This Week in Retro: Friday the 13th (Patreon)

May 9, 1980: Death comes to Camp Crystal Lake and horror is never the same

by Diamond Feit

In writing these columns and revisiting famous works of the past, I've pointed out before that it isn't necessarily the first instance of a concept that captures the attention of the most people. Nintendo's Game Boy wasn't the first handheld video game console, Final Fight wasn't the first beat-em-up, and Super Smash Bros. wasn't the first crossover fighting game (or arena fighting game). Success, as history has shown time and again, is arbitrary.

Released 40 years ago this week, Friday the 13th was not the first horror movie, nor was it the first slasher flick. It was neither better nor more shocking than its predecessors. It wasn’t even the best example of its own series, which wouldn't really hit its stride for years. But it found more than success: It achieved cultural infamy and created a legacy that may likely outlast cinema itself.

After decades of strict content regulations, American movies in the 1970s took advantage of the demise of the Hays Code to gleefully explore topics that never would have been acceptable just a few years prior. Especially popular were so-called "exploitation" films, which were cheap to produce and often financed independently; these opened the floodgates for filmmakers of all kinds to take their shot. Some formats, such as blaxploitation and martial arts films, presented a golden opportunity for stories about underrepresented groups; Netflix viewers would benefit from watching Dolemite is My Name for a comedic example of this phenomenon. In the case of horror films, however, it meant buckets of gore for bloodthirsty audiences.

Lest this introduction suggest otherwise, I am not here to malign entire decades or genres of film as trash: There are plenty of "exploitation" films which have stood the test of time and maintained critical or cult significance well beyond their era. Death Race 2000 (1975) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) remain personal favorites of mine. I only raise this point to explain why Paramount Studios would agree to release a film in 1980 whose only apparent appeal was "nine attractive people are butchered in the woods."

Friday the 13th shares traits in common with other horror films, especially Halloween (1978), but its success and its many, many sequels came to define the slasher subgenre of horror films. The film focuses on a group of people in a remote area who are partying, screwing, or just existing in an underdressed state. These people are picked off one at a time, often gruesomely, with lots of first-person camera shots. Eventually, a single survivor confronts the killer (in this case a woman named Alice, feeding into the "final girl" trope) and manages to escape... but the ambiguous ending suggests nothing is truly over.

Given its legacy, it's remarkable how much the original Friday the 13th doesn't jive with the rest of the series. For two acts, the identity of the killer is treated as a mystery, with the first-person camera used as a means to conceal the killer from the audience's view. The "final girl" stereotype, typically depicted as "purer" than her cohorts, doesn't mesh well with the character of Alice in this film: She smokes weed, drinks beer, and has an implied sexual relationship with the camp owner.

The biggest change of all: The killer in Friday the 13th is not Jason Voorhees but (spoilers?) his middle-aged mother. It's a surprise, but from a story standpoint, it's a lame surprise. Mrs. Voorhees (she doesn't get a first name in this film) appears out of nowhere in the third act and almost immediately reveals herself as the culprit. What fun is it to have a mystery and then introduce a brand-new suspect before spilling the beans? Having a woman—especially an older woman—serve as the serial killer is an rare twist in the slasher genre, but considering she's killing people on behalf of her son and speaking in his voice, she's just a flip of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) who killed people on behalf of his mother and spoke in her voice.

Jason is not absent from Friday the 13th, but his role is both tertiary and revealed to be central to the story. According to Mrs. Voorhees, Jason drowned in Crystal Lake back in 1957, so she spends the rest of her life murdering anyone who attempts to operate the camp. Yet at the end of the film, Jason seemingly appears and attacks Alice, only to vanish afterward. The police also do not recognize his name. Is he dead? Was he really there? It's left unclear in the original Friday the 13th, but Jason would return in the sequel to kill Alice and then spend the rest of the 1980s killing countless others.

Besides its long legacy on film, Friday the 13th left almost as large an impact on the video game world, albeit one borne from the sequels rather than the original film. A home computer game was released in 1985, and an NES game appeared in 1989, both focused on fighting Jason, who had taken over the franchise by that point. However, an undead Mrs. Voorhees was a major antagonist in the NES game. More recently, Friday the 13th: The Game was released in 2017 and ported to Switch in 2019. Unlike the ’80s games, it is an online multiplayer experience where one player takes up the role of Jason while the rest play as camp counselors trying to escape his wrath. Again, Mrs. Voorhees plays a supporting role.

Three games in 40 years doesn't sound like much, but Friday the 13th has seeped its way into countless video games by way of passing references. Second only to the H.R. Giger Alien design, images from Friday the 13th—particularly Jason himself—are peppered throughout gaming history, especially Japanese games (though, curiously, there is no record that the NES game was ever released for the Famicom). Interpretations/homages of Jason Voorhees appear as heroes and villains alike, from Splatterhouse to Ninja Gaiden to Resident Evil 4. Even Nintendo borrowed Jason's famous hockey mask (first seen in Friday the 13th Part III, for the record) for spooky enemies in Super Mario Land 2 and named them J-son in Japanese.

Beyond films, beyond games, Friday the 13th as a concept became inescapable in the 1980s through endless references and parodies. The movie arrived just in time to take advantage of the booming home video market, and as the sequels poured in, the series would often have an entire shelf to itself. I remember seeing the boxes all lined up at my local store (R.I.P., Video Connection) where the threatening silhouettes and skull-like hockey mask loomed large. The movies were practically daring me to pick them up; I was never brave enough, not that the clerk would have rented them to me anyway. It didn't matter. The movies became prime sleepover material and late-night cable fodder to the point that when I sat down to watch Friday the 13th for this column, I couldn’t tell if I had actually seen it before.

The Friday the 13th template for slasher films became so popular, the entire genre burned itself out by the early 1990s. Jason's "final" film in 1993 sent him to hell, and his box-office numbers went with him, grossing less than half of what the original film had 13 years earlier. In the years since, there has been a comeback, a crossover, and a reboot, but none of them stuck. However, like his on-screen incarnation, Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th are unkillable. Jason's hockey mask is more famous than actual hockey masks; for many people, it's more famous than hockey itself.

I am not a dedicated horror fan, and slasher movies in particular were never my forte, but Friday the 13th still fascinates me. There's barely a protagonist, the mystery isn't well handled, and it ends with a shrug. The makeup effects are excellent, even as the end of Mrs. Voorhees is surreal in its strangeness. Could anyone at Paramount have known this was going to be the film that launched a thousand copycats or birth a cultural icon? Unlikely, and the studio sold the rights years ago when the films were no longer profitable. Yet Friday the 13th has endured, and will endure long after I'm Crazy Ralph's age, ranting to anyone who will listen about how we used to watch movies together at the same time in giant rooms with the lights turned off. And phones? Nobody had any phones...