Too Young To Be Watching This: Friday The 13th
Why Camp Crystal Lake may be home to the scariest franchise of them all…
Snappy twig. Out in the forest. Everything pauses.
That’s the moment — the cliché from TV and the movies. Not just in horror films or thrillers; it happens in children’s shows, animated cartoons. Instant suspense. Unease. A sudden chill. There’s someone or something out there.
It’s no joke if you hear “snappy twig” in reality. Particularly if you’re alone. You’re out in the forest. Nowhere obvious to turn to for help. There could be anyone out there.
You thought you were alone, but it’s worse.
This is the primeval draw of the Friday The 13th movies. It’s a brilliant concept — never unscary. A bunch of people are out in the wilderness. There’s someone out there who means to cause them harm. Watching and waiting.
It’s like going for a swim in the sea, and you feel something touch your foot. Pass the concept through many different hands, render it in different ways, and it still has an infinite capacity to scare.
Oddly, my first memory of Friday The 13th is from that magical night I went to see The Empire Strikes Back. Six years old, skipping all the way down the street. A double bill at the ABC in Clydebank — paired with the original Star Wars. My sister and her husband took me. I remember their amusement at the state I got myself into in the walk up Kilbowie Road to see this film.
Sat inside. The low lights, the curtains. The lassie selling ice creams in the thin red light. Feet drumming, every nerve end sparking with the best and purest excitement. My sister gave me the programme to flick through, a vain attempt to calm me down. These publications are a relic of the ancient cinema experience, like the B features and short films they’d play you instead of repeatedly slashing your attention span with advertising.
(In fact, the short film paired with Empire was The Black Angel, and I will write about this soon.)
The programme was a glossy printed black-and-white pocket-sized publication, stapled. Posters of forthcoming attractions, a preview of what the cinema was showing that week, and the glorious local adverts. One such advert was for the double-bill I was attending. On another page, there was a poster for another double-bill: Friday The 13th parts one and two.
Images from that night more than 40 years ago comfort me to this day; mental Polaroids that put the nice wee smile on my face, the one I make when I think no-one’s looking. The Millennium Falcon’s flight cabin, zooming through a treasure chamber of stars. The asteroid field. The Imperial March. Yoda’s twitchy ears. Clashing blue and red light sabres. Vader’s black magic in the carbonite chamber…
But there’s this other image that stayed with me, for the opposite reason. The dark side, you could say.
You can see this image if you search online for the quad poster for the original Friday The 13th. An illustration of a woman’s face, screaming, eyes wide, whites prominent, a clear expression of terror. She’s looking at a knife that appears to part the page, showing us this woman’s shrieking countenance underneath. I saw this image only a few days ago on Twitter, on an account dedicated to old cinema billboards and quads.
There it was. I flashed back. I got the fear.
It’s disturbing. Aged six, I didn’t know anything about Friday The 13th, or what the film might be about, but the image told you everything you needed to know. It reeked of a dirty, seedy malice. The kind of wrongness that wasn’t anything to do with monsters or ghosts or invaders from outer space; unmasked ghouls who would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky kids; the things taking place on the strobing box in the corner that you could shut out if you put your hands over your eyes or ran behind the couch.
No, this was close to things you knew, even at age six, could really happen. The implication you well understood from grainy front page pictures of smiling children juxtaposed with brutal, slabbed headlines. Or written in thin white lines on the faces of men you saw in the street. The addition of a blade. The subtraction of life. Or at the very least, blood.
The Empire Strikes Back was a universe of light and wonder, a benign explosion in my synapses. But the other thing, the image of the screaming woman and the knife in the programme, the one that disturbed me a little under the low lights, kept its place in the memory banks.
I wasn’t to know that I would be watching one of the movies in that shadow world double bill within a matter of weeks.
Someone we knew was a video pirate. This was a roaring trade in the scheme where I grew up. This guy could get you anything — the nasties, blue stuff, the latest cinema releases captured with a portable video camera — you name it. John Waters famously observed that video recorders were invented because people are too shy to masturbate in public. But video nasties, as they came to be known, dominated headlines in Britain, sparking a moral panic and leading to draconian categorisation and licensing. Movies like The Evil Dead and many others became notorious, leading to front pages and moral campaigns by the likes of Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association.
Producers and distributors of this material, legitimate or otherwise, must have cackled at the free advertising. You couldn’t have generated that kind of sustained interest, that gravitational pull, if you’d thrown tens of millions at the Saatchi brothers. People wanted to see it. It was in the papers; it was on the news. It had a tidy wee title.
