Marcie: “I guess it’s just my imagination…”
[turns around]
Marcie: “AHHH!”
Just like Friday the 13th, Jewish holidays are never at exactly the same point in time, but shift from year to year, because the Hebrew calendar is lunar, or based on the moon. One of the most prominent Jewish holidays is Passover, a spring celebration which remembers the story of Exodus in the Old Testament, when Moses led his people out of Egyptian slavery (and from there into the desert, because their troubles were far from over). It’s called Passover after what happened during the last of the plagues which God visited upon Egypt; after blood and frogs and locusts and darkness and all the rest, God killed every firstborn child in the kingdom–except the Jewish children, whose parents had been told by Moses to mark their doors with lamb’s blood so that their households would be spared, or passed over. For Jews, this is a story about how their God protected and delivered them from bondage. But for the Egyptians, it’s a story about which kids died and which kids lived, and what made the difference.
Each year during the Passover seder, we answer four questions in a guided call and response ritual, all centered around the larger question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” On the night of the seder, unlike other nights, we eat bitter herbs; we eat matzah, unleavened bread; we dip our herbs twice; and we eat reclining. Why? Because these are symbolic acts which tell a story and remind us of its values. Whether we know it or not, when we watch a slasher film, we ask a similar four questions, for a similar reason: we want to understand what the story means for us.
- The first of the four questions we ask is, Why is this night different from all other nights?
Friday the 13th gives us three explanations for the timing of the murders at Camp Crystal Lake. The first two explanations are refuted, at least in logical terms and in the dialogue (the cinematic intention is more ambiguous). The third is not entirely satisfying. But all three touch upon one of the film’s themes: the generation gap.
The Truck Driver: Dumb kids. Know-it-alls. Just like my niece, heads fulla rocks.
Annie: You’re an American Original.
The Truck Driver: [mocking] I’m an American Original. Dumb kid.
Annie, who seems like the main character of the film for a while simply by virtue of having the most dialogue early on, is introduced asking for directions to Camp Crystal Lake from the local townspeople. All of them are older, including the truck driver who agrees to take her halfway to the summer camp where Annie will be working as a cook. In their conversation on the way, Annie sounds like an innocent, ignorant of the camp’s dark history. Talking about Annie’s new boss, who owns and is re-opening the camp, the driver asks, “Did Christy ever tell you ’bout the two kids murdered in ’58? Boy drowning in ’57? Buncha fires. Nobody knows who did any of ’em. In 1962, they was gonna open up… the water was bad.” This litany of semi-annual events, a remarkable run of bad luck, is his evidence that Camp Crystal Lake is simply cursed in some way, doomed to hardship, danger, and failure. The driver views the current reopening as an invitation for… well, something… on the basis of his knowledge of the town and its history. Annie, on the other hand, doesn’t heed his warning, and the lines they trade about “an American Original” are the two very different generations shaking their heads at each other in bemusement across the gap. Later, Annie will take a ride from another adult, and die in the woods at their hands.
In another car at another point, Steve Christy talks to local officer Sgt. Tierney about the moon. The short but significant exchange between them furthers the film’s argument between the characters about why the murders are happening (even though these two don’t yet know about the killings):
Tierney: “It’s not bad enough to have Friday the 13th, we’ve gotta have a full moon too. We keep statistics. We have more accidents, more rapes, more robberies, more homicides, more of everything when there’s a full moon. It upsets people. Makes them nuts.”
Steve Christy: “You’re making a science out of coincidence.”
If not exactly young, Christy at least straddles the generation gap, presenting some measure of responsible adulthood (he owns the camp, hires the new young employees, and directs their renovation efforts) but also lacking the experience and authority of the police sergeant. Crucially, in a movie that consistently presents scenes of young men and women expressing sexual desire, Christy’s interest in Alice is another indication that, thematically, he exists on the youthful side of the divide. Contrast with, for example, the truck driver, who doesn’t come on to the young, attractive hitchhiker in his cab in the slightest (in an ’80s movie).
