Pumpkin Person rating: 9.5/10
WARNING THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), PLEASE DO SO BEFORE READING FURTHER.
In honor of Friday the 13th being tomorrow, and falling so close to Halloween this year, I had to review one of my favorite movies of all time: Friday the 13th (1980).
Shortly after Halloween (1978) became the most successful independent movie of its time, a platoon of slasher films rushed into production, hoping to replicate Halloween‘s success. Of these, the most successful and influential was Friday the 13th.
Like Halloween before it, Friday the 13th was a movie about, and for, white America. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, just the reality of American culture circa 1980.
Both films revolved around most quintessential white experiences. Halloween was about teenagers babysitting in the suburbs of a small Midwestern town, and Friday the 13th was about summer camp.
Both films had not a single non-white character.
Although Friday the 13th was set in 1980 (the year of its release), it seems symbolic that its opening murder takes places in the 1950s: the glory days for white America, and the film begins by focusing on camp counselors who are unapologetically blond and blue eyed. They sneak away from guitar duty to “fool around” in the upstairs of a cabin, not knowing someone is stalking the camp. We see from the killer’s point of view that someone is walking through camp bedrooms as people sleep, and that someone is climbing up the stairs to punish the young couple.
The moon is full.
Fast forward to 1980 and a fresh batch of camp counselors is coming to work at what has been nicknamed “camp blood”. One by one they are killed off, as a demented old man named Ralph tries to warn them they are doomed if they stay there.
Unlike the original Halloween which relied more on suspense than gore, Friday the 13th reveled in blood and guts. We’re talking spears stabbing you from under your bed, bloody corpses pinned to doors, and axes to the face.
But what made this disgusting display so brilliantly ironic, was that when the face of the killer was finally revealed, it was not the hulking hockey masked man we associate with the franchise, but an All-American 1950s style mom!
She was the lady next door, the girl scout leader, the June Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver.
In a riveting performance by Betsy Palmer, we watch as this all American mom (Mrs Voorhees) from our TV dreams, who we think is there to save the day, slowly reveals herself to be the machete wielding homicidal slasher of our horror nightmares.
Driven mad with grief after her mentally retarded son Jason was allowed to drown because camp counselors were busy making love, she had been vengefully stalking the camp for a quarter century.
But if that weren’t enough of a twist, Friday the 13th has perhaps the best surprise ending of any horror film ever. After surviving the night of camp blood and beheading Mrs Voorhees, the heroine, Alice, gets into a canoe, and just drifts aimlessly. In one of the most beautiful scenes in horror history, she wakes up in the boat to a glorious new morning. Although supposedly June, the autumn leaves reflect multicolored hues in the morning lake, as she looks up to see the police there to rescue her.
And just when you think it’s a happy ending, the corpse of Mrs Voorhees drowned little hydrocephalic son, Jason, jumped from his underwater grave to pull Alice into the lake.
Alice wakes up screaming in a hospital. Apparently she must have just dreamed being pulled into the lake
But what makes the dream so utterly creepy is that in Friday the 13th part II, Jason shows up at Alice’s home and murders her, except he’s not the corpse of a drowned little boy she saw in her dream, but a grown-ass man in his thirties!
Apparently the mentally disabled Jason had never really drowned at all, but survived in the woods, too low in spatial IQ to find his way home, or, too low in social IQ to realize going home was the thing to do.
And just as Jason’s mother murdered teenagers at the camp to avenge the perceived drowning of her son, in the sequels, it’s Jason who kills teenagers at the camp to avenge the beheading of his mother.
Despite being just another brain dead horror franchise, it requires a certain intelligence to appreciate such plot symmetry.
Pumpkin Person 
Something I’ve never said was that I was a horror movie junkie when I was younger. I watched all of them, including this. The 80s were the golden age of horror.
Now I can’t watch horror movies without panicking. For some reason my adult mind takes them more seriously. Its very odd and probably linked to my current status as holding on to sanity with my fingernails in a basement.
Now I can’t watch horror movies without panicking. For some reason my adult mind takes them more seriously. Its very odd and probably linked to my current status as holding on to sanity with my fingernails in a basement.
I have a similar experience with downhill skiing. As a teen I would race down the steepest black diamond hills without a care in the World, but now my adult brain is far more worried about injury.
I think back in the old days, studios weren’t bothered about money so much and you got a lot of novel and creative ideas in the horror genre with low budgets. Things that John Carpenter did for example.