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And so, thanks to the video man and his suitcase of curiosities, my dad and my two elder brothers sat me down to watch Friday The 13th Part Two one bright Sunday morning. As she always did at the weekends, my mum was at work, otherwise this wouldn’t have happened. Indeed, when she found out later — wondering why I wouldn’t turn the lights off at bedtime — hell’s fury was unleashed.
But she wasn’t there to stop it. The tape went into the top-loading JVC. Play was pressed.
I knew about horror films. The Hammer movies’ long fingers reached right into the 1980s. Horror, and horror iconography, particularly that of Dracula, was very popular with children. Certainly he was with me. A cartoon I loved was shown on the BBC, with Dracula as one of the main characters: The Drac Pack. It was him, the wolfman and Frankenstein’s monster, getting into scrapes and solving mysteries. I think this was produced by Hanna-Barbera, similar in style to Scooby Doo… which was maybe the ultimate example of this kiddified horror.
There were Dracula board games and ice lollies; my sister got me a set of Mego Mad Monsters, with a bug-eyed Dracula prominent among them. I even remember — I must have been five at the most — pleading to be allowed to stay up late during the summer holidays to watch Dracula AD 72, with good old Christopher Lee as the count, very late at night (after the 10 o’clock news). Curiously, I remember agreeing with mum that it was “rubbish” and heading to bed; I’ll have to rewatch that, one day.
As Jason Voorhees would agree, mum knows best.
I was bought a copy of Monster Monthly magazine, which had a pull-out poster of Vincent Price, as The Abominable Dr Phibes. Later, I’d be entranced by the Scream! comic, IPC’s attempt to cash in on the video nasties phenomenon in early 1984. It would only last 15 issues, but its influence was profound, not least on me.
But this was… safe horror. In that it didn’t actually frighten me. Dracula was a bloke kidding himself on about his hairline, possibly a fan of Brylcreem, someone whose chief attribute isn’t really fangs and blood and burning eyes, but… evening attire. My Mego dollie had natty wee dress shoes, a cape with red edging that felt lovely and smooth to the touch. Sure, he had the teeth and the eyes, but he wasn’t truly scary. Some grannies would have been delighted to see him doing a stall at the church jumble sale. “What lovely manners!”
Jason Voorhees, with his stinking forest cabin and his hood, with his mother’s head in the fridge, burying a pick axe in someone’s head, was not in the same vein. This was the real stuff. It was very, very frightening, then and now. And worse still — it has echoes of real life, real things that happened to real people.
Friday The 13th Part Two begins with a recap of the previous movie. The highlights reel on its own is the stuff of trauma, including Pamela Voorhees’ head flying off in slow-motion, hands vainly clutching the air either side of a gushing stump. Then of course, there’s her beloved son going for his swimming badge while the final girl, Alice, bides her time on the water in a canoe. If you’ve seen this movie, whatever age you saw it, these images will be flashing through your head. It’s horrific, but that’s just an appetiser compared to what comes next.
What is Jason Voorhees? Apart from “Pamela Voorhees’ son”, the picture is indistinct. Is he the ghost of the drowned boy? If so, this is a ghost who somehow grows into a man, and stalks and murders young people who stay at Camp Crystal Lake. Part two of this saga sees Jason wearing a hood with a single eye hole cut in it. Not the world’s most practical attire for your classic serial killer — as we saw in Django Unchained, those cut-out eye holes are a problem when you have to move fast, and you also have to contend with the loss of binocular vision. Certainly, Jason would fail his driving test. He would ditch this millinery from part three onwards for the hockey mask which we all know by now, the star of many horrifying video box covers. Friday The 13th has spawned two key pub quiz questions: who was the killer in the original? (Not Jason; Jason’s mother.) And when does the hockey mask appear? (Part three.)
But I think hillbilly cabin-dwelling Jason is the scariest of them all. The hooded element is taken from a real thrill killer, himself the subject of a movie, The Town That Dreaded Sundown. And the kills in part two are horribly realised. There was something jarringly domestic about them. Jason hides behind doors and leaps out of cupboards; he creeps up on a couple in bed, in perhaps the most notorious kill of them all, penetrating both with a spear. (Opens voice memo to Sigmund.) The police chief authority figure gets a pick axe… the guy in the wheelchair ends up with a… this girl caught in a snare gets her… you don’t need the details. No-one does, really.
It ends with a jump-scare on a par with the naval incursion of the original, as a maskless Jason crashes through a window to surprise the final girl and her boyfriend.
How high did I jump? It may not have been a world record, but it was certainly a personal best.