But the older generation is not only associated with responsibility, and a general lack of interest in the sex, drugs, and rock and roll enjoyed by their younger counterparts; they’re also associated with this irrationality, the superstition about the date, the moon, and the camp’s supposed curse. Most notable is the old man nicknamed Crazy Ralph by the locals, who prophesies doom and explicitly claims to be a messenger of God.
Most extreme in her irrationality, of course, is the killer herself, Mrs. Voorhees. Even beyond the murders, she seems emotionally unhinged–sometimes maintaining a clever deception, other times launching into crazed rants about the teens whose irresponsibility supposedly got her son killed, and then near the end, seeming to speak to herself as another identity, a high pitched child’s voice urging her to kill. And yet, for all her insanity, as the person responsible for the killings, Mrs. Voorhees is the only person even close to correct about why they’re happening now: as she tells Alice, today is Jason’s birthday. The coincidence of the birthday with the new camp counselors arriving seems to be what has driven Mrs. Voorhees to commit this new round of murders.
Just as Mrs. Voorhees explodes the gender divide in the film (more on that later), she does the same for the generational divide–rather than looking at the film’s young people with bemusement, she harbors a deep, demented rage, killing them year after year in revenge for her poor, drowned son. That the young camp counselors whom she blames for Jason’s death are, 23 years later, a generation older than the new counselors she’s attacking now seems somewhat lost on her. The important thing–and here we circle back to the truck driver’s history of the disasters at Camp Crystal Lake–seems to be to keep this place closed for good. But the question of whether that motivation or the insane desire for revenge holds more weight in Mrs. Voorhees lingers, not settled by a movie which refuses to say much, at all, definitively.
The film’s few clues as to the significance of the timing–theories about a curse, or the moon–are even more ambiguous thanks to the contrast between the dialogue, which argues for a rational explanation, and the film’s mood and visual language, which suggests something more supernatural is at work. Repeated shots of the moon lead the viewer to wonder if it does, indeed, have some role to play in these events. (In fact, the first shot of the film, during the 1958 prologue, is of the full moon, tying past and present together–or maybe that’s just making a science of coincidence.) And after all, this is called Friday the 13th (and not, for example, A Long Night at Camp Blood, the film’s working title). Does that indicate some significance to the date beyond coincidence? Are the mad susceptible to such influences? And what do we make of the final moments of the film, when Jason himself appears? Are they to be taken literally, or simply as a dream? “He’s still out there,” says Alice, after remembering (or dreaming) that she saw the dead boy rise from the lake. In that moment, either young Alice has slipped into an acknowledgment of the unreal not shared by her peers… or, thanks to her survival experience, has simply grown up. As the movie’s Final Girl, she’s the only one who gets the chance.
- The second of the four questions we ask is, Why is this place different from all other places?
Why does this movie in this place become a slasher film, rather than a teen romance or a camp comedy or anything else? What is it about Camp Crystal Lake as a setting that invites cinematic violence? The motivations discussed above, the idea of a curse, Mrs. Voorhees’ revenge, are justifications, but what actually imposes the killings on the camp is the way the environment and the people within it are filmed. According to the camera, they deserve it.
Minimal dialogue, thin characters, an almost total lack of plot–Friday the 13th is, more than anything else, a cinematographer’s movie. The film’s visual language tells its story more than most horror films, and the techniques it uses comprise a consistent effort to force us to be complicit in its violence. It’s not the first movie to use its camera to try to make us identify with a killer–that might be Fritz Lang’s M, whose child predator looks out at a room full of stone-faced accusers and feels terror–or even the first horror movie to do so, as the long take POV shots in Halloween and Peeping Tom will attest. What makes Friday the 13th unique is the array of strategies brought to bear (careful framing and shot choices, even beyond the killer’s point of view) and the way its lack of conventional narrative and character details clears the field for the film’s four key visual techniques to work on us.
