Halloween is a great time to stuff your face with candy and watch scary movies. For horror film producers, cheap costume designers, and candy manufacturers, it’s a time of year to make a lot of money. I like Halloween but don’t always enjoy what comes with it.
Many of the films promoted around Halloween are more goofy than scary, and when cable networks show you marathons of movies for 31 days, most days are filled with movies I’m not thrilled to watch.
Horror critics and superfans enjoy breaking scary movies down into subcategories, such as slasher films, monster films, horror science fiction, goat horror (it exists), rodent horror, real-crime serial killer horror, and so on.
I don’t have a favorite horror movie subcategory, but I like a film when it’s entertaining—even if it’s stupid, unrealistic, and cheap.
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One of my favorite brain-dead villains, Jason Vorhees, only makes a brief appearance in the first Friday the 13th film but is responsible for most of the murders, excluding Friday the 13th Part V, in the sequels.
Friday the 13th Part IV was supposed to be the Final Chapter, but since it made too much money, Paramount produced Part V and called it A New Beginning. It’s a laughably bad movie and the only film in the series that features a different mad killer with a hockey mask.
The puny antagonist isn’t Jason Vorhees; he’s a paramedic named Roy. Roy, the killer, doesn’t sound scary for some reason, and why did they choose a paramedic? If you want to watch the best Friday movies, check out the original, Part III, Part VI (Jason Lives), and Jason Goes to Hell, the ninth film.
In Part III, Jason gets his hockey mask from a misunderstood makeup effects nerd, and you can still watch it in 3D if you can find the DVD. The 3D effects are remarkable for a cheap horror movie, and I think they spent more time making the 3D look cool than they did on the story.
Friday the 13th (1980)
Although its writer and director admitted they stole the idea from Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th is a better rip-off than the original. The original Halloween is a slasher that changed the genre and was a low-budget hit. The creators are proud of their original slasher idea, but I’m sure they watched Black Christmas in 1974.
For Halloween, John Carpenter replaced the Christmas killer in Black Christmas with another escaped mental patient who murdered high school kids instead of sorority sisters.
He changed the holiday to Halloween because who wants to watch vicious, bloody murder on Christmas? No one in 1974 wanted to watch it, but moviegoers loved Halloween, and in 1980, they fell in love (and hate) with Friday the 13th.
When Sean Cunningham released Friday the 13th in 1980, the critics hated it. They treated it like the contaminated food tossed out of a cruise ship porthole, and newspaper writers across the country made sure to include “gory,” “too much sex,” and “garbage” in their headlines.
Some went to great lengths to convince their readers it was evil trash and bad for America’s youth. Several years ago, I read an article about Gene Siskel’s militant reaction to Friday.
He called Paramount to protest the movie, published Betsy Palmer’s home address in his review, and urged his readers to send her critical letters.
I can’t disagree with everything the critics said. Still, I’m surprised that a low-budget horror film would cause a pretentious, well-paid writer to obliterate a movie far tamer and less exploitative than grindhouse films from the 1970s.
Gory, low-budget movies were nothing new in 1980, but Friday the 13th was one of the first horror films to use realistic-looking fake blood. The makeup effects in the movie are high caliber and help elevate the weak plotting and acting.
Friday the 13th and many of its sequels represent the true, bloody spirit of Halloween even better than the Halloween films. Although Jason Vorhees doesn’t begin murdering college students until Part 2, he borrows his psychotic mother’s camera angle from the first movie.
The first-person killer view is used throughout the original Friday, and though it’s well done, it was done with more style in Dario Argento’s Susperia three years earlier.
Friday’s setting appeals to me more than other films like Halloween. The location was an authentic camp in New Jersey, and Sean Cunningham and his low-budget team were lucky to land a spot that didn’t look like a cheap Hollywood set. Halloween wasn’t shot on a stage, but the locations in California are dull and unremarkable.
The wooded landscape and sparkling lake in Friday are gorgeous in the daytime, but the atmosphere becomes frightening when the sun drops. When an intense thunderstorm rumbles into the camp, the violence ramps up, and you see more of Tom Savini’s gory effects.
The movie’s script was written while the film was being made, and you shouldn’t search for any hidden meaning in the dialogue or plot. Some of the film’s opponents believed the filmmakers were evil peddlers of sex and murder, and somehow, the movie could convince the country’s youth to embrace violence and wreck society. However, Friday the 13th isn’t that manipulative or nefarious.
It’s only the result of Sean Cunningham trying to make a higher-quality, more successful horror film than Halloween. Although it’s dipped in sleaze in some scenes, it’s not as lurid or controversial as some critics claimed. It doesn’t contain subliminal images or satanic sound effects.
Some parts of the soundtrack sound oddly similar to the music in Psycho, and like the film itself, it’s a world-class rip-off. Without the screeching violins and the weirdo that keeps whispering “Kill, Ma” when Mrs. Vorhees is stalking counselors, the movie wouldn’t be the same.
The cinematography and music are impressive for an amateur team. Cunningham created a scary film without good acting, a cohesive plot, support from the media, or a big budget. It’s ridiculous and amusing, and I’m still confused as to why some critics complained about the sex.
There’s only one brief sex scene, and it teaches teenagers a valuable lesson. If you make love or smoke pot at summer camp, you’ll be killed. The filmmakers weren’t destroying America’s youth; they were encouraging the kids of 1980 to live like Puritans and avoid vices and matters of the flesh.
The film provides valuable lessons, such as the importance of well-lit bathrooms, how hitchhiking can kill you, and why playing strip Monopoly doesn’t sound sexy.
Aliens and the Fifth Sequel
When I went with my father to see Aliens in 1986, there was a group of drunken college students in the front row. When the previews began, they kept hollering and carrying on, but suddenly, they got quiet.
A teaser trailer from Friday the 13th Part VI had them mystified. A lightning bolt struck Jason’s tombstone at the end of the trailer, and the subtitle Jason Lives roared onto the screen. The front-row fools erupted in applause and started cheering Jason! Jason! Jason!
I remember being surprised that the movies were still popular, especially after the disaster of Part V. There are 12 Friday the 13th films you can view, but someday, another filmmaker will resurrect Jason and kill him again.
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