Friday the 13th (DVD)

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"You're doomed. You're all doomed if you stay!"
--Crazy Ralph

Film buffs can probably argue from now 'til doomsday about exactly which film originated the slasher genre, and I have no doubt they are doing so right now. Some might say the genre goes all the way back to the silent days of German Expressionism, others to things like Hitchcock's 1927 "The Lodger." Certainly, one could make a good case for Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960), although that film, as good as it was, didn't exactly set off a slasher craze. I would imagine that Wes Craven's "The Last House on the Left" (1972), Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974), and, of course, John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978) could also lay claim to the honor. My own candidate, though, is Sean S. Cunningham's "Friday the 13th" (1980), not because it actually started the trend in slasher flicks but because perhaps more than any other film, it helped to popularize the genre and codify the formula.

We all know the formula by now since we've seen it repeated in so many films since "Friday the 13th." There is always a group of young people, usually in their late teens, isolated in a remote area, who get picked off one by one by a crazed maniac. These teens are always highly attractive, always played by actors in their twenties, and always engaged in drinking, partying, nude swimming, and casual sex whenever possible. The mad slasher himself is omniscient and omnipotent; that is, he knows everything and is everywhere at once, able to kill one teenager in the woods five miles from the nearest house and ten seconds later step out from behind a tree and kill another teen coming from a cabin to relieve himself. The slasher also seems to know where all of his victims are every minute and how to murder each of them with enough gory variation to satisfy the most finicky horror fan. Indeed, the slasher usually seems so smart that one wonders why he is content merely to pick off witless teens when he could put his mental powers to work as a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist, or a talk-show host. What's more, the teens never stick together but always go their separate ways on the darkest, scariest nights. "Let's see," they say. "We know there's a manic loose killing everybody in sight. How about we each take a flashlight and a penknife and try to find him. Oh, and if you're alone in your room, lock the door and don't let anybody in." So the person alone in a room hears a noise outside and immediately goes to investigate. Alone. Additionally, the slasher must be invincible. You can shoot him, stab him, electrocute him, bury him six feet under, and he'll return to fight another day. You can't keep a good monster down.

You'll find that "Friday the 13th" pretty much wrote the book on slasher flicks. The point is not to develop character or create atmosphere or even produce any excitement but to show as much grisly death as possible and keep the viewer wondering who will die next.

Yes, the movie does have sort of a plot. After being closed for some twenty-odd years, Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer) is reopening Camp Crystal Lake, an out-of-the-way summer camp in New Jersey. The camp hasn't been open since a strange set of events occurred there, events that included the murders of several young people. The locals now call the place "Camp Blood."

Producer and director Sean S. Cunningham rounded up the usual suspects for his young victims, all of the actors in their early twenties and portraying college students on summer vacation working to open the camp. There are Alice (Adrienne King), Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), Annie (Robbi Morgan), Brenda (Laurie Bartram), Jack (Kevin Bacon), Bill (Harry Crosby), and Ned (Mark Nelson). Obviously, the names that stand out are Harry Crosby, son of Bing Crosby and Kathryn Grant, and Kevin Bacon, whose only notable previous appearance had been in "Animal House." Most of these actors die exquisitely in the film.

Naturally, we have to have a weird assortment of peripheral characters, too, so we get Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), who runs around warning the kids that they're all doomed if they stay on at the camp; Officer Dorf (Ron Millkie), whose name fits him, a dorky, uptight motorcycle cop; Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), the mother of you-know-who; and Jason (Ari Lehman), who makes his first, obligatory appearance here.

Director Cunningham and writer Victor Miller call upon every dramatic pause, every red herring, every point-of-view shot they can muster to drum up a little tension and suspense. If we all hadn't seen this kind of thing done so often before and so often since, you could even say it works. Better still is composer Harry Manfredini's background score, which in the titles should have given credit to Bernard Herrmann, it sounds so much like "Psycho," "Vertigo," and "North by Northwest." Nevertheless, the music is probably the best thing about "Friday the 13th," creating more frights than do the actors or the script. Also credit Tom Savini, who handled the makeup and stunts on this movie and about 800 more after it. He helps a low-budget horror film look like a far bigger project.