Cinema is by default an engine for empathy. We look through the camera at people we don’t know, and through looking we become interested, become involved, start to feel as though we know them, start to care. Suddenly they’re not a stranger anymore. It’s an almost mystical process, some function of the brain needing to make friends and tribes with the other humans we see up close. It’s part of what makes cinema such a powerful tool for social change (both good and bad). And it’s something Friday the 13th needed to sabotage. This movie isn’t about empathy, except for the sick, twisted empathy of the audience for a murderer. We need to not identify with the hapless victims; we need to gain satisfaction from their gruesome demise. Figuratively, the film needs to distance us from its characters, and so literal distance is part of the solution.
Take a look at the 1958 prologue, for example, which establishes the narrative structure and the visual language for the rest of the film. Characters are introduced from a distance; go off alone or in pairs; and are killed. These camp counselors (the ones who were negligent while Jason drowned, according to Mrs. Voorhees) are first shown to us in a very unusual composition:
In this shot and many others, the film uses distance to bring a chilly, unsettling mood to what would otherwise have the warmth and pleasantness of any other teen hangout or beach party sort of movie. This is a scene where counselors are playing music for the kids in front of a fire–but the framing and position of the camera ensure that none of that is directed at us. We’re standing outside the group. Their faces are turned away from us, particularly in the center of the frame (to which the eye is naturally drawn). We struggle to individualize them; they seem to us like abstractions, the idea of “kids at camp,” rather than some actual kids at an actual camp. This, it must be emphasized, is not the point of view shot of the killer, lurking just off-screen. This is the film’s “objective” viewpoint. It’s a strategy that will be repeated throughout the film, from Annie’s introduction:
To this killer’s view of three swimmers at play:
Or this one, where the distance and darkness emphasize the underdressed soon-to-be victim’s vulnerability:
These aren’t the only shots in the movie, which after all is a conventionally-minded, glorified B-picture only a few steps above an AIP cheap exploitation flick, or a cheesy ’70s giallo–it doesn’t have the visual rigor (and anti-commercial sentiments) of, say, a Terrence Malick film, or a Jonathan Glazer (Birth, Under the Skin). But in a way, that makes Friday the 13th more involving and dynamic–a scene will play out more conventionally between the characters, and either the start or end of the scene will suddenly pull back, reminding us that the characters’ contemporary concerns are meaningless, that they are all alone, that they will probably die tonight. The woods and the water surround them and make them small in an environment that is neither hostile nor peaceful, but apathetic and neutral. It will watch them play their silly games, and it will watch them bleed. If the camera judges at all, it seems to say, “You were foolish to come here.” It seems to say, “What will happen is inevitable.”
Sometimes, of course, the camera is not merely pretending at a kind of cold, objective indifference to the human life within the camp. Often it is the mostly-invisible killer’s perspective, labeled throughout by music (composer Manfredini was inspired by John Williams’ work in Jaws, where score suggested a shark just out of view) and particularly by camera movement, which indicates an active kind of viewing. Before the killer’s identity is revealed, they are frequently roaming around for a better view, pushing branches out of the way, or hiding from victims peering out of windows–mostly implied by the camera’s own movement, and sometimes by a hand reaching briefly into frame. One shot even plays with this established language by giving us a shot of a couple in medium distance:
The camera tracks their movements left to right, then zooms out…
…to reveal not the murderer, but another camp counselor, perhaps jealous of the other man (a very young Kevin Bacon).
The shot continues to zoom out and then track the counselor right to left around a corner, making us wonder if perhaps this really IS a killer’s POV shot…
And then in the next set of shots, a dueling set of POVs show the counselor spying somebody watching him from a doorway:
This kind of double fake-out is indicative of the way Friday the 13th is always trying to keep you off-guard and guessing, even about what its visual language might be expressing.
