One of horror’s most popular and enduring franchises began as a Halloween copycat. No, really.
Producer/Director Sean S. Cunningham sought to capture the same success of Halloween by borrowing its formula and applying it to a film title he thought audiences wouldn’t be able to resist. To drum up interest and test the waters for any similarly titled films, he put out an ad in Variety touting his idea as “The Most Terrifying Film Ever Made.” Never mind that production was still months away. His gamble paid off. Released theatrically on May 9, 1980, Friday the 13th wound up cracking the top twenty highest-grossing films of the year and inspired a slew of sequels, crossovers, and a remake.
With a modest budget, simplicity is key in this seminal slasher. Just before the summer season, a group of counselors prepping to open the long-dormant Camp Crystal Lake get picked off is grisly fashion by an unseen assailant. In the film’s final act, the killer is revealed to be an unassuming grandma-type, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), embittered and broken over the tragic drowning of her young son Jason.
Up until this reveal, Pamela’s identity is kept secret through the use of POV. The only hints to her identity stem from the reactions of her victims just before their deaths. Some, like plucky camp cook Annie Phillips (Robbi Morgan), react without a trace of the usual guardedness found in a hitchhiking female climbing into the vehicle of what we assume to be an unknown man. Others, like Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), react with recognition, followed by the shock of betrayal. The twist that the film’s killer isn’t the usual masked maniac type but an average, older woman went far toward the film’s overall memorability.
The simplicity and budgetary constraints meant development among the other characters was limited to nonexistent, with Adrienne King‘s Alice Hardy becoming the last one standing to take down Mrs. Voorhees after the dawning realization that all her friends had been brutally slaughtered. As the Final Girl, Alice was the most fleshed-out character of the bunch. Alice began her journey with one foot already outside the camp- she wasn’t even sure she wanted to stick around for the camp’s opening. Steve, hoping to woo her, convinced her to give him one more week to decide. This little character insight painted Alice as a more reflective type, but it’s also an interesting detail to note when compared to Mrs. Voorhees’s motivation to kill. Voorhees targeted those that attempted to return Camp Crystal Lake to its former glory, and Alice had no vested interest in the project.
Of course, the other major component of the film’s success was the special makeup effects by Tom Savini and his crew. Poor Annie’s throat is slit in the woods, Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) receives an ax to her face, and Kevin Bacon‘s iconic death, pictured above, saw his character Jack get an arrow driven through his throat post-coitus. Even the killer earned a rather bloody death via decapitation. The body count in a slasher film is crucial, and Friday the 13th came barreling right out of the gate with a whopping nine victims, not including Mrs. Voorhees.
The final component that contributed to Friday the 13th’s appeal with viewers was the hook scare ending, inspired by the jump scare conclusion of Carrie. Poor Alice wakes up alone in a canoe out in the middle of the lake, only to be dragged out and into the depths by Jason’s corpse. It’s all a dream… or is it? The final shot shows a couple of ripples that hint maybe it wasn’t a nightmare, after all. It’s something the sequel ran with and never looked back.
If ever there was a prime example of the disparity between critics and horror fans during the golden age of slashers, it’s Friday the 13th. The slasher might have struck a chord with audiences, but critics despised the film. Granted, that was par for the course in the golden age of slashers, but it’s interesting to look back and see just how much they hated this one. Notable critic Gene Siskel famously attempted to thwart viewers from seeing the movie by intentionally spoiling the ending in the first few paragraphs of his review before skewering the film for its “sickening attack scenes.” The real bread and butter of slasher films, fans of course understand.
Forty years removed, Friday the 13th looks and feels of its time. Its influences are worn plain as day on its ’70s-styled sleeves, and some of the low-budget seams show. Upon the first watch, it’s easy to focus on the blood spewing from the stump where Mrs. Voorhees’s head once resided, but multiple revisits make it easier to spot a man’s hairy hands standing in for Betsy Palmer’s. That the franchise has become synonymous with Jason Voorhees means that the original has become overshadowed by its sequels in the decades since, too. Still, Cunningham, writer Victor Miller, and the cast and crew turned what was initially conceived as a Halloween copycat into a surprise box office hit with legs. Outside of the 2009 remake and Freddy vs. Jason, the original film is the highest-grossing of the franchise.
Friday the 13th established the mythology and the groundwork for the sequels that followed. It perpetuated the hunger for slashers during that period, and delivered a few twists and jolts that caught viewers off guard. In the decades that followed this film’s release, young Jason has grown up, discovered his identity through various masks, slaughtered over a hundred erstwhile campers, died repeatedly, and found himself the subject of a custody battle that’s hung future sequels in limbo. All of which is owed to a foundational slasher film with a catchy and unforgettable title bestowed upon it by producer Sean Cunningham: Friday the 13th.