Now they only want proven ideas, which means stealing East Asian horror movie plots.
The last horror I saw was Room 1408 which terrified me so much I had to pace my back garden for 20 minutes in circles to calm myself. My mind can’t take these things.
“Get Out” just came out this year. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Greatest horror movie of all time!!
I’ll have to check it out!
Fun fact…James Cusack has as good a record at sleeping with top level women as Leonardo Di Caprio and Justin Timberlake.
So he was raping women who desperately needed parts, a la Weinstein?
Alternatively the writers obviously thought of none of this and everything in a horror movie is a rhetorical device used to induce an adrenaline rush.
Everything from Jason’s lack of intelligence, to his lack of and later distorted appearance is to dehumanize him and make him into an unreasoning force of nature against which you can do nothing, merely observing your own demise, creating suspense and thus fear.
[rest of comment redacted by pp, Friday the 13th, Oct 2017]
Alternatively the writers obviously thought of none of this
I never said, nor implied, the writers thought of any of this. F13 is a classic example of serendipity. By sheer chance the film makers stumbled upon a wonderfully symmetrical and fascinating narrative.
I just don’t see the point in drawing conclusions about characters that the writers never intended to make.
His still being at Camp Crystal Lake has less to do with spatial intelligence and more to do with the classic ending of many campfire stories “And Legend has it he is still there to this day, stalking the woods around us…” For bonus points you get one of your friends to dress up as the guy and ambush your friends.
People are terrified about the prospect of being attacked by an unknown enemy hiding in the darkness.
I know this is an IQ blog, but this has a tedium to it. I imagine you’re fan enough to deliver a straight and comprehensive review anyway.
I agree that psychoanalyzing fictional characters is largely pointless which is why i only do this kind of thing near Halloween. As you imply, the behavior of these characters largely reflects the writer’s mindsets and goals, and reading more into it than that is a wild goose chase.
But it’s just fun sometimes to analyze fiction as if it were reality because writers will often say that after a certain point, the characters take on a life of their own, and it no longer matters what the writer intended or why. At a certain point the story grows organically from the characters themselves and the writer becomes almost a passive observer.
Now I’m not suggesting the F13 films have reached that stage of development but once you create a fictional world, it becomes governed by its own internal logic, and the writer, regardless of his agenda, must adhear to those rules.
I suspect there are all kinds of things we can learn from fictional characters that the writer did not intend or even knew himself. For example a feminist writer who eschews sexist stereotypes might be horrified to discover that all her female characters behaved submissively without her even realizing she was writing them that way. So we can learn something about reality that the writer did not know, let alone intend to imply.
The fictional world is a reflection of reality even when not intended to be, and even when intended not to be.
>But it’s just fun
No.
>I suspect there are all kinds of things we can learn from fictional characters that the writer did not intend or even knew himself.
You know and I know you’re doing this for the leisure, you’re not deducing useful psychological information betrayed by the writers unconscious intentions rather than stated purpose.
It’s just a personal preference PP. I find analysing irrelevant information tedious, apparently you find it interesting in itself.
Personally I’d be more interested to find out the implications of our desire to be scared by movies.
Everything from Jason’s lack of intelligence, to his lack of and later distorted appearance is to dehumanize him and make him into an unreasoning force of nature against which you can do nothing, merely observing your own demise, creating suspense and thus fear.
Interestingly enough, Jason was only created because the film makers needed a reason for Mrs. Voorhees’s killing spree, so they gave her a dead son (Jason) who’s drowning she was avenging. Only when they needed a last minute scare did they decide Jason would jump out in a dream sequence, and so the special effects master Tom Savini decided to make him look scary. The low intelligence and deformity was because Savini had been freaked out by a hydrocephalic as a child, and so wanted Jason to be a “hydrocephalic mongoloid pinhead”.
But more generally, Jason in the sequels was part of a tradition of low IQ villains who were scary in part because you couldn’t reason with them, as you say. This was another trope they copied from Halloween, but which probably traces all the way back to Frankenstein. This in sharp contrast to the high IQ villains of horror such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Dracula.
And Harvey Weinstein.
I miss the 80s. Everything was much more innocent and simpler back then.
The century 1920 – 2020 can be seen as the slow progression of jewish power and you can all see the results for yourself. Pick up an old magazine. Its interesting.
Yes or no – [redacted by pp, Friday the 13th, Oct 2017]
No
Where is Philipp Fry??? I mean, iluminatikitty??