Film Review: Friday the 13th (1980)

Film Review: Friday the 13th (1980) | Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

John Carpenter’s Halloween is often credited with creating the modern slasher film genre, but it took a series of its cheap and often uninspired imitations for the subgenre to take its recognisable and formulaic form. Among those imitations, the most successful and arguably the most iconic was Friday the 13th, a 1980 film directed by Sean S. Cunningham, which would start the most successful horror film franchise of all time.

The plot is set in a summer camp at Crystal Lake, New Jersey, and begins with a prologue set in 1958. Two young counsellors are about to have sex before they are viciously stabbed by someone. The apparently unsolved murders, together with the tragic drowning of a boy one year earlier, brought notoriety to an isolated camp, but two decades later its owner Steve Christy (played by Peter Bouwer) wants to open it and a number of young men and women are hired as counsellors and brought to the premises to prepare it for the opening. They are all having fun enjoying the sun, sports, various games, and sex, and, despite cryptic warnings from a few menacing-looking locals, are unaware that they will become prey for a relentless killer who will begin to kill them one by one.

Friday the 13th isn’t a particularly good film, nor was it envisioned to be particularly good. Cunningham, until that time known mostly for working with Wes Craven on a low-budget, ultra-violent rape-and-revenge film Last House on the Left, admitted that he wanted nothing more than a cheap imitation of Halloween. Its screenwriter Victor Miller copied the most obvious elements of that film’s formula – a lone and seemingly unstoppable maniac who murders vulnerable teenagers until being more or less successfully challenged by the Final Girl – and added only a few alterations like the isolated camp setting, a bigger body count, and the identity of the killer not being revealed until the twist ending. Cunningham made the violence more explicit and gory (although some of the killings actually happened off-screen) and added glimpses of explicit nudity. His direction is, however, of very poor quality compared with Carpenter’s, and Friday the 13th doesn’t hide its extremely low budget, making it rough around the edges. The acting, with the exception of Betsy Palmer in the role of Mrs. Voorhees, isn’t anything to write home about, and most of the characters are easily forgettable. Unsurprisingly, most of the young cast, with the exception of Kevin Bacon, didn’t have much of a career afterwards. What works in this film is the tight pacing, simple but effective musical score by Harry Manfredini that adds an iconic vocal leitmotif for the killer, as well as the makeup effects by Tom Savini, who made the gruesome killings look realistic. Friday the 13th, despite angering influential critics like Gene Siskel, made excellent business at the box office and paved the way for films of a similar nature. In the end, it was Savini who made the franchise; his idea to end the film with a disturbing dreamlike sequence like the one in De Palma’s Carrie opened the way for an inevitable sequel and the series that would feature the iconic character of Jason Voorhees and his hockey mask.

RATING: 5/10 (++)