31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 13 (Friday The 13th)

Ch ch ch ch. Ah ah ah ah.

Time to confront evil. Here it is, laid out before you in 95 minutes of cinema released in 1980. Alien had one foot in the door of both worlds, but this movie is, without question, a pure Slasher. We'll unpack what that means and how it relates back to Alien sometime, but we are tumbling headlong back in time to the roots of a great tree. A great evil tree that has borne disgusting fruit picked en masse by Hollywood harvesters... but I am getting ahead of myself. This is Friday the 13th, written on a Thursday the 13th, watched on a Wednesday the 12th. It is, from what I understand, a horror movie classic, a seminal entry in the slasher horror genre that spawned its own line of sequels and also influenced God knows what else. It is not a terrible movie. It is, however, an evil movie... but not an evil movie without some merit. Before my great exorcism, I'll highlight what I really liked about this one.

The first thing is the way the camera works. Like another important slasher horror film that came before it, we have POV shots from our killer's perspective as they stalk and slash the innocent sexy teens working to get Camp Crystal Lake back up and running. Standard stuff, and a valid way to shoot a movie and all, but the fun comes with the uncertainty. When you're with one of the sexy teens alone and in the dark, you're never quite sure which shots and camera angles to trust. Is this your omniscient audience POV, or are you looking from the eyes of the killer, ready to strike? You don't know until a cut... or a cut, one that draws blood. If you're gonna make a horror movie and have POV killer shots, this is a really great way to build tension! Even I, who knows not a single goddamned thing about cinematography, can pick up on what the movie's doing here and applaud it. The second thing it does well, incredibly, is show restraint. For a movie whose main source of terror is the sudden and violent deaths of human beings, it actually has one foot in each door. You do see horrific depictions of slashed throats and axes to faces, as is expected of this sort of film... but there are actually offscreen kills in this one. Sure, you see every body eventually, but the money shot of these damned movies is watching the shit happen. The movie actually forgoes two or three of those in favor of keeping tension, and I can respect that! It's a remarkable bit of artistic restraint. Good decision.

Here's where we go off the rails. This movie is evil. Not entirely on its own merits, as I found some good points... but at the end of the day, everything about it is just wrong on some level. Sure, we've had good things to say about movies where people get murdered in the past 12 days. It's motive and trope I'm concerned with here. Everything so far has either been an unknowable entity with pure survival instinct, or something genuinely otherworldly and strange. Our killer is a pissed off middle-aged woman working out of either a deep, deep psychosis or pure pettiness. Maybe even a fusion of both. I knew, going in, who our killer was. I just assumed she held a vendetta against teens, because it was negligent teens who caused her son to drown. "Death to the sexhavers", in other words. That's not entirely true. It's a vendetta against opening Camp Crystal Lake again, and it paints a bizarre picture when you try to wrap your head around it like I am. Look at the first kill in present day. A hitchhiker gets picked up by Mrs. Voorhees, mentions she's working at Camp Crystal Lake which is reopening... and THAT. THAT is enough to set off whatever murderous gears work in her head and go wild. Revving up her jeep to high speeds, chasing the girl into the woods like you're hunting prey, and cutting her throat violently. Jesus! So begins her killing spree. The Camp will not re-open, and all you sexhaving delinquents will die. The man who dared, who deigned to try and re-open it, will die. The movie obviously wants me to believe the woman has a psychosis because she speaks to herself as her dead son, urging herself to kill kill kill... but then she's calculating. She throws corpses into the cabin to scare the remaining teen, pretends to be an innocent lady to get in there and kill her, all that jazz. If she hated the damn camp so much, why not burn the thing to the ground while it's abandoned? Bam, no more camp. Oh right, the obvious answer is "because then Kevin Bacon can't get an arrow shoved through his neck.". Of course.

This is ugly and ridiculous, and that in itself is evil... but it's how the roots spread that get it. This is one of the many roots that spread and spread itself over multiple sequels and influenced god knows who else. It even created rules, for god's sakes! Dozens, hundreds, thousands of fun-loving teens who drink and smoke pot and fuck each other, cut down by dozens, hundreds, thousands of angry angry psychotics utterly incensed at such depravity. Or supernatural entities incensed at such depravity; this is the "birth" of a legend, after all. Mrs. Voorhees, on her own vendetta to murder a sexy teen, is decapitated by that sexy teen in a battle for survival. A battle not against a monster clown or a hulking zombie, but a little old lady who suffered a tragic loss and decided that everyone had to die because of it. This act of kill or be killed sets off the bloodbath of Jason Voorhees, and countless other sexy teens die. A horror icon is created, rules are made, and we eat it all up. As for our traumatized sexy teen, laying in a hospital bed and having nightmares about the dead child coming up from the water? The very object of guilt swallowing her whole? She'll get hers in Part 2, because All Sexy Teens Must Die. If one looks close, you can make out what fate (and Hollywood) has decreed.

You and your friends are dead. Game Over.