The same applies to another consistent visual motif, the use of interior frames. Often shots, whether from a distance or not, will use trees, walls, doors and windows as part of a frame-within-the-frame. (Examples abound, including the prologue and dueling POV shots embedded above.) This has two effects. First, the characters often seem trapped within these interior frames, another way the film expresses their hopeless situation. Second, our desire to peer in or past the visual obstacles encourages us to identify on an unconscious level with the perspective being utilized. The motif is therefore most common when expressed from the killer’s point of view (but not exclusive to it):
Like most of its techniques, Friday the 13th didn’t invent the invisible killer (the previous two decades were littered with thrillers, many of them Italian, in which murderers stalked their victims but were little seen beyond a pair of black-gloved hands reaching out to stab or strangle), but is significant because it combined and perfected a series of strategies invented by earlier movies. It’s not what the movie did that was new, but why. Typically invisible killer movies were trying to hide the identity of the murderer, because at heart they were mystery stories, whodunnits, where the murderer was already among the characters and we just didn’t know it. Friday the 13th doesn’t do this, because Mrs. Voorhees does not show her face until late in the film. Our first reaction when we see her show up is, “Who?” A conventional giallo would have had her be an open presence in the movie in addition to the killer, until the eventual reveal that they were one and the same.
No, the purpose of Friday the 13th‘s extensive use of POV and other techniques to hide Mrs. Voorhees throughout is meant to give the film a convenient cypher, a hollow space for us to inhabit. The movie wants us to identify with her, rather than with her victims. To see them as shallow, vacuous, promiscuous, irresponsible kids who deserve their inevitable deaths. To feel the power of stalking someone who doesn’t know you’re there. The thrill of voyeurism. The coldness that comes from sabotaging the empathy engine. After a while spent steeped in this perspective, we’re no longer rooting for survival. We want blood. Yes, we understand it now. They’re guilty. If not of killing Jason, than of sleeping around, drinking, smoking pot… Or just guilty of being stupid enough to go off on their own on a dark and stormy night. Especially on a Friday the 13th.
- The third of the four questions we ask is, Why are these characters different from those in all other movies?
Because they aren’t really characters.
Friday the 13th is a movie about confusing people with objects, and vice versa. The goal of the screenplay, beyond the basic repetitious pattern of “young people at play, sex, stalking, blood,” is to set up associations that blur the lines between human and thing. The heart of the film, then, beats loudest in the moment when Alice finds a bloody axe lying in bed:
This the key moment for Alice, when she discovers what kind of movie she’s in; and it’s a key moment for us, the point at which the confusion of death reaches its surreal zenith. That axe shouldn’t be there. That bed is for people. Axes are not people. Live bodies are not dead bodies. Women are not objects. And yet these categories are disrupted again and again throughout the film.
Most interesting, perhaps, is the way the movie calls forward and backward in time in a way that only we in the audience understand. Take, for instance, the snake which appears in a girl’s bedroom, requiring the collective efforts of every counselor to find and kill. The sequence’s plot function is to introduce Chekov’s Machete so that it can be swung in the third act, but thematically the snake seems tied to the killer herself: both are dangerous interlopers in the camp who must be violently repelled by the counselors–indeed, both are beheaded by the machete in the end. There’s also this shot, which reflects a certain pointed reversal of the invisible killer POV shots–the watcher becoming uncomfortably seen:
The other most potent blurring of the boundary between life and death, past and present, is the scene where one of the boys, Ned, pretends to drown in the lake. The other counselors rush to save him, only to discover he was faking (although whether as just a joke, or as a chance to get mouth-to-mouth from one of the girls, it’s hard to say). The killer watches this from the opposite shore, and we get a sting of the iconic chanting on the soundtrack–“Ki ki ki ki, ma ma ma ma,” which is to say, “kill them, mother”–implying that the association between this prank and Jason’s drowning has enraged them. On the one hand, you would think this incident is evidence that this new batch of counselors would not have let Jason drown. On the other hand, the flippant way they treat the issue probably had a hand in sealing their fates.
