A 24-Hour Nightmare of Terror: The Senselessness of Death in ‘Friday the 13th’
When Sean Cunningham met Wes Craven and the two came together to produce a horror movie, they weren’t looking to send any kind of message or even — at first — make any kind of art. Craven wanted to see if he could make a film, if he was up to the challenge. A deeply thoughtful creator, he couldn’t help but pose fundamental questions of right and wrong, of how easily upstanding people could turn to savage behavior, of revenge and the purpose it may or may not serve. Heavy themes for a young debut filmmaker. The film was, of course, The Last House on the Left. It was without a doubt a first time effort, raw and imperfect in ways that almost entirely accentuated its best qualities. Even if the filmmakers behind Last House didn’t set out to instill any kind of purpose into it or make anything more than quick and cheap exploitation, they did.
Wes Craven went on to revisit some of the same themes for his sophomore feature, the now classic The Hills Have Eyes. As a director, he settled into the genre easily and quickly, even if he never quite felt comfortable being pigeon-holed as a “horror director” throughout his career. Sean Cunningham had, as he’s never been shy about saying, never really been interested in exploring the genre at all. He knew that horror and exploitation made money and he did them to keep the lights on, but he wanted to make other kinds of films and so he set out to do just that throughout the rest of the ’70s. The trouble was that those other projects had not been nearly as successful as The Last House on the Left.
By the end of the decade, Cunningham found himself needing to once again make a horror picture to keep the lights on, but if he had to do it, he wanted it to be a huge success. And so he famously put out an ad in Variety with the title Friday the 13th and the promise of “The most terrifying motion picture ever made!” The rest, naturally, is history. Cunningham directed his hopeful horror picture himself this time, creating something incredibly different from The Last House on the Left and (as became immediately apparent) much more easily digestible for mainstream audiences. Like Last House, Friday the 13th was no stranger to controversy. But it was very different from what the previous effort had seen, because this time the ever-growing controversy stemmed from the film’s enormous success.
Friday the 13th did not just strike gold at the box office, it became one of the most successful independent films of all time. It was effortlessly simple, a situational film about a group of isolated teens in the woods at camp, in a town none of them are familiar with, cut off from local authorities by a storm and simply hoping to wait out the rain or for their boss to return — neither of which happens, as they’re picked off one by one by a killer to whom we’re not even given any clues to guess the identity. It’s a body count movie, one of the most efficient and successful of all time. That, by itself, is one of the most striking differences from the earlier Last House on the Left.
Despite the controversy surrounding the violence in Friday the 13th at the time, The Last House on the Left is an infinitely more disturbing and visceral movie. All of the violence in Last House has a purpose, even when it just seems to be random chaos throughout the first half. Krug and his makeshift family of psychopaths do a horrific, terrible thing, assaulting and killing young Mari and her best friend, Phyllis. It’s an act that, in maybe the film’s most disturbing scene, even the killers themselves are shocked and disgusted by in the quiet moments after the girls have both died. But this display of violence exists to stand in direct contrast to the vengeance enacted later on by Mari’s parents after they discover that not only has she been killed, but that her rapists and killers are in their house and taking advantage of their hospitality after the fact. Perhaps most horrific of all is the fact that the initial murders are so drawn out, that Mari and her friend both know they are going to die long before it actually happens.
Things truly could not be more different for Friday the 13th, in which violence has no purpose, is a thing you don’t want to think about at all and something that comes swiftly — not drawn out by any stretch — when you least expect it. On one level, this is simply because there wasn’t a ton going into the development of the idea. As both Cunningham and Victor Miller have noted, they found a successful formula in John Carpenter’s Halloween and tried to emulate it as successfully as they could. The results work better than either one of them could probably have anticipated.
Friday the 13th is a film about being young, being free, being independent, but at the same time being of the age where mortality really begins to take shape in your mind. Standing at the edge of teenagedom, looking back at childhood and realizing that what you have is going to end. This is, appropriately, represented in the form of an older woman, a mother figure who — cutting through her complicated motivations — is essentially punishing these would-be camp counselors for their youth. Many have projected a puritanical message on Friday the 13th that really isn’t there, perhaps in part because of Mrs. Voorhees’ targeting these teens for “making love while that young boy drowned.” I think that doesn’t quite hold up for a few reasons.
The first, and probably the most important, is that Mrs. Voorhees killed those particular teens in the film’s opening moments, which is a huge thing to note. She has already claimed her vengeance twenty years before the events of the movie even take place, she has killed the people she felt were responsible, and even then it simply wasn’t enough. In addition to that, there’s the fact that she’s punishing the negligence much more than she is punishing the sex itself. Her son died because the counselors tasked with keeping an eye on the campers turned their back and allowed a disabled boy to die unsupervised, if those two counselors had been playing tennis, she probably would have been equally pissed. There’s also a clever inversion of another classic horror film going on in this character, one that was very intentional on the part of Victor Miller. That’s the fact that we have a killer who is a mother keeping her dead son alive in her mind, even speaking in his voice, which is a total inversion of Norman Bates taking on the persona of his dead mother in Psycho.
