Friday the 13th review.
While everyone else saw Halloween in 1978…Sean Cunningham saw dollar signs. He picked a date to set a slasher movie of his own in and a legend was born. Kind of. Friday the 13th may be the first installment of an iconic franchise…but the actual icon doesn’t show up until later.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Friday the 13th
Directed by Sean S. Cunningham
Written by Victor Miller
Starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Kevin Bacon, Harry Crosby and Laurie Bartram
Friday the 13th Review
Friday the 13th was never intended to launch a franchise. The creation of an everlasting horror character was so unintentional that he doesn’t even appear until a last-minute dream sequence…and not in the form that would become iconic. We’d have to wait until Part 2 to see an adult Jason Voorhees. He wouldn’t get his hockey mask until Part 3. So, what was the point of the original? To cash in on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween.
Halloween became an instant smash hit upon release in 1978. Knockoffs and copycats were inevitable. Low budget slasher movies could return giant profits and Sean Cunningham wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass him by. Friday the 13th was in production within months of Halloween hitting theaters. It made its own theatrical debut in May of 1980. Inexplicably…not on a Friday the 13th. There would be a Friday the 13th one month later…but I guess they just couldn’t wait. It didn’t matter. Friday the 13thwould become a box office hit in its own right…and a franchise became inevitable.
The movie hitting big further led to the slasher genre taking over horror in the early 80s. 1981 saw the release of both Friday the 13th Part 2 and Halloween II. My Bloody Valentine, Final Exam, The Prowler, The Burning, Student Bodies and Madman were just some of the slasher movies that would join them. It wouldn’t take long for the genre to burn itself out. The Friday franchise, however, was just getting started.
Most of what made the franchise work isn’t seen in the original. The backstory is set up here…kind of. For an adult Jason to be walking around a year later you must ignore the most important thing that this movie establishes. Jason drowns as a child and his mother, Pamela (Betsy Palmer) murders camp counselors to keep the camp closed. When Jason is alive and well in Part 2…avenging his mother’s death at the hands of final girl Alice (Adrienne King) a plot hole so big is created that Sean Cunningham drove through it and away from directing the sequel.
As for Friday the 13th itself…it’s pretty good. Compared to most of the early 80s slasher movies that would follow, at least. Within the series itself…it’s top half. It has a decent cast of likable characters and great effects work from Tom Savini. And, honestly, not that much else. It pales in comparison to Halloween in creating suspense. Part of the problem is that, at its core, Friday the 13th is a broken whodunit.
We learn late in the film that Pamela Voorhees is the killer. We are unaware of her existence before she shows up for the film’s climax. This puts the rest of the movie in a strange place. We don’t know who is killing people, or why. It doesn’t give us any clues to try and solve it. We watch a series of things happen and then are told why they happened. If the characters weren’t decent and the effects weren’t great…Friday the 13th would be a forgettable slog of a movie. It goes out of its way to make the plot in the moment as vague as possible.
What we do know is that two counselors were murdered two decades earlier. That occurred a year after a child drowned in the lake. This story centers around the reopening of the camp 22 years after the drowning. Looking at only these facts you can connect the dots between the events and the payoff to Friday the 13th makes perfect sense. The movie doesn’t seem to care if you try to do that during the murders, however. The only thing it tells you is that the place is cursed. No hints about Pamela as a character or that Jason may have somehow survived. Nothing to clue you in to who might be behind the mayhem. We see a lot of characters run into an offscreen person and say things like “oh…it’s you” so the beats of a mystery exist…just without any clues or suspicion of who it is.
In fact, when Pamela shows up appearing to be a helpful face…there really isn’t a reason not to trust her. Until she fills in questions the movie wasn’t really asking, there isn’t a reason to think anything about her. Her arrival does line up well with the moment you start to question if the movie is ever going to explain itself. Palmer makes the exposition laden scene memorable with a perfectly unhinged performance.
The truth is that a lot of this doesn’t really matter. The series would evolve into something different, while retaining the pattern of murdering teens. The film itself creates enough memorable moments and kills to justify its existence. It even introduces us to Crazy Ralph, the finest and most memorable example of the prophet of doom archetype. It makes up for what it lacks in storytelling with its imagery and likable characters.
What makes Friday the 13th fascinating is how little attachment to the future series it really has. Jason is mentioned, and the death of his mother plays a prominent backstory to early sequels. But the timeline doesn’t make a lick of sense. What should be the strongest tie to the series is instead its biggest plot hole. If Jason survived in 1957 what was his mother avenging in this one? If Jason saw his mother beheaded and seeks revenge for it…what was he doing the last 22 years? Why didn’t he pop up and say, “Hey ma…just so you know I’m fine”. It’s better not to think about it.
We do see Jason briefly in the original movie. He pops out of a lake, still as a child, and pulls Alice into the water for one final scare. It’s an effective one. Probably the most memorable moment of the film. It’s explained to have been a dream and given that Jason is an adult in the next one…that must be true if you are trying to force these stories together. But that’s the problem. They weren’t thinking of a Part 2, or a Jason led franchise, when Friday the 13th was made. You can only review Friday the 13th as a standalone story.
A story of revenge for a lost child. A story told through shocking images and one wild climactic performance. And to be honest, a story with very little thought about how to build its story. A whodunit without suspects. A mystery that doesn’t care if you think about it at all as it’s unfolding. In truth, the best way to experience Friday the 13th now is to show it to someone who doesn’t know Pamela is the killer. With Jason firmly established as a pop culture horror icon, the reveal in the original Friday retroactively becomes the shocking twist it wasn’t in 1980.
Scare Value
Friday the 13th is impossible to not grade on a curve. So many bad rip-offs of this rip-off arrived over the next several years that the first Friday looks strong in comparison. It’s not the best installment of the franchise. It does lay the groundwork for a pattern that would make Paramount Pictures a lot of money though. Introduce teen characters…dispose of them. Unlike other chapters, however, it’s a whodunnit. A whodunnit that cheats the rules completely. We don’t meet the killer, or know of her existence, until the end of the movie. It doesn’t give you suspects or red herrings. It just slaughters people and then says here is who dun it! Objectively, Friday the 13th isn’t a very good movie. But it is a classic one.
3.5/5
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Friday the 13th Trailer
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