Whatever the lack of logical consistency, the range and some might even say originality of a franchise that essentially revolves around horny, pot smoking, beer drinking teams being stalked and killed can only be described as astounding.
In early 1979, Sean S. Cunningham, inspired by the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween a year earlier, placed an ad in Variety seeking funds for a copycat effort that didn’t even have a completed script at the time. The nascent project had a name that would one day be synonymous with a new genre, however, Friday the 13th. At the time, Mr. Cunningham wasn’t exactly a directorial or producing superstar, nor would he ever be for that matter. Back in 1972, he’d edited Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, but had no real credits to his name in the seven years since. Beyond capitalizing on Halloween, he knew only that he wanted to make something quite distinct from Wes Craven, a movie that would “make you jump out of your seat” and be more of a “roller-coaster ride,” and he wanted even the logo to capture that feeling. For the ad itself, he commissioned an advertising agency to create something with big, block letters bursting through a pane of glass even though there were potential copyright issues with the name alone, an earlier effort being titled Friday the 13th: The Orphan. Despite not having a script, the Variety ad was impactful enough to raise over $550,000 to produce the effort and by the middle of 1979, the film began coming together.
Victor Miller, a screenwriter even less experienced than Mr. Cunningham was as a director, completed the first draft of the screenplay, believing that making the mother the serial killer was a potentially winning angle. “I took motherhood and turned it on its head and I think that was great fun. Mrs. Voorhees was the mother I’d always wanted—a mother who would have killed for her kids.” In the meantime, Mr. Cunningham focused on casting. Though New York City was the obvious choice because they planned to shoot in nearby New Jersey, the sort of actors who could make the film weren’t. Rather than looking for “great actors,” the plan was to find a likeable, attractive cast, who could read the dialogue passably well and work cheap. The only established actor chosen was Betsy Palmer, playing the infamous Pamela Vorhees, who had been active on Broadway and in the movies since the early 1950s, and she only took the job because she needed a new car. Rather than making a hit that would go on to define a genre, she was convinced the film would be “a piece of shit” though that didn’t prevent her from pocketing $1,000 for a few days of work. Of the cast, only Kevin Bacon would become a star, and interestingly enough he was at last partially chosen because he knew two of the other lead actors from the New York City off Broadway theater scene, and the casting director believed their pre-existing chemistry would make the film easier to shoot. Otherwise, the cast and the characters didn’t exactly break new ground – Halloween also featured attractive, sexually interested teenagers in key roles, as did Black Christmas even earlier – perhaps save for Mark Nelson who played Ned Rubenstein as a practical joker who gets killed. David Grove, an author and something of a slasher film historian, believed that was the first instance of a character trope that would go on to be mainstay, finding no predecessor in either the aforementioned Black Christmas, Halloween, or similar films that predated Friday the 13th.
In true rapid fire fashion, shooting began in New Jersey, mainly in Hardwick, Blairstown, and Hope, all part of Warren County in early September 1979, but troubles quickly arose because it was unseasonably cold that year complete with an early snowfall. As a result, scenes needed to change location, perhaps most notably the opening sequence was moved indoors, and parts of the script needed to be rewritten on the fly. Otherwise, the budget was so low they couldn’t afford stunt people or exterior lights, leading to the actors performing their own fight scenes and a dark, grainess to the end product that would ultimately add to the visual aesthetic, if not define it for more than a decade before production values improved across the board. Though the cast and crew stuck with it, maintaining a “very pleasant attitude,” there were a few incidents. Ms. Palmer insisted that a slap had to be real for the audience to believe it and in rehearsal, proceeded to slap Adrienne King so hard “She collapsed to the floor, crying,” in her recollection, “‘Sean! [Cunningham] She hit me.’ I said, ‘Well, of course I hit her, we were rehearsing the scene.’ He said, ‘No, no, no Betsy, we don’t hit people in movies. We miss them.’” A live snake was also cut in half for a scene, literally sliced in two with a huge knife, while the owner “was just standing off to the side, tears running down his cheeks” according to Ms. King. Despite these and what we can assume were other challenges, filming, including reshoots, was completed by November, a short period even back then, setting the stage for a 1980 release.
