Whither Jason? – The Drama and Dichotomy of Friday the 13th
Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th might not have been the first slasher – not by a long chalk – but there’s a strong case to be made that it was the first to consolidate the structure, aesthetic and audience expectations of the sub-genre as we know it today. Particularly, it cemented the concept of the final girl.
(Yes, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in Halloween is a final girl by default, but her survival is dependent on the intervention of an adult male; same goes for her characters in Terror Train and Roadgames. Scream queen, definitely; final girl, hmmm.)
Commandment-like, the rules that Friday the 13th set up are:
-Thou shalt confine the action of thy film to a specific location;
-Thou shalt assemble a collection of photogenic teenagers with interchangeable personalities;
-Thou shalt have two of them make the beast with two backs and/or have the more buxom of the female talent take narratively unnecessary showers;
-Thou shalt kill the shit out of them in various imaginative ways;
-Thou shalt define thy killer by a single, easily memorable trait, be it preferred weapon, manner of dress or choice of identity-concealing mask;
-Thou shalt have thy beleaguered and tormented heroine discover the corpses of her erstwhile companions, driving her to the brink …
-… only instead of mentally disintegrating she gets her final girl funk on and it’s showdown a-go-go with the big bad;
-Thou shalt end with a sequel-friendly hook.
There is also another one, contiguous with the “define thy killer by a single trait” commandment:
-Thy killer shall be known by a mononym (yes, all of them have surnames: Voorhees, Krueger, etc; but it’s their first name that is both co-opted into fandom and shoehorned into the post-colon titles of the sequels).
Subject of which, let’s throw in one more:
-Thou shalt rely on increasingly portentous and/or outright ludicrous subtitles the longer the franchise rumbles on.
Only Friday the 13th doesn’t obey one of these commandments, and here we need to hoist the jolly SPOILER and leave it flying. ‘Friday the 13th’ is the first of the Jason Vorhees films, a series so committed to the canonisation of its antagonist that the very name Jason features in the titles of five of the twelve films.
Jason Voorhees makes one appearance in Friday the 13th. It comes a couple of minutes before the end credits roll and he’s revealed as a little kid (granted, a little, dead, zombified kid) and in all probability an hallucination. Which brings us to the final slasher commandment:
-Thou shalt not behold thyself to continuity.
So, having got all of that out of the way, let’s waltz across the dance floor of a plot synopsis. A brief prologue sets the scene as 1958; at Camp Crystal Lake, a group of impossibly wholesome looking young adults are singing ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’; two of them peel off to get jiggy in a storeroom, whereupon the others strike up a rousing rendition of ‘Tom Dooley’ (sample lyric: “I took her on the mountain, and there I took her life / I took her on the mountain, stabbed her with my knife”), so maybe not that wholesome after all. ANYWAY, the lustful couple are swiftly despatched by an unseen assailant and before you know it a title card informs us it’s the “present day” and — …
Okay, let’s load up the blunderbuss and take our best shot at the elephant in the room. Friday falls on the 13th of the month at the most three times in any calendar year; sometimes only once. It happened only once in 1958: in June. Ditto 1980, the year the film was released and the year we have to assume the film is set given the “present day” title card. These specifics don’t really matter much as far as this first instalment is concerned, but it’s worth setting out the stall marked “the Friday the 13th dating controversy” just in case I return to the franchise in future reviews.
So: rutting camp counsellors are despatched, the film leaps forward 22 years and a bright, pretty, idealistic young woman, Annie (Robbi Morgan) is hitchhiking to Camp Crystal Lake to take up a position at the soon-to-reopen summer camp. She fetches up at the small town bordering the lake and is immediately subject to some portentous psychobabble courtesy of resident nutcase Crazy Ralph (Walt Dorney). Undeterred, she continues on and before you can say “aha, we have a reasonably nuanced character with a touch of backstory played by a likeable actress”, any hope that Annie will be our final girl is cruelly torn away, the movie notches up its first casualty and next thing we’re at the camp and some really bland and uninteresting teenagers are being hectored by the camp’s new owner (and all round humourless prick) Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer).
There’s little worth saying about any of these characters – even the actual final girl, Alice (Adrienne King), doesn’t have much about her until the last reel savagery forces he into a fight-back – except that one of them is played by a pre-stardom Kevin Bacon and another spends the film playing unfunny pranks and you just want to slap him. Indeed, there’s little worth saying about the draggy mid-section (endemic to most flicks of this ilk) during which horny teens romp around in swimming cozzies, toss off half-hearted banter, and try to screw each others’ brains out whenever the opportunity presents itself. Eventually, the body count starts to ratchet up and interest resumes.
Friday the 13th boasts a relatively parsimonious body count (by what would become the standards of the genre), and it expends more screen time and creative energy than one might expect in establishing some red herrings. But of course, Friday the 13th has a better hand to play than any of its successors in terms of being a mystery as well as a slasher.
You see, it ain’t Jason who’s the big bad here. Matter of fact, the poor little bugger’s the victim. Which makes his last minute hallucinatory appearance no more than a cheap scare quickly revealed as a bad dream, and the narrative swerve that the series took from its second instalment onwards – belligerently shoehorning his name into the subtitle with 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan – quite a weird decision.
A weird decision, however, that created an icon.
Lucy Bellingham
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