• Friday the 13th/Friday the 13th Part 2
• Friday the 13th Part 3/Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (page 2)
• Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning/Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (page 3)
• Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood/Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (page 4)
• Killer Extras (page 5)

"Do you think you can get through the summer?"

"I don't think I can get through the week."

One look at the teenagers in Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13^th and we can see that they're displaced, without religion or identity. Shallow, dim, they don't have any past and they don't have any future. Their existence is entirely ephemeral and half-developed. Their lives consist solely of pot, sex, and menial work. We know that they're really talking about life in the above-quoted exchange--life as a biological process that will come to an abrupt stop for most of them by the end of the week, if not by the end of the summer. They think they're just talking about work and boredom.

Nobody in the film seems particularly ethnic, and that's appropriate. These people are products of a culture without roots. The film's best gag is the fact that the teenagers in 1958 are generally indistinguishable from those in 1980. The teens in Friday the 13^th are extremely bored; time can't be wasted quickly enough. In the film they go swimming, sing songs, and play strip Monopoly--there is an aggressive anti-intellectualism in them, and for that matter anti-spiritualism. A girl tells her boyfriend about a dream she had: "It's raining very hard and it sounds like pebbles. I put my hands against my ears to try and block out the noise. Then the rain turns to blood." Revelation 8:7 talks about "hail and fire mixing with blood and coming down to the earth." Revelation 8:8 talks about a third of the sea turning into blood. We can recognize that the dream is roughly a vision of the Apocalypse; Cunningham repeatedly shows a black cloud going over the full moon, an image that could be in reference to Revelation 8:12, where a third of the moon, sun, and stars is smitten. Needless to say, the characters are blind to it. Both the girl and her boyfriend have no idea that what she has seen is a message from God that the end is near.

Keeping with the Biblical references, take note of the title: Friday the 13^th. Friday was the day of the Crucifixion, and thirteen is Judas' number. (Jesus plus twelve apostles equals thirteen.) Granted, Christ died for the good of mankind--we can't give any of these characters that sort of credit. Beyond its religious significance, the joke in setting the film on Friday the 13^th is that, Hey, Friday is the beginning of the weekend. As with Camp Crystal Lake itself, the characters regard the date as a mark of leisure time, not as the embodiment of evil or any other such weighty significance. Near the end of the film, Mrs. Voorhees sarcastically laments the youths' deaths: "So young, so pretty." The false sentiment of the dialogue adequately conveys the truth that one's life is not valuable because they are young and pretty. The slasher genre, the idea of having a killer systematically slaughter all but one of these characters, in effect re-establishes the fact of their mortality--and underlines the frivolousness in which they piddle it away.

The killings in the Friday the 13^th movies have often been characterized as the uncontrolled id at work, the figure of Jason (or, I suppose, his mother) being animalistic and amoral. The film sometimes leans towards this sort of interpretation. A cop tells the camp manager that all the loonies come out during the full moon. As I mentioned, we see a full moon frequently. Natural, biological forces, underlying the animal nature of the killer, predestine the murders. The murders are likewise often explained as the uncontrolled superego, punishing horny teenagers for their horniness. Sometimes it's interpreted as both, the killer representing the unconscious sex wishes of the surviving virgin, simultaneously acting out her wish and punishing those who are not as repressed. I generally don't think that any of this plays out very well in this particular film. Virgins are killed alongside the sexually active. The surviving girl may be virginal, but we realize that she is just as likely not, and the boy she's in love with gets it good. It seems that there really isn't much of a reason for them to die. They die, I suppose, because they have not produced a life worth protecting. They mean nothing. The motive for the killer, when it is revealed, proves wholly independent of their actions. The psychology of motivation becomes frankly rather inconsequential, because the whole drama takes place in a void.

Friday the 13^th is a very minimalist and laid-back film. Horror film critic and scholar Mike Bracken describes it as "lazy." "Lazy" is a sort of partial criticism, and I think Bracken intended it as such. Laziness doesn't have the lift, the stimulating nature, of a really great film. But it still has its own aesthetic. The film betrays a type of nihilism you can only find in a vacuum--a real poetry or sense of hope isn't able to seep in. There are a handful of transcendent moments, including a pre-sex scene with a girl simply lying on a bed in her panties that actually has considerable eroticism to it. The music by Harry Manfredini of course seems to mimic Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score, but the angrily psychotic dissonance is especially fascinating and powerful when it takes on a note of sombre regret in the canoe sequence at the end. It manages to be sappy, but coldly and intentionally unconvincing. The sequence ends with a rotting young Jason dragging the heroine underwater. The film then cuts back to reveal that this was all a dream. Cunningham added the gag during production at the suggestion of makeup artist Tom Savini, who in turn stole it from Brian De Palma's Carrie, natch. In both films, the effect is cheap, heartless, and cruel. It manipulates us--and the victimized heroine--into developing a kind of peace and even empathy with the monster she had been fighting. In Carrie, the argument is that Carrie is a "shit-eating" monster and always was, and that Amy Irving is foolish for thinking otherwise. Similarly, when Friday the 13^th's heroine expresses concern that Jason is still out there, we realize from her dream that she asks not out of sympathy, but because there is another monster out there on the loose, putting everyone in danger.

