THE TERROR BEFORE THE MASK: FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) - THE LANDMARK SLASHER AT 45
It is hard to view Sean S. Cunningham’s original Friday the 13th in a vacuum, away from the franchise he unintentionally created. This is due to its poster boy slasher villain, Jason Voorhees, and his infamous hockey mask that has become so recognizable in the mainstream. There was a Friday the 13th released in every year of the 1980s, bar 1983 and 1987, and Jason had become a ‘80s pop culture icon. So much so that non-horror fans were aware of him, and they did not even necessarily know the character by name. When they thought of the genre, what would often come to mind was a hulking hockey-masked maniac massacring scantily clad beautiful young women. Jason had become emblematic of slasher horror, a cinematic movement Friday the 13th had opened its blood gates to; a deluge of rip-offs of a rip-off flowed out.
Cunningham has stated that he did not aspire to make high art, as he just wanted to make a scary good time, by exploiting the phenomenal success of John Carpenter’s slasher template, Halloween (1978). Itself possibly influenced by Bob Clark’s proto-slasher, Black Christmas (1974). Paramount Pictures wanted to milk the Halloween cash cow too, so they picked up the domestic rights to Friday the 13th for $1.5 million, and with a $1 million advertising campaign aimed at teenagers and young adults, they distributed wide this $550,000 exploitation picture. While the independently released Halloween became a hit, it did so by gradually opening in territories over the course of a year and a half, right up to the release of Friday the 13th, which was an instant cult smash. It made a ‘killing’ at the box office with a take of $39,754,601, and it grossed another $20 million from international distribution by Warner Bros. Then other studios started picking up small low-budget slashers, and they released these in cinemas everywhere. Friday the 13th had kick-started the first slasher cycle.
These types of trash flicks with no star actors were usually seen in the seedy grindhouse fleapits on 42nd Street, Manhattan, New York, and on the drive-in movie theatre circuit across America, released by shady distributors to make some easy money. This was the first time that a reputable major Hollywood studio had released such a film, so general audiences could go see it in the clean and luxurious surroundings of their local multiplexes. Honest workers and students were going with friends and partners, amongst the safer company of other regular folk, as opposed to the low lives of drug dealers, junkies, pimps, prostitutes, and street thugs.
Audiences lapped up the feature’s focal selling point of its shockingly realistic set-pieces, in which a likable bunch of teens are gruesomely dispatched one-by-one in loving graphic detail, realized by SFX wiz Tom Savini. Even though around half of the murders happen off-screen, we still see the horrid aftermaths. This made for an intense visceral experience, and added the gore factor to the slasher template. It is in stark contrast to Carpenter’s minimalist approach in Halloween that focused on eerie atmosphere and taut suspense and tension, and it has little bloodletting. Friday the 13th is almost as much Savini’s film as it is Cunningham’s, as the director mostly just points the camera at the execution of these practical special make-up effects creations. But he does pull off some effective highlights, with well-paced, suspenseful and tense, and genuinely creepy sequences that deserve more credit than they are given.
Screenwriter Victor Miller creates an unsettling mood with moments of quietness, both compressed and expanded, in a deliberately paced slasher piece that demands our patience. Aside from setting up the premise and the lore, and throwing in a red herring, the first act is almost plotless. It mostly plays out like a slice of teenage life in the woods, as we get to know and like this small group of characters. It generates our fears for them due to the horror we witnessed in the opening, and the horror returns when their bodies start piling up from the beginning of the second act. Even then, the killer commits their murders on the quiet, because they stalk the teens unbeknownst to them, so they do not get the chance to defend themselves.
Composer Harry Manfredini’s main theme greatly resembles the striking strings ensemble of Bernard Herrmann’s composition for Alfred Hitchcock’s granddaddy slasher forerunner, Psycho (1960). Manfredini’s cue motif sting alerts us to when the mystery killer is on the screen, together with cinematographer Barry Abrams’ point-of-view shots.
The cold open in the period setting of 1958 establishes the summer camp location in the fictional rural town Crystal Lake. It sets the grisly tone, as it features the obligatory first stalk and slash set-piece to whet our appetites, with the double murder of a young couple of camp counsellors that were getting it on. We see the first use of the first-person perspective of the psychotic killer, used to evoke a sense of voyeurism. This technique was innovated by Michael Powell in his cult classic psychological horror, Peeping Tom (1960). This prologue tells us that sex = death, just as the opening of Halloween does, when we see through the POV of the six-year-old Michael Myers, him repeatedly stab his older sister Judith to death, after she just had sex with her boyfriend. Both sequences serve as the backstories of the present day events.