It’s not quite as well shot as the first one, and was reputedly heavily cut by US censors, but it has a grubby allure to it. Cheap thrills striking hardest. I never forgot it, and it was a horrible experience for a little kid. I should not have been watching it. It’s close to “call social services” territory, these days, but despite my fear and the lights burning late into the night, I couldn’t wait to tell my wee pals at school that I’d seen it. The video era meant that seeing these films as a child gave you a certain currency. Sweaty, dog-eared currency.
I have a theory that the reason we have terrible people in business and politics these days is that they were shaped by the prevailing entertainment of the 1980s, particularly from the United States. Ferris Bueller, Marty McFly, and Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters were just some examples of characters of this era who had it all, but not through any great effort or ability. They were chancers, and even worse, coercive, manipulative, devious. They were pre-digital push-button figures who had it easy. “Why work harder?” was a message you’d see on t-shirts. Variations of this slacker sentiment were espoused by Garfield the cat (and perhaps he’s another example).
Back To The Future is a brilliant movie, and Michael J Fox’s performance is unforgettable and will define him forever, but I have to confess I always found something a wee bit off about Marty McFly. He starts Back To The Future with the girl, and still has her at the end, no effort required. She isn’t what McFly desires. He desires a thing, not a person. At the start of the film, he yearns after an automobile — specifically, the red Toyota pick-up truck. By the end of the movie, he drives it away, because he has enriched his father. I do wonder if that’s the point of Back To The Future. Familial connection equals wealth, ultimately. Not love or revenge.
On Wall Street and the City of London, there were similarly people making fortunes at the touch of a button (until the crash of 1987, anyway), and not particularly shy about their wealth, either — the yuppies. Bret Easton Ellis was very clever in juxtaposing the world of video nasties with the real-world nasties of Wall Street in American Psycho. Because in Friday The 13th and with Michael Myers in Halloween, and later Freddie Kruger from A Nightmare On Elm Street, you had a new kind of horror icon, a step away from Christopher Lee’s hay fever eyes and the see-through nighties of his girlfriends. In these new terrors, almost despite yourself, you began to root for the monster as he chopped, stabbed and terrorised his teenage prey. They weren’t characters, so much as a score card, a means of introducing some novel method of despatch with fresh tools. The new killers were on t-shirts; they became dollies. They had fans. You’d be forgiven for thinking they were the heroes.
There was no moral dimension in these films — they are gleefully nihilistic. If she’s lucky, you get one female survivor. As Wes Craven showed us in the 1990s with Scream, there were rules to these proceedings. The final girl was usually virginal. Anyone who took pleasure in sex was usually punished in the most graphic way possible (though not before giving you a wee eyeful — another warped element of these films). The braying yuppies with their designer clothes and designer drug habits weren’t exactly on the same page as the celluloid mass murderers, but there is a line to be drawn between sheer, unslakeable greed in the financial markets and insatiable bloodlust at Camp Crystal Lake.
The link between real life cases and movie murderers is an uncomfortable one. The subject of Ed Gein and his links to Psycho and The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre is currently being examined in a Netflix series. Another one, Mindhunter, brought many of the monsters of the 1970s back into the public eye, people and crimes best forgotten about; monsters snared by advances in technology and law enforcement.
The scariest book I ever read remains The Stranger Beside Me, by Ann Rule. It’s about Ted Bundy. There is one part near the end when behavioural scientists decide to allow the incarcerated Bundy a treat: he is allowed to watch the original Friday The 13th. Bundy grew excited while watching this movie, the reasons for which, I realise, I don’t want to type or address here. They cast Jason Voorhees and any vicarious enjoyment you might derive from his films in a new light.
Perhaps there are lines to be drawn between the grubby bottom feeders who commit these kind of crimes in real life, and the type of people who seek economic and political power for its own sake, and abuse it. Maybe the line is thicker than we might have supposed, as greed, governance and the media in the western world heads to ever darker, even barbarous destinations. Upon first review, this strikes me as a bit of a reach. And then you think about what’s happening. What we’re going through. And who’s in charge. And what hope we have of changing it any time soon.
So, this Halloween, we’re swerving the bloodier pieces of work. In my house, after the kids are in bed, we’re going back to the old Amicus portmanteau anthologies and Hammer horrors, pointy teeth and pointy boobs included. With its reliable British acting aristocracy performing way beyond the parameters of the genre, there’s something comforting, even cosy, about these terrors.
This year I think I’ll leave Jason Voorhees in the video cassette box… Well, maybe just a little peek…
(The featured image is my Halloween costume this year.)