Still, Mrs. Voorhees’ actions and motivations reinforce the idea that Friday the 13th is ultimately about being young and confronting death, as well as the utterly senseless nature of that death. She represents an older generation, looking down on the younger generation with explicitly baseless and even paranoid disgust. It’s fitting for the film as a whole, as Friday the 13th is not a movie stocked with adult role models, far from it. Most of the adults are either outright dismissive of the kids, creepy or — in the case of Ralph — both. Steve Christy is the closest thing the original film has to an adult voice of reason, but even he’s gotten a little too close to Alice and refers to his flock of counselors as “babes in the woods, in every sense of the word” when he goes to the diner. Poor Annie can’t get so much as a ride to the camp without getting groped by one driver and killed by another.
Nothing of what happens in Friday the 13th is about shirking responsibility. The counselors aren’t stoked about the work they have to do to get the camp in order, but they’re more than willing to do it. It’s not a movie about vilifying youth, but rather about the idea (again, as you stand on that last tightrope between being a teenager and being an adult) that adults can’t save you, that no one is coming to get you out of the mess you’ve found yourself in, and if you are going to survive, you will have to do it on your own. While the theme is explored much more deeply in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s perhaps one of the few prominent themes running through both of these wildly different franchises.
Death, in Friday the 13th, is something that is completely unexpected. In that respect, it truly stands in stark contrast to the slow, drawn-out murder sequences of The Last House on the Left. Thanks to the incredible work of Tom Savini, each individual death sequence is a shock to the system. It happens, and then it’s gone, lingering just long enough for you to recognize what’s happening and for an afterimage to form in your mind. The number of counselors dwindles slowly but surely until only Alice remains, none of them even know that anything out of the ordinary is going on until it’s too late. They’re here to have fun, they’re here to be kids for perhaps the last time before giving themselves over to adult responsibilities. And of course it is the last time, in a way that none of them remotely expected.
The deaths in the original film happen totally without rhyme or reason. Other than a ring and a jeep, there’s no suspect to try and pick out of the small cast of characters. But, intentional or not, it simply stands as a reminder that death in and of itself is without reason or purpose. It’s something that happens when you least expect it, and not thinking about it does absolutely nothing to make it go away. These kids are isolated, they’re out enjoying the last days of what could by any stretch be called childhood and for them to meet such grisly ends while doing it, which is honestly perfectly in line with the film’s basic motif of facing mortality by any means necessary.
What happened to young Jason (who never appears but in a flashback of his drowning, screaming for help and frozen in time, and again as a vision or ghostly apparition, still in the lake and in many ways frozen) was a pointless tragedy. There were only two people with the closest approximation to responsibility, and they were killed for it. And still it wasn’t enough. There was no reason for Pamela Voorhees’ son to die, there was no expectation of it, but it happened nonetheless. She preaches of responsibility to Alice, perhaps even to earlier victims we didn’t see, but all she is actually doing is dishing out the exact same blunt, pointless tragedy that she had been forced to suffer herself. Mrs. Voorhees is frozen in her grief, her repeated flashbacks of Jason, still thrashing, still screaming for her help, only embody that. And the only way she can communicate with that grief is to echo it.
Alice, as a heroine, gets frequently compared to Laurie Strode in Halloween, but I think that’s mostly due to how often the two movies get compared in general. Laurie is aware, on some level, that things are out of the ordinary even if she doesn’t get drawn into a conflict with Michael until the last few minutes of the movie. Alice, however, is even less aware. She never catches a glimpse of the killer early on. Nobody does. She has absolutely no idea what’s happening until she’s running around the camp realizing that all of her friends are dead.
For Alice, facing off against Mrs. Voorhees is totally reactionary. Whereas other lead characters like Laurie or Elm Street’s Nancy Thompson can be called heroines as they’re ultimately fighting for the lives of others in addition to themselves, Alice is only fighting for her own survival. That’s not a dig on the character, it just comes down to circumstances. There is no one left to save but herself, and so she does that by any means necessary. She doesn’t know she’s a final girl, and while she is aware that something is out of the ordinary, it’s in a much more general, “What’s going on here?” kind of way. In fact, when she first sees Mrs. Voorhees, she immediately rushes into her arms, believing that she’s been saved. That only reinforces the hard lessons that Friday the 13th teaches over and over, that adults aren’t always there to help, that they can’t be counted on, and that sometimes they are the ones responsible for your pain.
Death in Friday the 13th is plentiful, but it is also meaningless, and it’s meaningless because that’s in essence just what it is. It’s something that happens when you’re thinking about living your life. The counselors joke about the camp being called “Camp Blood” by the locals as a way to distance themselves from the harsh reality of this place’s past and of death in general. They’re thinking about having a good time, one night of fun before they jump back into the responsibility of cleaning up the camp, and because they’re trying so hard not to come to grips with the reality of mortality, they’re confronted by it that much more harshly.
Friday the 13th is an extremely scaled-back, simple slasher, but one that works very well in that regards, and one that does a great job of setting up the campfire story vibe that defines the rest of the franchise. Honestly, from the lack of clues to the killer’s reveal, the ill-defined structure and the last surprise of the undead young Jason Voorhees leaping out of the lake, it feels like a campfire story that’s being told to us, unraveling loosely and being made up on the spot. And that’s ultimately a huge part of its charm. It’s one of the definitive horror films of its time, and while it gets lost among the rest of the series due to its lack of Jason, it’s one that is absolutely worth revisiting not only for Betsy Palmer’s unhinged performance, but for Savini’s tremendous FX and above all its incredibly effective atmosphere. And even if it is “just” a stalk-and-slash, killer in the woods movie, after all this time it still remains one of the best.