After the title sequence, there is a narrative time jump to Friday 13th June 1979 (the year the film was made). We meet hitchhiking cook, Annie (Robbi Morgan). She gets a ride from local truck driver Enos (Rex Everhart, 1929 - 2000) halfway to the reopening Camp Crystal Lake, which the locals have nicknamed “Camp Blood”. Walking to the truck, they cross paths with prophet of doom, Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney, 1912 - 2004), who exclaims about the camp, “It’s got a death curse!” This town drunk is a red herring, and he foreshadows the horror instore, codifying the slasher trope of a doomsayer from the older generation warning the younger generation of their impending tragic fates. He has memorable lines like, “I’m the messenger of God. You’re doomed if you stay here.” Keep this is mind.
Enos also warns Annie that Camp Crystal Lake is jinxed, and he feeds us exposition. He tells her about a series of tragic incidents out of chronological order: a couple of camp counsellors were murdered in 1958; a boy drowned in 1957; a bunch of fires happened, but he does not specify the date; and when they tried to reopen in 1962 the water was bad. Enos mentions the most important event between two of the events it triggered - the murders and the fires - so it is not on our minds over the course of the proceedings.
Screenwriter Miller has ticked a box for a whodunit. Taking place in a small countryside town, the history of these crimes has more of an effect on its residents, sending ripples through the community, which relates the backstory to the young outsiders. As the perpetrator was never caught, it has dire consequences for them, because they are staying in the same location where the crimes were committed.
Then we are introduced to the rest of the camp counsellors. Driving to the camp are lovers Jack (a post-Animal House Kevin Bacon) and Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), and their third wheel jokester friend, Ned (Mark Nelson), a character type that will become archetypical in the slasher sub-genre. When they arrive, they meet: owner Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), who has been fixing up the place for its reopening; final girl Alice (Adrienne King), who is an art major; Bill (Harry Crosby, son of Bing), who is Alice’s love interest; and Brenda (Laurie Bartram, 1958 - 2007), who is an animal lover. Victor Miller created these characters for the youth of the day in mind to identify with. Despite the one-dimensional characterisations of these teenagers, they are portrayed as well-meaning, fun loving, and carefree, so we care about them. We value them as sympathetic victims purely of circumstance, when their lives are tragically cut short in the most brutal and callous of ways. This is a clear distinction between the annoyingly obnoxious kids that would populate slasher cinema soon later.
Victor Miller has placed the teens in a remote location away from adult supervision to be systematically murdered. They are lambs to the slaughter. It is a simple yet terrifying concept. They are stuck in an outlying backcountry area, during a heavy thunderstorm at night, with the electricity out, the telephone lines cut, and all means of transportation off limits, while they are oblivious to someone stalking them, and we are the only ones let in on this. Camp Crystal Lake popularized the slasher’s exploited settings of summer camps and other isolated environments - the backwoods in general, amusement parks, college dorms, etc. These are places we can easily find ourselves in, and so it provides a real sense of dread and potential doom. Mario Bava’s 1971 giallo/slasher prototype, Reazione a Catena/Chain Reaction (A Bay of Blood, Twitch of the Death Nerve), was the first to do this, taking place at a secluded bay side mansion.
Steve drives out of the camp in a green SUV to go to town for supplies. Straight after, a same colour SUV picks up Annie. The roof is down, whereas the roof of Steve’s was up, and the colour of the license plate on the back is blue, whereas on Steve’s it was yellow. Once Annie is in the passenger’s seat, we see her from the driver’s POV, as she tells them she will be the cook at the reopening Camp Crystal Lake. The driver then speeds up, goes right past the road to go to the camp, and Manfredini’s pounding score plays. There is then the first of two chase sequences - the only instances in which the victims know they are being stalked. The vehicles’ similarities will play a crucial part in the finale, because Alice saw Steve leave the camp in the SUV.
On another note, for future reference, when we see the killer’s legs as they are chasing Annie, they are a man’s legs.
Crazy Ralph sneaks in to the camp and warns the group, a sign of their imminent deaths. Soon later, Ned follows the killer into a cabin. Just as a thunderstorm is about to hit, Marcie tells Jack she has been scared of storms since she was a child, and describes her recurring nightmare, “… the rain turns to blood, and the blood washes away in little rivers.” As it starts to pour, so begins, 'A Long Night at Camp Blood', which was the tentative title of the script. The second act of the film is when it comes alive.