Without much luck, I have proposed in casual conversation that Plan 9 From Outer Space is a satire. (It's not a satire if you didn't intend it as such, I'm told.) I argue that the heroes in Plan 9 From Outer Space are objects of ridicule: they are flat and largely unintelligent. The best characters exist in the periphery--the villains and aliens are more interesting and ultimately more sympathetic. Friday the 13^th works in the same way. The film gets a rush of life when Betsy Palmer's Mrs. Voorhees comes onto the scene. It's true that she is campy and over-the-top and that she is unmistakably insane. The character invites the film's worst laughs: her Tammy Faye Baker looks, shiny lips, and bright white teeth make it difficult for the audience to relate to her from the very start. It becomes close to impossible when she starts talking to herself, most particularly in her "Jason voice." The performance is almost baroque, like she wandered in from another movie. But it's alive! Her son drowned because the camp counselors were too busy fucking instead of watching him. This has made her determined to exact revenge and keep the camp closed. There is something tragic and ironic about the fact that she has made it her life's work to avenge her son's death by killing camp counsellors. Whereas most of the camp counsellors apparently get into the business simply because they needed a job for the summer, she has far more emotional investment in killing than any of her victims have in living.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 1.78:1 (16x9); English mono, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 94 minutes

In Friday the 13^th Part 2, it's Jason himself who does the slashing, not his mother. This sets the film apart from its giallo roots, since the killer is neither insane nor even exactly human. He's more of a golem, a simple being who knows and understands only destruction. The entire tone of the series changes at this point. Compared with the original, Friday the 13^th Part 2 is a lot leaner and meaner. It has a sense of humour about itself. The original did also, but its humour was more a humour of content than one of style. Director Steve Miner includes lots of little visual jokes involving POV shots. At the beginning of the film, we hide behind a doorway, spying on the first victim. She takes a shower, and we follow her into the bathroom. She abruptly opens the curtain and looks directly into the camera. All of these shots are red herrings. Suddenly a cat jumps through the door, startling both her and us. Then she opens her refrigerator and finds a severed head. That's when the killer sinks an ice pick into her neck: the moment the POV shots become objective is the moment she gets it. Another good gag goes almost unnoticed as we crouch in the bushes watching a mostly-nude girl return from skinny-dipping. After drying off, she inadvertently throws her towel over the lens.

Miner is consciously playing around with the conventions of the slasher movie, and he's doing it in a subtle enough way that it works as intended (I imagine a theatrical audience giggles in delight at the abovementioned bits) while not distracting from the mood or suspense of the film. Miner's abundance of POV shots results in us relating to the killer over the victims more than ever before. One of my favourite moments in Friday the 13^th Part 2 is when a counsellor is telling two others that joke about the rabbit and the bear taking a dump in the woods. We hear the joke being told as they drive away, and their voices fade. We then hear the punchline in the next shot. I love the way that this decentralizes the joke as the subject of the shot. While I assume that the shot of them driving away is in Jason's very POV, it's rather inarguable that it is from his perspective. Because we aren't in on the joke, because we are standing outside of the joke, we become incapable of sympathizing with the victim. We're very much on the side of Jason.

The Jason-as-lonely-child motif is established in the very first shot. A little girl is skipping down the street singing a nursery rhyme. We only see her feet. Her mother calls her home, and as she leaves the frame, Jason enters. (How did Jason get away from Crystal Lake and to the suburbs for the kill? Nobody can say for sure.) The heroine is a major in child psychology, and at the end of the film, she traps Jason by dressing in his mother's sweater and telling him that she is pleased, but he needs to put the machete down now. You know, he is so cognitively underdeveloped that he associates any woman wearing her sweater with his mother, just as my wife's nephew used to call me daddy because I'm an adult male. The entire premise of the series is perhaps reliant on this particular hang-up. Otherwise he would be able to differentiate the camp counsellors who neglected him from the ones he is killing. Jason's obedience to his mother is quite a thorny issue. I don't think Jason kills camp counsellors because his mother has told him to.

The whole reason she killed them in the first place was because she believed that that is what he wanted of her. (In the original Friday the 13^th, a voice in her head tells her, "Kill her, mommy!") Instead, I think it's fairer to say that both Mommy and Jason are driven by their own emotions and outrage. The idea of disassociation as the primary motivation of the killers is one greatly stressed by the filmmakers in the first two Friday the 13^th films. In the original, Mommy directly tells a potential victim that she killed her son. But the very idea that this is all that got Jason through roughly nine films is sort of exasperating, if not out-and-out offensive. It's better, I think, to redirect their motivations less towards a specific teenager that they keep on seeing and more to the entire culture that let Jason drown. This is not that big of a stretch: Mommy says in Friday the 13^th that she would not have the camp re-opened. While this would make more sense if she bore some sort of semblance to sanity, we can see how easily another drowning could happen.