Perhaps the only thing the producers spent any money on was special effects and the musical score. Tom Savini, fresh from his work on George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) created what were innovative techniques at the time including an axe to the face, an arrow penetrating a throat, a knife through a throat, and a decapitation with a machete, setting the stage for the sort of creative, shocking explosions of gore that would fuel these films for the next forty plus years. Needless to say, not everything went off smoothly under the circumstances. When Mr. Bacon was killed, he was positioned under a bed with a prosthetic neck to make it look like he was lying down. The plan was to pump fake blood through a hole in the neck, but the contraption failed and one of the actors ended up using the tube like a reverse straw. The axe to the face was also intended to be more graphic, but the prop kept sliding across the mold rather than grinding into the skull, prompting them to just cut to the shot of the axe already in the head. The actor shot in the eye with an arrow, Harry Crosby suffered temporary blindness from the chemicals in the fake blood, and when the infamous decapitation scene during the climax was filmed, the actresses weren’t even there.
Harry Manfredini provided the orchestral score, combining traditional strings with a haunting voice in the background, whispering either “kill, kill, kill, ha, ha, ha” or “ch ch ch, ah ah ah” that prompted much debate among fans and has become something of story of its own. In 2015, Mr. Manfredini finally explained that he was inspired by Eastern European music, particularly Polish, which employed a lot of consonants in their vocal tracks. In the film itself, Ms. Palmer says “Kill her, mommy” in her son’s voice and the snippet stuck with him as a “creepy shot,” suggesting she was hearing voices throughout. Mr. Manfredini spoke the words themselves, as he described it “harshly, distinctly, and rhythmically,” and ran the recording through an Echoplex machine that repeats the sound, adding delay and reverb. Beyond the creep factor, the goal was to suggest the presence of the killer during the movie’s many point of view shots. This was necessary because narratively the film is based on something of a trick. Unlike a traditional murder mystery, where the killer is one of the characters present from the beginning or almost from the beginning, the audience just doesn’t know who they are, Mrs. Voorhees doesn’t appear until the final act. The music, however, makes her present throughout, even if we can’t see her. In fact, there are a handful of scenes that result in scares not related to the killer. In these instances, such as a prank with a bow and arrow before the kill scene, the music never plays.
While industry insiders were not bullish on Friday the 13th’s prospects at the box office, with Variety calling them “bleak,” Paramount purchased the finished product for $1.5 million, the first major studio to back the budding slasher genre and spent another $4 million on marketing. The critics were not enthused either. The Los Angeles Times’ Linda Gross claimed it was a “silly, boring, youth-geared horror movie,” the Statesman Journal’s Ron Cowan described it as a “routine ‘endangered teenagers’ exploitation movie” and derided the director’s “rather plodding approach to suspense for most of the film, sometimes allowing his camera to act as the killer, sometimes as the victim. And the victims, of course, deliberately put themselves in peril.” The violence, which is rather quaint by today’s standards wasn’t back then, “Gruesome violence, in which throats are slashed and heads are split open in realistic detail, is the sum content of Friday the 13th, a sick and sickening low budget feature that is being released by Paramount. It’s blatant exploitation of the lowest order.,” claimed the Hollywood Reporter while Michael Blowen of The Boston Globe simply said it was “nauseating,” “Unless your idea of a good time is to watch a woman have her head split by an ax or a man stuck to a door with arrows, you should stay away from Friday the 13th. It’s bad luck.” Equally unsurprising were the unfavorable comparisons to Halloween, which Dick Shippy of the Akron Beacon Journal claimed played “like Hitchcock when compared to Cunningham’s dreadful tale of butchery” and The Burlington Free Press’ Mike Hughes said “copies everything, that is, except the quality,” “The lowest point of the movie comes near the end, when it exploits the genuine grief and madness of the villain. By then, things simply aren’t fun anymore” Perhaps no one was more appalled than Gene Siskel, who described the film as “one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business,” and urged people to write the Chairman of the Board of Paramount’s parent company to express their contempt rather than merely skip it at the box office.