Death is foreshadowed often in Friday the 13th–not unlike Halloween, released two years prior, its dominant mode is a kind of moody dramatic irony–but one more example will show how the film sets out to confuse people and objects. Brenda, one of the girls, is standing next a target at the archery range when an arrow flies into it at high speed from just off-screen. Brenda is understandably mad at Ned (what a practical joker that guy is), who fired it. In another film, Ned might have been the recipient of a few arrows himself, later on. But Friday the 13th has a more expansive notion of justice. Ned’s arrow, the kind of stupid, dangerous joke that definitely has its roots in Ned’s attraction to Brenda, confuses Brenda, a person, with an object, literally a target for him to shoot at. All the young men at the camp treat the women this way. Christy makes a pass at Alice, his employee. Ned tricks one of the girls into kissing him. Jack and Marcie peel off from the group to have sex, and while Jack isn’t particularly to blame here, the camera sure is interested in objectifying Marcie:
The girls aren’t totally innocent in this (Marcie is just as interested in Jack, and it’s one of the girls who proposes they play Strip Monopoly), but the bulk of the violence seems to be visited upon the men, particularly the more distinctive murders. Ned’s throat is slit and his body is left on the top bunk. The notion of arrows returns when Jack is stabbed in the neck from underneath the bed, as if the killing is an act perpetrated by the bed itself in revenge for what was done on top of it, and then again when Bill is found pinned to door by multiple arrows. Like the axe, Bill shouldn’t be there, isn’t a thing on which a bow and arrow should act, is a person who had been alive and now isn’t. The arbitrary senselessness of it all–for one thing, that Bill seems to get the fate Ned earned–allows space for a deeper meaning: not a reductive form of punishment, but a cosmic one. Ultimately these people die because they live in a universe where they must, a universe where it is imperative that, however sloppily, the injustice of Jason’s death is balanced out.
- The fourth and final question we ask is, Why are those who survive different from those who die?
In other words, why is Alice spared? Why does God pass her over? What’s her lamb’s blood? “I’m a messenger from God,” says Crazy Ralph. “You’re doomed.” Mrs. Voorhees proves him right, for everybody except Alice. God, or the ghost of Jason Voorhees, or simple insanity, metes out a brutal fate to each of these kids, leaving Alice all alone, and us asking why–asking so fervently that Friday the 13th cemented the trope of the Final Girl, that last survivor.
So many horror movies are, in the final analysis, about men and women. Friday the 13th, with its genuinely surprising revelation of the killer (even today, many probably don’t remember that Jason doesn’t show up until Part II), is an unexpectedly internecine front in the gender war. Mrs. Voorhees strikes back at men on behalf of women, but she also strikes back at women on behalf of her son, killing the playful youths whose reopening of the camp represents the reopening of her emotional wounds, re-inflaming her grief and rage over what happened to Jason. If the others had to die because of their moral failings, perhaps Alice had to live because she didn’t share them, because she rebuffs Christy’s advances earlier that day and never goes off alone with a boy that night. “Why me?” Rachel cries in The Ring. “What did I do that he didn’t?” The answer’s very banality is maddening. Surely life and death can’t turn on such trivialities alone. If a world where the good are harmed and evil goes unpunished seems untenable, so too does a universe where the slightest moral transgression is met with swift and brutal consequences.
But there’s another, more satisfying level which might explain why Alice lives. Friday the 13th is not just about the gender war or the generation gap (both metonymized in the fact that this is surely the only horror movie in existence where the killer wears a bad mom sweater). It’s also a carefully plotted game of cat and mice–a strategic back and forth. Insane or not, Mrs. Voorhees is either a tactical genius or having a “let it ride on red for the eighth time, croupier” run of luck, running back and forth across the camp and taking the counselors out one by one like Batman on a good night. She’s in the right place in her car to pick up Annie hitchhiking; lures Ned into a cabin, leaves his body on the top bunk, and knows to wait under the bottom bunk for Marcie to leave Jack; takes down Christy just as he returns to camp; disables the generator and guards it well enough to get Bill, who knows something is up; gets in two or three other murders for good measure and has the presence of mind to leave and circle back to the camp in her car so she can pretend to be nice, helpful Mrs. Voorhees in order to get Alice’s guard down. None of this requires supernatural assistance or is beyond the realm of possibility; I’m just saying that this middle-age woman could give John Rambo a few pointers.