The teenagers Jason and his mother kill are hedonistic, plastic, and entirely free of both worry and intelligence. The series reminds me of times of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, with the monstrous Morlocks occasionally plucking off one of the beautiful, child-like Elois they've been raising. At no point do any of these teens so much as begin to suggest that they're different. We meet the one character who survives when she arrives late for orientation, a trespass she can almost freely flaunt as she is sleeping with the head counsellor. Jiminy Cricket!

I mentioned in the previous review how one of the victims had a dream where it was raining blood. It was close to one of the signs of the Apocalypse, and she was basically too dense to realize that this meant the end. Not to mention, of course, the symbolism of the day Friday the 13^th itself as the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ. In Friday the 13^th Part 2, the heroine makes a curious word choice in describing Jason's return from the dead as a "resurrection." Is Jason a Christ figure? Or rather, keeping with the apocalyptic thread, an Antichrist figure? It's not that far of a stretch, really. Although I admit to never finishing the book, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot was of course a Christ figure who liked to hang around children. The retarded John Coffey character in The Green Mile was an obvious Christ figure ("J.C.") as well. It's worth noting, I think, that we have no knowledge about Jason's father. He seems almost irrelevant.

There is, of course, a great absurdity to the idea of Jason as an Antichrist figure to which I am not blind. I would think that the Antichrist would want to eliminate good and promote evil. Jason simply eliminates the otherwise insignificant. Nobody in Friday the 13^th Part 2 really represents anything that can be interpreted as virtue. The whole Apocalyptic Christian subtext is in itself a sort of sarcastic joke. As Jason's evil stems as much from his innocence as good stems from the innocence of the idiots around him, there proves to be even less to the motivation of his murders than meets the eye. The interpretation of Jason as an Antichrist figure is worth mentioning, however, because I believe that it is symptomatic of our desire to sympathize and take sides with him over his boring victims. Those who are disturbed by how these modern movie monsters--the Jasons and Freddies, the Chuckies and Michael Myerses--become famous by virtue of their mayhem haven't seen the movies: a good deal of the time, they are the most interesting and sympathetic characters in the whole film. The original Friday the 13^th played like sort of a lowbrow "Waiting for Godot". Death was mainly there to show how meaningless life was. The common reading that people in Friday the 13^th movies die because they have sex--that Jason metes out a puritanical justice upon the encroachment of adulthood (meaning after sex the "child dies"), or by extension that he represents AIDS (although I think that these films precede the disease by a little, especially among the heterosexual community)--is more convincing in this film.

Miner seems to reserve a very extreme hatred for women in this film. This is the first film in the series that shows any nudity, but there is something sort of distasteful about it. One girl in particular is introduced to us in very short, very tight shorts and a shirt that tightly hugs her breasts. She later goes skinny-dipping and we view her from a distance. Where previously her sexuality was accentuated, here it is nearly non-existent. While I believe that in the former scene we are directly seeing her from the perspective of a horny teenager and in the latter we are directly seeing her from the perspective of asexual Jason, in both she is severely objectified.

In From Dusk Till Dawn, honorary supporting actor Tom Savini talks about how it's easy to put a stake through the heart of the vampire prostitutes because their "flesh is soft and mushy." Indeed, as a make-up artist, Tom Savini's special effects stress the softness of the flesh. Who can forget how easily the zombies in Dawn of the Dead chewed through the bodies of their victims? It was indeed nauseatingly tactile. I find the violence in Friday the 13^th Part 2 to be especially sexual, due in no small part to Savini's make-up effects. His accent on the flesh makes us think of sex or, in the case of Dawn of the Dead, food. The body is reduced to an object for gratification of the appetite. (Compare to something like Peter Jackson's gross-out classic Dead Alive, where the accent is more in ligaments and pus--the last things you think about there are sex and food.) I'm not sure who came up with idea of using piercing weapons (a spear and the ice pick come to mind) for the killings, but this decision also sexualizes the violence. Miner seems to stress the pushing of the weapon into the flesh. Penetration, in other words.

The conception of Jason mirrors, in some visual elements (and I guess one thematic element), Ed Gein, the credited granddaddy of sexual violence. Jason lives in a shack, where he keeps the mummified head of his mother, whose insanity created his own. He dresses in flannel. We reflect that if the killer were not a supernatural entity such as Jason, he'd be some kind of a crazed loner instead. To be fair, the original film had an understandable debt to the Gein-inspired Psycho. Jason's costume in this film is said to be an homage to 1976's The Town That Dreaded Sundown from (take note, "Mystery Science Theater 3000" fans) Legend of Boggy Creek auteur Charles B. Pierce. I have not seen The Town That Dreaded Sundown, but from the stills on the Internet Movie Database, it seems clear that the homage was intended. From what I have seen of Charles B. Pierce's oeuvre, and from what I've learned of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a hickish, drive-in vibe is being channelled. The hint of Gein is then compounded.

Compared to the original, these aspects give Friday the 13^th Part 2 a somewhat hollower and more nihilistic flavour. The violence is less eerie and inevitable than it is fetishistic and passionate. I can't say for sure whether or not I feel it's an improvement on the original film--it is simply something different in the same vein. The picture ends with a shot of the mummified head of Jason's mother that looks like an album cover for a death metal band. That's appropriate, I think.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 1.78:1 (16x9); English mono, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 86 minutes