Friday the 13th

Please note the purpose of this blog is to discuss established classics that I've never seen. As such, the following is laden with spoilers.


Why So Long?
At this point in proceedings it's probably becoming clear that I didn't watch a lot of horror movies growing up. There's a variety of reasons behind that but the principle one was a lack of interest. Now though, in the days when even escapist entertainment has a running time that would test David Lean's patience, there's an attraction in catching up on the popcorn-fayer I missed. This film is just over ninety-minutes long, could a child born after the year 2000 even conceive of such a thing?

And?
One the laziest and most deplorable things anyone can do, especially someone who's self-important enough to put their thoughts up on the internet like they matter, is to take cheap shots at something they didn't find agreeable. Which makes it very difficult to write the following the sentence. What the f**k is this nonsense? How has this become a cult classic? From what I can make out, some folk saw Halloween in 1978 and thought, "like that, but crap".

Okay, so I will concede that I did not see that twist ending coming. Interestingly that is one of the twist endings that has only been enhanced by the passage of time and the place the film has taken in the cultural canon - yes, I was expecting Jason to pop up. And to their credit, that the revelation is a revelation does raise some interesting talking points about the role of gender in the horror genre. Yet, when we stop to consider the gory deaths of our young protagonists, we soon realise that a conversation piece on gender politics probably wasn't what the filmmakers had in mind; as the female cast, to a person, meets a much more gruesome and prolonged ending than their male counterparts.

I'll further concede that, for a film approaching its forth decade on release, its aged surprisingly well. Although this owes much more to the machinations of Hollywood than it does to the creative talents of the filmmakers. Released in 1980, the same year as The Shining and just two years after Halloween, this was one of the first films to echo the blueprint those films would lay for years to come. The majority, as there are exceptions, of Hollywood horrors from then until pretty much now have followed this formula, just with better special effects. I suspect this film is less of a cult classic on the basis of content than it just got its timing spectacularly correct.

This of course raises the question, would I like the film more if I managed to see it before I was in my mid-thirties? Probably not. What this film can't escape from, is that it's clearly just an attempt to cash-in on Halloween's success. Where Halloween built a film around a terrifying phantom of a protagonist, Friday the 13th builds a narrative around the idea of being repelled by our obsession with sexually promiscuous teenagers. As if to really hammer home this Reagan-era fear, at one point we're treated to a rendition of some bible-songs from our counsellors just before they get down in the hay. 

"I'm a messenger of God. You're doomed if you stay here!"

I don't want to go too far down spoiler avenue, but teenagers playing with each others genitals when they should be doing the task in front of them is a very central theme in this film. Which has the odd effect then of positioning our villain as a vengeful Christ-figure. As I said, the more you explore the themes of the film, the more that gender-role thing I mentioned earlier just looks like a complete accident.


Will You be Watching it Again?

Probably not to be honest, I mean, why put this on again when I can just put Halloween on instead? I may get round to watching one of the sequels and finally seeing what all the hype is regarding Jason Voorhees, but I have my suspicions that he's just a crap Mike Myers.


Has Any Light Been Shone on Some Heretofore Unknown Bit of Pop Culture?

Crazy Ralph! South Park has a similar character throughout their ongoing series who tends to pop-up muttering words of foreboding, usually when Randy has some mad idea. I always suspected he was a reference to some slasher flick, nice to finally find out which one it was.