As Jack and Marcie are making love, on the bottom of a bunk bed in the same cabin Ned followed the killer into, the camera pans up to the top bunk and Ned’s throat slit corpse, and then there is a close-up of Marcie’s face as she climaxes. She then leaves to use the bathroom. As Jack lies on the bed smoking a cigarette, a drop of Ned’s blood falls on his face, and then suddenly, from beneath the bed, a right hand (of a man) grabs his forehead, and their other hand rams an arrow through the mattress and into the back of his neck, piercing through, and blood spurts all over his chest. The slasher film’s intrinsically linked sex and death has never been so explicit. As Jack and Marcie are having sex, the dead body of their friend is laid out above them, and the killer is underneath them.
Despite our anticipatory anxiety for the inevitable, we are still shocked by the viciousness of Marcie’s murder, because obviously, we did not know how it would play out. In an “Oh, shit!” moment, we see behind her on a wall in the bathroom, a silhouette of an axe being raised. She then turns around to see it held high, lets out a loud scream, then we see it come down, and a hanging light shade that swings wildly when the axe makes contact with it. We see the axe buried in the left side of her once pretty, destroyed face, as she falls back, and slides down a shower curtain and out of frame. The axe hitting the light shade makes for a nice touch in the execution, as it bridges the driving of it into Marcie’s skull, and when the camera returns to the swinging light shade for the last shot of the scene, it makes for haunting imagery.
Off-screen kills are never popular with slasher/horror fandom, and this sequence is never talked about, but it is well staged and executed. When Brenda is in her cabin lying on a bed reading a book, she hears the ghostly sound of a young boy’s voice crying out for help from the darkness outside. This is the killer mimicking a child’s voice, but it sounds authentically like a child. Brenda, concerned for their safety, goes out to search for him using a torch, and only wearing a nightgown. The boy can still be heard in the thick of the thunderstorm, until his voice suddenly stops, when Brenda finds herself at an archery range where the killer has lured her to, and they put on the lights that blind her as she stands in front of a target. Soon after the lights have come on, the film cuts to the exterior of the cabin Alice and Bill are in, and we hear Brenda let out a deafening scream. Earlier, we saw Brenda putting up the archery range, and when she finished positioning one of the targets, Ned, messing around, used a bow to shoot an arrow into the target while she was standing right next to it. Due to this foreshadowing, we get an idea of how she is killed. A child’s voice calling for help to a young woman alone at a remote location, in the pitch-blackness of night, during a heavy thunderstorm, then those blinding lights, and her death scream, are chilling imagery and sounds. When I first saw the film, this is one of the moments that stayed with me.
Bill delivers the immortal line in slasher cinema - “I’ll be right back”, and so we know he will not be. When Alice discovers him dead, we get a close-up money shot of his bloodied carcass pinned to a cabin’s door with arrows, and his throat is slit.
This brings us to the finale. Alice is holed up in a cabin, and the killer terrorizes her by throwing Brenda’s body through a window she is standing by. Alice then sees the headlights of a vehicle pull up, and seeing a SUV, she mistakes it for Steve’s, unaware that he has been murdered, so she rushes out, and is met by a woman we are seeing for the first time. Set up in the first act, this is how Alice comes face to face with the killer, and she is now more vulnerable not having the protection of the cabin.
We could clearly see that the killer’s hands and legs were a man’s, but now we are presented with a stocky middle-aged woman with a butch haircut. Whom are the filmmakers kidding with this cack-handed gender swap reveal?
The woman tells Alice that her name is Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer, 1926 - 2015). After she feigns innocence over Brenda, she tells Alice about the boy who drowned in 1957. The negligence of the camp counsellors because they were having sex, caused her unsupervised young son named Jason to drown, when he tried to swim in the lake by the campgrounds where she worked as a cook. She tells Alice that after what happened that she could not let them open the camp again. She tells her that today is her son’s birthday, falling on the superstitiously unlucky Friday the 13th. This started the trope of the slasher villain revealing themselves and their motive to their last intended victim. Mrs. Voorhees is delusional in her belief that she is saving other children from the tragedy that befell her son by murdering innocent people to make sure the camp stays closed. Half of her is a sympathetic grieving mother; the other is a deranged vengeful murderess. This is elevated by the brilliant manic energy of Betsy Palmer, who is the most experienced actor here, and she is easily the best.
Harry Manfredini’s sound effect of “ki ki ki, ma ma ma” represents Mrs. Voorhees’ psychosis of schizophrenia, as she has auditory hallucinations of her deceased son Jason telling her, “Kill her, mommy!” The “ki” comes from “kill”, and the “ma” comes from “mommy”. This is a role reversal of Psycho - the mother is alive, and her son is dead.
