Friday Week: And then the rain turns to blood, and it washes away in little rivers, and then the sound stops

FRIDAY THE 13th

1980

Directed by Sean S. Cunningham

Written by Victor Miller and Ron Kurz

Spoilers: severe, but, like, get real

Friday the 13th is a bit imposing to discuss.  It's simultaneously very difficult to write about (its reputation precedes it, and as a subject of film criticism it's been as fully excavated as any of history's most celebrated and foundational classics, to the point that, like it or lump it, we kind of have to agree that it is one) and very easy (its reputation precedes it and there's a certain ritual pleasure to Friday the 13th, and hence a ritual pleasure in simply reciting in one's own voice what everyone already knows about its plain scenario, its doofy characters, its grindhouse-adjacent production quality, and the winning twist it puts at the end, such that it seems like it ought to have precluded this movie ever turning into the 1980s' most-franchised slasher brand, and yet with seven sequels in that decade—notwithstanding the several more still to come—that's what happened anyway).

I'm going to try to say new things about Friday the 13th, though I expect that's impossible.  But, to begin with, I was not prepared to much enjoy my return to the headwaters of Crystal Lake; shotgunning the whole rest of the 80s Fridays a couple of years ago, but without rewatching the original, which till then had been the only one I'd seen—an original which is somehow exactly the same as all its sequels and entirely unique within its series—might have played some role in this.  However, what probably helped the most was my recollection of it as pretty lackluster, a mediocre slasher film that also tended to have bad photography, altogether amounting to a rather dull murder spree despite its enjoyably unusual killer.  Basing this opinion on that single watch, I don't know what the chip on my shoulder was that night ten years ago, but that chip has detached itself in the decade since: prepared to be bored, I wasn't; prepared to find its characters mildly annoying and incredibly poorly-acted, they weren't (too badly, anyhow); prepared to grumble about too many unlit night scenes, even that turned out to only be, like, six shots out of a 95 minute film, and clearly the combination of a format upgrade for Friday the 13th itself and the march of cinematographic trends here in 2024 has been of enormous benefit to DP Barry Abrams in 1980.  His creaky old movie with a lighting budget of $20 could generate some spontaneous applause today with its ideas about how darkness, or even daylight exteriors, ought to be rendered in a horror movie, purely on the basis of "wow, this is what cheap, churned-out movies could look like back then?," and while I don't like the flatness of many of the interiors, I could probably go further and note that it's even resisting some of the more disagreeable cinematographic trends of its day, with very little blow-out in its exteriors, and a solid grasp on how to take a sunny summer idyll and make it gloomier only as the horror draws nearer.  And so, by modestly praising the photography of a famously sloppily-photographed film, maybe I already have said something new about Friday the 13th.

But its charm is not its craft, as such, even if it doesn't quite get the measure of credit it deserves for it; it's the simplicity, lifted out of complete featurelessness only by the slight convolutions of a "boo" horror flick stinger and, before that, by its aforementioned twist.  And that twist—honestly—might not even qualify as "a twist," given that virtually nothing has been done to set it up, and to the extent it is any "twist," it's more exploiting the in-universe assumptions of its heroine than it's ever exploiting its audience's.  In any case, I really can't imagine watching Friday the 13th—even watching it completely cold—and not realizing who the killer is within about fifteen seconds of her finally showing her face.  (If I could, then it's only because a kid today might have a harder time than their primitive forebear in 1980: for it's possible that the pop cultural weight of the many films subsequent to this would suggest that the first Friday the 13th is likewise about the killer, Jason Voorhees; but, of course, it's not.  Its principal writer, Victor Miller, reportedly doesn't even like what the subsequent twelve films did with the innocent exigence for his killer's rampage.)  But that's all speculative: Friday the 13th is, needless to say, one of those movies where all its present-day viewers will have been entirely spoiled as to how it ends.  I mean, sure, one of the characters in the film is kind of set up as a red herring, in that his whereabouts aren't accounted for during the early murders (he's the last twenty-something teen to die, in fact), and he has a tendency to wander off beforehand, and he's shown some talent with a bladed instrument; but I had to have this actively pointed out to me, because whether that was something consciously built into Miller's script as a misdirect, I don't know if director Sean S. Cunningham noticed, since the actual Friday the 13th has zero interest in drawing your attention to it.

So: simplicity, then.  The idea seems to have germinated with Cunningham, who famously started advertising his movie before it even started production, receiving its (frankly) terrible original logo and title card design from a marketing firm who appear to have trained themselves on industrial protocol manuals.  He was probably then best-known as a producer on Wes Craven's brutal 1972 thriller, The Last House On the Left—if not that, then for directing not one but two (unrelated!) Bad News Bears knock-offs—but Last House is probably the touchstone, as Cunningham wanted a horror film that backed off on the nihilism, and come the end of the decade he finally got around to it, openly admitting that he was prompted above all by the previous year's Halloween and, more to the point, Halloween's epochal financial success—hence his renaming of the film from the more descriptive A Long Night At Camp Blood, and a brief conversation to establish "golly, boy, but it sure is Friday the 13th, here in the present year," which, as a bonus, confirmed the silly tradition of slasher films being named after calendar events, even if it stands slightly to the side of it.  Let us observe that Cunningham obviously wasn't the only one working along similar lines in 1980; yet he made the definitive Halloween knock-off, so that every slasher to come was just as likely to be a knock-off of his as John Carpenter's.