Audiences were much more bullish, however. After wracking up almost $6 million on opening weekend, the film went on to gross almost $40 million domestically, and $60 million internationally, around $230 million today, making it one of the most profitable of 1980 behind Airplane! and prompting a sequel that was rushed to theaters the following year. At the same time, it’s hard for me to believe the cast and crew, shivering and seeking shelter from the snow in an unseasonably cold New Jersey fall in 1979 had any idea that they were laying the groundwork for a franchise that would have more lives than Jason himself and would ultimately become the cornerstone of an entire genre, copied over and over again to this day. The third entry followed in 1982, the fourth in 1984, the fifth in 1985, the sixth in ‘86, the seventh in ‘88, and the eighth in ‘89. After a short hiatus, the franchise was back for number nine in 1993 then number ten in 2001, followed by a crossover with another 1980s horror franchise, Nightmare on Elm Street in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. In 2009 it was rebooted, in 2017 it spawned a video game, and most recently a TV series prequel, Crystal Lake. Throughout these entries, the original killer was replaced with Jason, Jason was killed, replaced with a copy cat, Jason was resurrected, Jason faced off against a psychic, Jason went to Manhattan, was revealed as an evil spirit, and even went to space. Whatever the lack of logical consistency, the range and some might even say originality of a franchise that essentially revolves around horny, pot smoking, beer drinking teams being stalked and killed can only be described as astounding. Forget the cast and crew, if you were to have told a theater goer in 1980, they’d still be making variations on the theme almost fifty years later, they’d probably claim you were smoking too much of something like the dead teens in the film itself.
What accounts for the insane longevity for such a simple, low-budget, critically derided idea that in many ways is ridiculous on its face? While I certainly can’t answer for everyone, I would suggest two things. First, as Mr. Cunningham described it in his vision for the first entry, the films are intended as a roller coaster ride rather than a drama, an experience more than a narrative and story. The combination of the audience knowing the killer is out there while the victim frequently does not, extensive use of point of view shots to suggest someone is watching their every move, and the expectation that death lurks around the corner produces a visceral reaction in the viewer. We might have seen it a million times before in Friday the 13th and other franchises, but we still can’t help falling victim to the suspense, watching on the edge of our seat, peering into every shadow, convinced the killer is there, sure to strike from where we least expect at any moment. The knowledge that – for the most part – the person we are watching doing whatever, sometimes just walking around, is likely to die shortly compels us to pay attention, both fearful and excited, terrified and titillated about what lies beyond the frame. The same way a roller coaster must be ridden to appreciate it, the film must be watched to experience it, and the same way all roller coasters are similar yet we still seek them out for the thrill, each movie is its own unique ride. Second, the combination of young people, generally good looking ones, with their entire lives ahead of them and the limited characterization that tends to define them in these simple films, who we all know are going to die, except perhaps one, adds a certain pathos that while admittedly unearned in many ways makes the concept more endearing than it should be on the surface. We were all young and dumb once, but most of us didn’t die for it. There’s an instant relatability that feeds directly into the first aspect, making the sum more than the parts, figuratively and literally given many of these teens end up dismembered.
The newest incarnation, Crystal Lake, streaming on TV is no exception. In many ways, it is the rule. Somehow, the show manages to ask and answer questions about a 46 year old franchise that I at least had never considered. From one perspective, it sticks to the formula. There are sex-addicted teens at a camp, plus drug-addled hippies that could’ve been culled from any previous incarnation, and death scenes even more graphic than Mr. Savini could’ve imagined. From another, it considers the original films, primarily the first two in an entirely new light by positing what happened to Jason between his drowning and his emergence as the killer in the second film – to be accurate, the timeline is shortened, in the original Jason drowned on Friday the 13th, September 1957 while in the show, the event occurred on June the 13th, 1971. While the originals left him in the woods with no explanation what he was up to all those years, much less how he survived that long or didn’t drown in the first place, the show uses that aspect as an entry point into the story, showing Mrs. Voorhees descent into madness afterwards, the reality that Jason must’ve been out there the entire time, and providing a backstory as to how either could’ve been possible in the first place. Is it perfect? No. Is it cheesy? Yes. Does it work? Absolutely. Will there be more to come? Almost certainly. Indeed, we might see at least some of why in a final irony: The show takes Jason’s drowning and return as a starting point, but the original script didn’t have the final, indelible scene of him rising from the waters of the lake to drag Ms. King under. It was added later. In that sense, Friday the 13th Part II and Crystal Lake are both the product of unintended accidents, decisions that were made without realizing what would become of them. The odds are high there will be more because we simply can’t resist.
