Bullshit! It's a vast camp full of
cabins, a lake, and the deep woods. There are a million places to hide. It's just
that wherever King goes, Palmer appears.
And this is where the film's influences become a
serious problem. It's passably creepy watching Palmer lurch around, her face
twisted in a rictus, talking to herself in the voice of her dead son who bids
her kill. But it would be a lot creepier if the entire shtick wasn't basically
a reversal of the parent-child roles from Hitchcock's Psycho. When the soundtrack goes
to a thumping "da-dum, da-dum, da-dum" rhythm during the chase, it might prompt
tension if it didn't sound so much like the Jaws soundtrack. (The familiar Friday
The 13th signature
theme, with its chanted "ki ki ki ma ma ma" syllables, fares better, though it
still sounds an awful lot like one of John Carpenter's homemade scores.) And
the scene where Palmer hacks her way through the door of a storage closet and
peers in at King would be a lot scarier if that wasn't such an iconic moment
from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. (Both films came out the same year, just a month
apart, so it's unlikely Friday The 13th stole the image from Kubrick, though it is
right there in King's book, which suggests the people behind this film might
have been hoping to tap into the bigger film's scares. Either way, it's hard
not to think of Jack Nicholson's far scarier performance while watching Palmer
leer through the hole in the door.)
Eventually, the long chase scene ends in a
slow-motion yet still very brief death (apparently heavily censored for DVD, if
the IMDB has it right), a surprisingly beautifully shot denouement, and one
last big scare, which is pretty creepy even if you know exactly what's about to
happen. The plaintive last lines of the movie recall the big reveal line from The
Ring ("You helped
her?"), as it becomes clear that there's still a monstrous evil on the loose.
But that doesn't pay off this time around; it would have to wait for the many,
many sequels.
How much of the experience wasn't a total waste
of time? A
good 40 percent or so, actually—not enough to quality it as a Better Late
Than Never entry, but enough that I never wished I was off doing my Hepburn
impression into the mirror instead. For a quickie indie, Friday The 13th is surprisingly beautiful
at times, particularly when it watches the incoming thunderstorm, and during
the dreamy idyll on the lake toward the end. The people are generally
indifferently shot, but the dark green woods are lovely, and the colors are
sharp and effective. The film is pretty tense at times, when something's
actually happening. Mostly, though, it's a landmark movie, and even if it isn't
always fascinating on its own, it's interesting to see the nascent beginnings
of America's horror-film industry, the exact point where super-cheapies like Texas
Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween,
and Last House On The Left began edging toward the mainstream. Just because
this particular chapter of film history is coated in fake blood doesn't make it
any less significant.