What it undeniably offers, though, is one of horror's most iconic settings.  So let's head on out to our cabin in the woods alongside scenic Crystal Lake, our present company being poor Annie (Robbi Morgan), now hitchhiking her way to rural New Jersey (tangibly playing itself) to take her employment as the cook for Crystal Lake's revived kids' summer camp.  We've already become familiar with Crystal Lake by way of the 1958-set prologue, where two horny counselors were murdered by an unseen assailant; but that isn't even the only reason that locals such as the truck driver (Rex Everhart) or the crazy prophet of doom (Walt Gorney) call it "Camp Blood."  Besides the 1958 murders, there was also the 1957 death by drowning of a little boy, some kid named Jason, and ever since there's been the less lethal but scarcely less threatening legacy of poisonings and arsons that pop up every time somebody makes a damnfool attempt to reopen the place.

Such is the ambition of its new director, Steve Christy (Peter Bouwer), Annie's boss, and he'll not really live to regret it, nor will Annie, this being not-unintelligently foreshadowed, without anyone calling explicit attention to it, when her current ride drops her off at a crossroads adjoining the gates of a cemetery.  And so there we have it: what Cunningham and Miller, or uncredited script doctor Ron Kurz, or Abrams, or somebody, is already doing is conjuring the mood that will attend the franchise for several more films, and which is the Fridays' greatest strength, namely their ability to draw their tale out of what presents itself, and has the sensation of, a bunch of local yokel folklore, the kind of scary story you tell out by a campfire, or in a dimly-lit cabin during a violent thunderstorm in between bouts of strip Monopoly.  What happens in Friday the 13th happens because it has to, in a sense, because that's how the legend goes ("and it was his mother")—otherwise why would you bother telling the tale?  That's fundamentally the case for any horror movie—any movie!—and Halloween obviously prefigures its efforts; but Friday the 13th is already making it a part of the textual fabric of its own atmosphere in ways that very few other horror movies manage.

Inevitably, Annie is the first to die, picked up by another driver in a Jeep whom we conspicuously don't see.  (And if I make it sound like I prefer this to Halloween, I'm afraid I do, one minor reason being that I have less of a discombobulating reaction to Friday the 13th's killer driving around the hills in a utility vehicle than I do when Carpenter's far more effortfully-mythic Shape drives around suburbia in his station wagon.  I also prefer this film's rumored mysteries of Camp Blood to Michael Myers's established facts.)  Annie's absence, anyway, is a source of conversation and annoyance from her colleagues, Steve's other employees, numbering six: Ned (Mark Nelson), the mold for the socially-anxious prank-lover who would become, for better and worse, a fixture of the genre, but at least this one's not shrill and dies first; Jack (Kevin Bacon), the pleasant hunk (though only Bacon's distinctive voice so much as suggests "movie star" in his future); Marcie (Jeanine Taylor), Jack's girlfriend and the straightforwardly horny one; Brenda (Laurie Bartram), the more circuitously and self-amusedly horny one; Bill (Bingspawn Harry Crosby), also a hunk, also horny; and Alice (Adrienne King), an outdoorsy young woman and aspiring artist with a certain thoughtfulness to her, and who is perhaps less horny in comparison to her friends, though there's no particular reason to suspect she doesn't fuck all the time just because she got better dice rolls during strip Monopoly.  However, she does wear pants, when she nails pieces of wood together, and she has a short haircut, and she's played by an actress who somewhat physically resembles Jamie Lee Curtis and was blatantly told "act like Jamie Lee Curtis did, in Halloween," so now I guess we can just stop watching these slasher movies I obviously don't like, and jump, immediately, to writing my master's thesis on slasher cinema.

At some length, a storm kicks up, and the camp employees begin to die, one by one, always when separated, till at last we get our Final Girl (thereby confirming that archetype, too), Alice, who stumbles through the killer's tableau of death, arranged for her benefit and ours by our murderer, Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer).  Palmer, as an actor, is up to the most interesting performance in the movie, despite its brief screentime, pitching Voorhees toying with her unwitting victim (Alice naturally assumes she's a bystander who'll render aid), and almost laughing in Alice's face at her obliviousness, as something perilously close to a fourth-wall breaking aside, but not immediately sliding fully into camp.  (Not that we shouldn't slide towards camp, but it's Voorhees speaking in her drowned son's voice—"kill her, mommy, kill her!"—that's gonna get us all the way there, basically already an unstressed meta-joke about oepidal serial killers.)  Now, Palmer is really not up, physically, to believably keeping herself from being readily outrun or slammed around by a woman less than half her age, but that's okay.  She's still the vehicle for one of the low-key weirdest images in horror, that of a cable-knit sweater hung off a deranged old mother, murderously protective of the sanctity of her son's gravesite, and that's surely sufficient.

