note – this article is the first of three that attempt to reconsider the much maligned series of Friday the 13th films in context of the American Horror Film, their artistic value and cultural worth… can you guess when the other two will be published?
Sean S Cunningham’s Friday the 13th is something of a whipping boy within the fervent and highly opinionated Horror film fraternity. Hurriedly distibuted by Paramount in 1980 on the back of the lucrative (and independent) success of John Carpenter’s hugely influential Halloween, it has been largely dismissed critically as a cynical cash in – a high investment, low value re-hash of the narrative and stylistic elements woven, more honestly by a director already ear marked as the next great American auteur.
Too often, Friday the 13th is given a begrudging and cursory mention, the odd eyebrows raised remark, consigning it to the negligible footnotes of the American Horror Movie and its new phase of development during this period. In short, the discussion of the Slasher movie, when done in an attempt to elevate the genre beyond the inherent limitations of exploitation, too frequently sidesteps Cunningham’s film, treating it as the black sheep of a rather horrific family.
Friday the 13th isn’t a particularly good film in the conventional sense. The direction is generally basic, the threadbare plot suspiciously contrived, the acting decidedly so so. The major studio attachment (Paramount, seeing the opportunity, picked up distribution rights in America for $1.5 million and spent another $1 million on pre and post release marketing) is justifiably denigrated and in many ways the film lacks the originality to warrant anything other than transient interest. But in the true sense of the word, as something of “enduring worth”, as a picture “typical” of its time and as a film “simple in style”, there is considerable weight in the assertion that Friday the 13th is a classic. In any case, this nonsensical film, one that begs, borrows and steals like a psychotic jackdaw from numerous and surprisingly disparate sources, plays an important part in the story of how the home made, low grade, stalk and slash picture grew up, got married (to the majors), had kids (to post modernism) and settled down to grow old and get fat.
Friday the 13th tells the story of a group of teenage summer camp counselors who are terrorized by an unknown, obscured knife wielding figure at Camp Crystal Lake – the jinxed location of a child drowning in 1957 and the double murder of two amorous teenagers the year after. Now, in the present day and on the eve of it’s re-opening, events take a grisly and violent turn for the worse as one by the one, the teenagers are picked off by the mysterious assailant….
Having cut his teeth in the violent transgression of Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left as a producer, and having directed a handful of cheap throwaway pictures in the interim, Sean S Cunningham determined to make a “roller coaster ride” of a scare movie. One that would tap into the prevailing tastes of the American audience and one that would appeal to the major studios for investment. Shot for $500,000 (only $150,000 more than Carpenter’s film in ’78), Cunningham’s film would go on to gross over $39 million– an indication of the lucrative potential found in churning out anniversary themed fright flicks. Despite its small scale origins, Friday the 13th had always intended to seek out a wealthy sugar daddy, the chief concern, clearly, to bankroll the picture to a market willing to pay to see it – as evident in Cunningham’s quest for copyright on the Friday the 13th moniker and his extensive work on branding with the movie title card.
Despite the commercial preoccupations that threaten to bloat the film, there is still plenty of aesthete to be mined from Cunningham’s picture – there is, for instance, Henry Manfredini’s well placed, chilling score and playful sound arrangement which borrows from Bernard Herrman’s Psycho composition and includes the creepy “Ki Ki Ki Ma Ma Ma” theme that defines the film.
But it is to Barry Abrams’, at face value, wholly economical, yet ultimately, extremely interesting, camera work that I want to draw attention here. Friday the 13th deploys extensive point of view photography. As had been the case with Halloween and in particular Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), this mode of representation encourages discussion relating to “The Gaze” and notions of identification in cinema. In her influential text on gender in the Slasher, Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992) Carol J. Clover comments on the way in which film “may not appropriate the minds eye, but … certainly encroaches on it”. Clover refers to E. Ann Kaplan who suggested “within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen” Kaplan and Clover are both alluding to the stalk and slash relationship between male “aggressors” and female “victims” – a critical hallmark of the genre and one made explicit in the stylistic, complex handling of Cunningham’s film.
In the first instance, the role of point of view is to excite or entertain the viewer, now complicit in the act of aggression. The first present day victim in Friday the 13th is a hitchhiker, chased through a forest, before having her throat slit. Through frequent cuts to point of view, we see the event through the eyes of the aggressor, and in particular the actual act of throat slicing. Whilst this approach was also the case in Halloween’s famous opening one take shot two years earlier, there are some notable differences. Carpenter’s film treats point of view as a tool, one chiefly for stylistic bravura and to play with space. From here on in, DOP Dean Cundey elects to (rather brilliantly) frame his aggressor within the same space as his victims. In doing so, he removes the viewer from active participation and creates a sense of seperation. In Friday the 13th , Abrams hangs on to the idea of directly connecting the actual acts of violence to the viewer’s experience of them, tightening the grip on audience identification.
In fact, each murder sequence features, to some degree, an element of viewer complicity. In the pre title sequence, point of view is used, indeed, fetishised, through the inclusion of freeze frame and invariably the crucial act of stabbing, slicing, chopping and carving subsequently, is one we witness through the eyes of the killer.
A second reading of this representation highlights the gender ambiguity evident in the films narrative. We assume through the sexual aggression, often against scantily clad girls, that the attacker is male. The film’s twist, of course, is that it is in fact the drowned boy’s mother, Mrs Voorhees, who is responsible for the killings. This twist calls into question our understanding of the events we have witnessed. We are invited by conventional expectation and by glimpses of our own body parts – a heavily booted foot, a roughly gloved hand – to suppose that we are male, but we are revealed, at film’s end, as a woman. Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill (also 1980) plays the same game, leading the viewer to believe by means of glimpses, that we are female only to discover, in the denouement, that we are a male in drag.
Cunningham’s film revels in this gender gag. Mrs Voorhees is certainly not the physical embodiment of femininity. Her hair is cut short, she wears unisex clothing and mimics the voice of a young boy (her son). When Alice, as the final girl, fights back, she swings a shovel into the crotch of her attacker who falls, groaning as if she had been struck in the balls…
Cunningham’s film then, is one that curiously pulls in two very different directions. On one hand it is an exploitation picture in the true meaning of the word, one that heralded in the age of major studio involvement forthwith, helped to shape the Horror franchising trend that continues to exist to this day and is a film that laid out the rules of post modernism for the genre later on. It’s cheap and dispensable, mindless and sensational entertainment at a base level. Even if enjoyably so.
Yet, on the other hand, it is an important and accessible example of the Fantastic, and its themes, in American cinema. Friday the 13th is an American film that leans on European approaches to filmmaking and an excellent example of low brow entertainment crossing over into high brow appreciation.
Whether Friday the 13th is self aware or not, is irrelevant. It’s significance, in context of the shifting style of the Slasher, as an American response to the handling of violence in the Giallo, as a clue to what would follow in the development of the genre and as a film at odds with itself, as so many subsequent Slasher movies would prove to be, is certain. But more on that later…