We did not get to meet Mrs. Voorhees from the outset, as a seemingly good person nobody suspects. It is a cop out in a mystery film when a character introduced for the last 20 minutes, reveals they are the killer and their motivation to the survivor, within their first two minutes of screen time. This is horribly lazy writing that insults our intelligence.
Friday the 13th solidifies the entwining of sex and death/the sin met with punishment implied in Halloween. Victor Miller makes it unequivocal by giving Mrs. Voorhees the urgency of sex = death that propels her vengeful murderous rampage on the horny young camp counsellors. The slasher film inhabits the puritanical, conservative, and Christian/Catholic world, as the killers represent their abhorrent views on pre-marital sex in a morbid moral lesson. In Friday the 13th, the warnings from Crazy Ralph - ‘the messenger of God’ - carry the underlying ominous threat that the teenagers’ so-called misdeeds will not go unpunished. The female victims in slashers are not usually promiscuous, as they are in normal, healthy, and monogamous relationships, but because the sex is pre-marital, they are nothing but sluts in the church’s narrow-mindedness. Alice is the quintessential final girl: she is not sexually active (she is possibly a virgin); she is sensible; she is resourceful; and she survives when confronting the killer. While the final girl is morally upright, it is because of her intelligence that she is able to think critically, and she can decide what she wants to do, unlike the followers of blind faith. When the final girl dispatches the killer who embodies this poisonous worldview, she vanquishes it.
The other chase sequence leads to the final showdown that takes place by the lake. It results in Alice decapitating Mrs. Voorhees with the machete she used to attack Alice, which is captured in all its gory glory in slow motion.
We then hear Manfredini’s tranquil closing theme, but this reassurance is false. An exhausted and traumatized Alice boards a canoe, she takes it out on the lake, and she falls asleep. In the morning, the police turn up, who shouts to her, and she wakes up and looks up. As the calming music still plays, the camera slowly, and suggestively, zooms in to the right of Alice, in the seemingly safe surroundings of the stillness of the lake. Then suddenly, we see the horrifying imagery of the decomposed and hideously deformed boy, Jason, rise from the lake, and pull Alice under the water in revenge on her for killing his mother. Alice then wakes up screaming in a hospital bed. I first saw Friday the 13th growing up in the 1990s, when I got my parents to rent it for me on an old dirty worn out VHS tape from our local video store. Despite the suggestive camera movement in this scene, I was still horror-struck by what happened, because up to this point, the film was grounded in reality, with not one hint of a supernatural element. Then it turns out to be a Carrie-esque nightmare sequence. This is one of the most finely crafted final jump scares in cinematic horror history, and it is one of my most vivid memories of my misspent youth watching movies.
In the hospital, Alice asks the present police officer about Jason, and he tells her they did not find a boy, to which Alice replies, “Then he’s still there.” She turns her head facing the camera, as we hear the return of the end theme, which now takes on a more poignant meaning, when the picture transitions to Crystal Lake, and the camera slowly zooms in on ripples in the water. If we can view the film as a singular work, there is heartbreaking melancholic beauty in this final shot. Half-way through the third act, it became the tragic story of a broken woman. She went insane when her world collapsed from losing her only child, a mentally challenged hydrocephalic boy, who she struggled to raise, but she loved him unconditionally. When he drowned, his body was never recovered from the lake, and so it did not give his mother closure. Jason is a dead child used as a plot device. He is the catalyst to the present day events, existing only in referential dialogue, flashbacks, and in a dream scene. In this context, it is something more psychologically disturbing. The story was never supposed to be expanded.
The original Friday the 13th is a genre landmark for three reasons: it was an anomaly, because it was something the masses had never seen; it ignited the slasher boom; and it started a franchise that would give us one of the most iconic horror villains. The film is a collection of some of slasher cinema’s most memorable moments realized by: Sean S. Cunningham’s workmanlike direction; Tom Savini’s convincing gross out SFX; Victor Miller’s serviceable to their single mindedness, but flawed, screenplay; and Harry Manfredini’s terrorizer soundtrack. It is nowhere near the masterclass filmmaking of Halloween, nor is it as well made, or as entertaining, as other slashers released later (including some of its sequels), but it is better than other entries in or out of the series that scraped the barrel. It does exactly what it says on the tin, as a grimy exercise in a sustained night of terror, encapsulated in a perpetual mood of dread and isolation. “They were warned… They are doomed… And on Friday the 13th, nothing will save them.”
Source: THE TERROR BEFORE THE MASK: FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) - THE LANDMARK SLASHER AT 45
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