So I've alluded to how Friday the 13th goes about being a horror movie—sort of less than insistently, and it occupies some nebulous space at the crossroads between the aligned forms of threadbare scary movie, watchably-shitty 80s teen comedy, and 70s porno.  Traditionally I've viewed this as its weakness, and I've come around to more-or-less holding it a strength: we have, to begin with, a cast that isn't even really that differentiated by their stereotypes, and who are allowed to bumble around to an almost reckless degree through a number of scenes devoted more to young adult naturalism than even nominal paranoia or comedy.  (Their dialogue is by-and-large comprised of affably bantery lines that sort of have the shape of jokes but, even if you allow yourself to get on the movie's wavelength, they're probably never going to do more than elicit a confused smile; this would be one more thing Friday the 13th confirmed for its genre, mostly for the worse this time.)  The shadow of Annie's demise is almost even dispelled, for a time.  But there is allowed to creep in, not anything like all at once, a sense of immense morbidity: Marcie's apropos-of-very-little relation of a recurring nightmare about blood rains, or, above all, that sequence with a snake that very literally brings the kids face-to-face with violence and death—at the wholly unnecessary cost of a real snake's life, which does, in fact, piss me off—but with attention paid to the genuine disquiet on Crosby's face, which would take him out of the running for "red herring" even if the film's complete disinterest in that hadn't.  Even once the murders begin in earnest, we still don't quite have "a horror movie," and I suppose that's a double-edged sword: the movie simply kind of continues but with fewer characters, and it's hard to work up a proper febrile terror when nobody onscreen is scared for more than a couple of seconds right before they eat it.  Yet, like I said, the movie continues as if it's ignoring all of Alice's friends disappearing one by one, almost until she's been left all alone before death, and it really can't be ignored any longer.  As it's my penchant to get grandiose about slashers, it's worthwhile to ask if it's not a fairly accurate, if violently accelerated, take on this thing we call "life."

I'm not going to go too far and insist that you shouldn't find this boring, but this time, I didn't find Friday the 13th's 95 minutes too much to get at this mood.  (Besides, if we're talking cuts, those should all belong to the Final Girl sequence: at some point we do have to wonder if it's worthwhile to have Alice hysterically beat the shit out of Voorhees fully three times before she finally arrives at the deadly solution.)  But one guy keeping it less boring than it could be is gore maestro Tom Savini, whose extreme special makeup effects represent another genre-codifying element here, maybe the most important one.  Friday the 13th is the film that confirmed the expectation that slasher movies would be about loving depictions of ruptured anatomy; and the quality and amount here, and the insistence on not leaving it to the imagination, is exactly how the slasher film ought to examine the reality of death, and with its climactic awesome machete decapitation, I suppose even the potential price of life.  (On the other hand, once it has, at last, become "a horror movie" for its last batch of characters, death tends to happen a lot more offscreen; I suspect this is more a budget thing, or just set-up for the corpse tableau, than "an artistic choice."  Either way, we do see the results of death.)

I mentioned up top that Cunningham's direction is underrated; it's not tight, but gets tighter, and is certainly good at parceling out information.  (Alice and Bill freaking out while attempting to phone for help from the still-nebulous threat while the camera cranes to follow the wire to its dangling conclusion is not world-shaking good direction, but it is good direction, and he generally knows how to frame and block his actors and use negative space.)  But the other big factor, which as much as Savini, few detractors have been able to stand against, is composer Harry Manfredini, whose score is, analyzed in bulk, mostly an energetic ransacking of Psycho and Jaws, though it's creatively derivative thriller music even at its worst; of course, at its best and most iconic, it's innovative indeed, with Manfredini's own voice spitting "kill, mommy" and then manipulated and roughly synthesized until it's not words anymore but more like a malign spirit panting over your shoulder.  And nonetheless focusing on that, or even the other thriller cues, discounts how much Manfredini's accomplishing: there's a Pino Donaggio-like elegy fittingly-built for the epilogue which, oddly, Savini devised, and that turned out to be the perfect way to end this half-real, half-legend tale, demanding a surprising amount of patience as we enter into a largely new and metaphorical territory with Alice out there on the water in her canoe and trapped by some airless sound design and nothing but Manfredini's score.  At least, until we get that jump scare with Jason—hey, he does show up!—and that ending is two great things simultaneously: an absolutely sincere acknowledgment of Alice's loss of innocence and dark passage into adulthood; and a dumbassed jolt of ridiculous horror flick fright that's been expressly admitted to be a rip-off of Carrie's nearly-identical denouement, assuring you that what you just saw was the fun way to approach the gravest and most universal of subjects.  It just works: Halloween blazed the path, but Friday the 13th showed the flexibility of the form it had established, and honestly it's no wonder they made like three hundred more of the things.

Score: 8/10