I love Halloween – love it, love it, love it. I love candy, I love pumpkins, I love getting dressed up, and I love that the world seems to have an orange glow.
And scary movies. I LOVE scary movies; and, the month of October is chock full of them! There are many staples that I watch every year around this time: Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining, and, of course, Friday the 13th. The granddaddy of them all, Friday the 13th rests firmly at the top of my list of favorite scary movies, and if you were a teenager in the 1980s, you know exactly what I mean. The movie came out in 1980 and tells the story of a group of camp counselors (how many 80s horror movies told that story? Madman! Cheerleader Camp! Sleepaway Camp!) at Camp Crystal Lake who are terrorized and killed one by one by this guy.
Okay, this is why Friday the 13th is one of the scariest horror movies ever. Jason Voorhees drowned as a young boy at Crystal Lake. In the first film of the twelve (! That’s right – 12) part series, we discover that Jason’s sweet mother, Pamela Voorhees is the killer, in her attempt to keep the camp closed for good.
But . . . it’s that last scene of the movie, that final moment that I will never get out of my head.
After a slew of murders, poor, sweet Alice is one of the lone survivors – you’re rooting for her, she survived! Here come the police! Until . . .
Oh. My. God. You can now peel me off of the ceiling for the zillionth time.
Friday the 13th as a franchise became HUGE throughout the 80s, as did the Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street stories. But Friday the 13th went on to have a television series, toys, and crossover movies with Freddy Krueger, making Jason Voorhees one of the most popular movie killers (and Halloween costumes) of all time.
Because just when you think he’s really dead–just like in countless other slasher movies, Jason keeps coming back. With film titles like The Final Chapter and Jason Goes to Hell–The Final Friday you would think that machete/gunshot/fire may have finally killed Jason. You would be wrong. The last Friday the 13th movie was made in 2009 and was a reboot of the original.
I’m just waiting for Jason Voorhees to don his infamous hockey mask one more time, and scare the crap out of me all over again.
October 12, 2015
OK, here’s the funny thing about these movies. As a kid, I HATED them. I was a sensitive, kind of superstitious kid and very idea scared the hell out of me. The thing was, as I later learned as an adult, the movie posters had to be creative and shocking to attract potential audiences, but also to cover up one important fact: Most of them were criminally cheesy and stupid.
Buuuut, tell that to ten year old me, walking with my Dad in the Whitehall Street Station, seeing movie poster ads that were as tall as I was, featuring Santa Claus with a chainsaw or something…
Even funnier… I still don’t care much for slashers because they’re still kind of stupid (*except* the original TCM) but now today I try to watch horror just to freak out my wife.