HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2020: Friday The 13th (1980)

Our sponsor today is another of my beloved Patreons, Sean Foster.  If you become a Domicile of Dread Patreon, you get to choose a film for my annual Gauntlet of Ghoulishness and any other stunt I come up with to raise money for charity.  Sean represents the American Civil Liberties Union, which fights hard to make sure predators like the ones in the White House right now don’t destroy democracy beyond repair.  

Sean has chosen a film that is ubiquitous among horror fans, namely the original 1980 version of Friday The 13th.  You would think I would be able to discuss this film from memory...except I’ve never seen it.

Honest.  Even though I actually wrote a pitch outline for a novel based on Jason X (It was set on a masoleum planet.  It would’ve been really cool.) for the idiot editor of Black Flame Books, who suggested I rewrite it into a Texas Chainsaw novel.  I mean, what kind of guy thinks like that?

So the upshot is, even though Sean S. Cunningham’s cash-in on the success of Halloween is a film that I am super-familiar with through simple cultural osmosis, I’m watching this with fresh eyes!

A number of young people congregate at Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey to help its new owner to renovate it for re-opening.  The locals are not supportive to this move; to them, the camp is nicknamed ‘Camp Blood’ due to a series of mishaps reaching back to the drowning of a kid in 1958.  As the owner leaves them to buy supplies, the counselors are systematically stalked and murdered by a mysterious figure until just Alice (Adrienne King) has to face off with the maniac by herself.

A lot of you already know the twists and turns and shocks of this film.  Hell, I’m willing to bet most of you have seen this film so many times you can recite the dialogue from memory.  But take it from someone whose first experience with it was a few hours ago....

Friday The 13th is not a slasher movie.

It is the last step of the transformation of the Giallo Film into the Slasher Movie.  In fact, now that I’ve seen it, it’s obvious to me that this film is heavily influenced by Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood, which I’ve always posited was Bava’s reaction to what giallos had become, and which is the first pre-shock of the giallo’s mutation into the slasher.  Not only is this film visually similar, but Cunningham....well, some say quote, some say homage, some say rip-off key sequences of Bava’s classic.  And the quotes/homages/rip-offs doesn’t stop with Bava; Cunningham consciously pulls a Janet-Leigh-in-Psycho with the introduction and development of Annie (Robbi Morgan) in the film’s first act.

Of course, as close as A Bay of Blood is to Friday The 13th, it’s still it’s own thing.  What I find fascinating is how Cunningham takes Bava’s framework and more or less successfully forces it into the shape of a standard ‘play fair’ mystery (the slasher genre owes as much to Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians as it does to Carpenter’s hit), while not playing fair with us at all.  You can see the mystery beats, but they’re Cliff Notes versions down to the point where key moments like the triggering tragedy and the ultimate villain aren’t laid out until the very end.  So even though we’re not getting a mystery, we feel as if we are getting one.

...which might be what Cunningham was after all along.  I think a key sign of what’s on his mind is how the opening credits do not list the actors at all.  Cunningham is in it for the spectacle, so in his mind Tom Savini is more important than Kevin Bacon, even though the actual gags are nowhere near as gory as I was led to believe, some of them being downright chaste!  Cunningham is focused more on Movie-As-Thrill-Ride, with an emphasis on set pieces, some of which are actually kind of effective and fun and some of which reminded me a lot of Giallo set-pieces without the candy-colored weirdness of that genre.

There’s one other thing I would like to say, and it ties in with the chaste-ness of the gags.  The Designated Spam-In-A-Cabin-Types are surprisingly well-defined despite the sketchiness of the script and they’re, well...likable.  The nudity is limited to one scene between two people who are established as being in a committed relationship, and the ‘Strip Monopoly’s naughtiness is more cute than salacious.  I wonder if the perceptions I had about this film were filtered through the ugliness that the series became, rather than what it actually is.  The cynical nature of later entries isn’t in this one, and I wonder how it would be perceived if it was a stand alone and not the first of a series.  

Obviously, this is a landmark film, and it is worth it if you are a student of the genre to check it out (but then, you probably all have seen it and are mocking me for not getting around to it until now).  It’s an interesting snapshot of what will become a major subgenre that defined horror in the 80‘s.  Just remember to keep in mind that you’ve seen a lot of this all before because they did it early.

There will be no sponsor tomorrow, so the Randomizer served up 1931‘s Supernatural, a horror film I’ve never heard of before starring Carole Lombard, of all people!  

There are other ways you can end up sponsoring a day during this Halloween Horrorfest besides becoming a Domicile of Dread Patreon!

1) You can buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi.  Suggested donation is $3

2) You can make a donation to Black Lives Matter.  Suggested donation is $10.  Please forward your receipt to me as proof.

3) You can choose to make a donation to the charity chosen by a sponsor on his/her/their day. Like with the third possibility, please forward me proof of donation.

As with last year, if I end up with more sponsors than there are days in October, I will go into Horrorfest Overtime, which means Halloween goes into November for me--and you!