One of the major slasher franchises is Friday the 13th; with 12 films to its name across nearly three decades, it has stood the test of time. Recently, the franchise has been locked in a vicious legal battle between Victor Miller and Sean S. Cunningham, this film’s original writer and director.
This threw the series into flux after the 2009 remake, leaving a huge gap that has now spanned fifteen years – the longest gap in releases since Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X. Yet, with the lawsuit concluded and the rights confusingly split between multiple parties, new material will begin to trickle out.
The original entry, as famously referenced in the opening scene of Scream, featured an interesting twist when it came time to reveal its killer. The conventions for slashers were still being written, which meant that most of the modern tools and tropes that the major films would rely on hadn’t truly been established. Still, the bones are laid out well – a group of young, attractive people arrive at an isolated location where they are slowly picked off one by one by a mysterious, unseen killer. Camp Crystal Lake, replete with a dark and terrible history that the surrounding area has dubbed a curse, has been plagued by misfortune repeatedly. The new owner, Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), has come along to reopen the camp. Still, a dark shadow looms over the summer as the counselors trickle in, threatening to end the good time before it can ever begin.
For most of the film, we spend time with six of the seven counselors Steve has hired. Alice (Adrienne King), Bill (Harry Crosby), Marcie (Jeanine Taylor), Jack (Kevin Bacon), Ned (Mark Nelson), and Brenda (Laurie Bartram). For almost all of these actors, this would be the biggest (and, for some, one of their last) films that they were in. Obviously, one name stands out amidst the crowd. Kevin Bacon, like Johnny Depp and Jamie Lee Curtis from A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, respectively, would have a massive career that has continued to this day. He also receives one of the most recognizable deaths in the film.
Clocking in at 95 minutes, we spend a little over twenty minutes with them before the first of the core group is killed. We get to know each of them in that twenty minutes. As characters, they run the gamut of likeability, and that is only because there isn’t much time to focus on them as characters. Alice is one of the earliest final girls, breaking the mold that final girls would be cast into as if they were iron throughout the 80s and nineties. She is all but implied to be having a relationship with Steve, smokes pot, and isn’t above participating in a game of strip monopoly. Her love of painting, general reliability, and decisiveness under pressure make her one of the most renowned characters to grace the Friday the 13th franchise – only Ginny Field has ever really topped her as the favored final girl.
Marcie, Jack, and Ned are a trio of friends, with the former two in a relationship and the latter their funny jokester of a friend. While some of his gags are tasteless, his curious nature does him in before the rest of the group is aware of any danger. Marcie and Jack spend much of their screen time flirting with one another and exploring the campgrounds after helping out for the day.
Brenda and Bill, like Alice, had already arrived at the camp sometime before Marcie’s group, which explains why they spent more time within their respective groups than with one another. A few scenes here and there show the group working to come together before the kids arrive, but their fate was already sealed long before then.
As the only defined relationship for the group, Marcie and Jack spend much of their time together rather than with the others. Marcie shares a dark, recurring nightmare she’s had since her youth, seemingly portending her death later in the film. The sweetness of their relationship is replicated in successive sequels, rarely successfully.
As a slasher film, it has a litany of victims to litter the movie with – beginning with the opening prologue, where we meet Barry (Willie Adams) and Claudette (Debra S. Hayes).
They’re a young couple who are counselors for Camp Crystal Lake in 1958 and are heavily implied to be the counselors most responsible for the accidental drowning death of a young Jason Voorhees (played here by Ari Lehman).
When the couple sneaks away from the rest of the group to have sex in the barn, they are attacked and murdered by an unseen assailant, leading to the camp being closed for a little over twenty years. Their murder is similar to Judith Meyers in Halloween, which has resulted in numerous slasher films emulating the trope of having a young couple murdered in the opening minutes. Scream famously follows this trek with Steven Orth (Kevin Patrick Walls) and Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore).
The seventh counselor, Annie (Robbi Morgan), is introduced after the prologue, making her way to Camp Crystal Lake. Her arrival is bright, bubbly, and cheer-filled, only to end with her shocking murder. Despite only having a few minutes of screen time, her absence impacts the beginning of the film as the counselors are getting it ready to open – as she is the new cook. Her death is painful for the audience because she is the nicest character introduced in the film, not discounting the others. We never see her as anything but a nice young woman who ended up in the wrong person’s car. Granted, we all know what would have happened to Annie if she had reached the campground.
A few people fill out the supporting cast, notably Enos (Rex Everhart), a truck driver who gives Annie a lift part of the way to Camp Crystal Lake, Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), the town drunk who frightens the counselors and warns them of the death curse before being shuffled off by the police. Indeed, Friday the 13th rarely features characters in its films that don’t meet some kind of grizzly end by the time the credits roll. Still, every film needs bit players.
After forty-plus years and multiple references across a variety of films, it is no secret that Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) is the killer out for revenge after the death of her son Jason. What makes her role so annoying, despite its iconicity, is that she is never once mentioned or even seen ahead of her introduction in the film’s final act. What works in Pamela’s favor is that she appears to be an unassuming, affable woman. Annie is clearly at ease with Pamela until they pass the turn-off to the camp. Steve clearly recognizes her before his end, crediting her comments to Alice about being “old friends of the Christy’s.” While her lack of sanity comes out in bits and pieces before the act is entirely dropped, Pamela is more or less a person that most wouldn’t look twice at if they crossed paths with her. Compared to Jason Voorhees in later installments, this is a plus in her column.
Slasher films of the earliest order have rarely been required to put much effort into their characters or plots, but what effort is put in often makes the difference. The score and the practical effects utilized in bringing the kills to life can also make a difference. Still, without a fun story – however thin – it’s merely something to look at. Friday the 13th set the stage for a long-running series that has been immensely well received. There’s a reason it’s one of the big three. Yes, it may come off as formulaic and sometimes a bit trite, but it is essential to remember that what comes before lays the ground for what comes after.
Lloydd Marshall Books 