Against this formidable opponent, Alice actually does hold her own. Over the course of three physical confrontations with Mrs. Voorhees, Alice demonstrates cool thinking (getting the gun and then trying to bluff with it when there are no bullets), ingenuity (could you figure out how to secure a cabin door with no lock on it as quick as she does?), and grit (unlike the other girls, Alice fights back when cornered, rather than just screaming). She has one advantage over the others, to be fair; she knows a killer is on the loose. But she figures out for herself that Mrs. Voorhees is that killer, and for someone without any training, Alice does a good job searching her environment for weapons and hiding places. Alice may not be the original Final Girl–if nothing else, Halloween gives Jamie Lee Curtis its full attention in the climax, even if she’s not the only survivor in the film–but she certainly helped cement the trope. Caught in a kind of haunted house experience as she runs screaming from one horrific corpse tableau to the next, Alice’s resourcefulness and willingness to fight distinguish her from her peers, and helped to create an enduring cultural archetype in which women overcome and outlast traumatic events.
What makes Friday the 13th particularly interesting along those lines is that its killer is female, in contrast to most of the slasher films before and after. Precisely why this is the case is hard to say–no doubt some combination of crass misogyny on the part of the filmmakers, the audience-alluring cocktail of women under threat of violence, and sometimes a sincere attempt to interrogate masculine predatory attitudes toward women–but either way, the result means that the battle between this Final Girl and its killer is unique. (Is there a kind of anti-Bechtel test for movies where two women are in direct conflict with one another and not over a man?) We assume for most of the movie that the unseen murderer is a man, partly because society has conditioned us to fill in men as the default, partly because horror movie villains are almost always men, partly because violence itself feels masculine. That the murderer is Mrs. Voorhees, and that she is operating out of some twisted mother’s love, is a genuine surprise that evens the odds and heightens the stakes. It is a different kind of challenge that Alice is forced to rise to, and rise to it she does.
Her one real mistake is a common one in horror movies: each time having apparently knocked out the killer, Alice twice leaves her and runs, rather than preventing her assailant from coming after her. Perhaps the intention was to pad out the movie, a little, or to obey the rule of three by providing three separate confrontations. Whatever the reason, the three fights do give us a nice, thematic set of weapons: the unloaded gun (Freudian in its symbolism), the frying pan (not only a gendered weapon but another person/object correlation, calling back both to Annie, the new cook, and to Mrs. Voorhees herself, the original camp cook), and finally the machete, which cuts off one snake’s head just as well as it did the other’s.
It’s not enough to be good, this third act seems to say. You have to be smart. The movie isn’t over–there’s still the dreamlike coda, the dead boy, and Alice’s last, unsettling line–but here endeth the lesson.
We ask these four questions of every horror movie, and particularly slasher movies, because we fear death, and we want to know how we can escape it. Friday the 13th teaches us to stay away from cursed places and beware full moons; to consider who might be watching us from afar; to not let our desires distract from our responsibilities; to keep our cool when danger strikes. Seeing those rules broken or fulfilled, with bloody consequences, is a thrill all on its own.
But on a deeper level, Friday the 13th has other lessons to impart. It tells us that we can’t be sure what’s real and what isn’t. That nature is indifferent to our suffering. That we treat each other like objects, rather than with empathy. That when it comes to filmmakers and God alike, justice is rough and fate and luck play just as big a part as our wit and bravery.
And it teaches us that even if we survive death for now, there’s always another sequel. Because their troubles were far from over.
Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because the devil tempts us all with weed and premarital sex. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.