Bear with me on this: I have an insane desire to make a Friday the 13th sequel. This may come as a surprise to some of the people who know me and know of my longstanding dislike of the Friday the 13th movies, but I have an idea and it's one that refuses to be flushed from the drain at the bottom of my hindbrain. It goes something like this: a reporter for a big city newspaper notices a pattern to the periodic massacres at Camp Crystal Lake, and comes to town to investigate. She's stonewalled by the locals, of course, except for the hotshot new sheriff, who has only lived there for a handful of years. He's not "one of them" yet, if you catch my drift. Small towns are insular, after all. In the course of digging through old newspapers at the library and through old case files at the sheriff's office, a pattern emerges that dates back much, much farther than Jason Voorhees's unfortunate swimming accident. Jason, it seems, was chosen for his role by something that lives in the lake. He's its herald. Meanwhile, the killings have begun again, and our intrepid heroes suspect that they're building to something, something awful. The stars are right. The thing in the lake is waking up, and Crystal lake disgorges its dead, to rampage as an army of unstoppable undead murderers. The lurker in the lake then rises to devour the sun. The end.
I realize, of course, that Jason's legion of fans would never forgive me, but let's be real, here: once Jason started appearing in monster team-ups and was projected into space, there's not really a lot of essential essence to the character that can really be violated.
I'm sure that this probably makes me a bad horror fan, but I really don't like slasher movies. I say that, knowing full well that there's nuance to this statement. It's odd, too, given that I was exactly the right age at exactly the right time to become a fan of slasher movies. Halloween came out when I was 12. The main wave of the slasher movie peaked when I was 15 or sixteen. I was the prime audience for them. But somehow, they never took hold of my affections. It's not like I wasn't a fan of violent movies at the time. Not at all. I LOVED the other horror movies that came out circa 1980. It was ground zero for the new horror masters like Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Romero, and I loved most of their movies. Hell, I probably loved all of their movies at the time, and I still love most them. But not the slashers.
I remember watching the first Friday the 13th (1980, directed by Sean S. Cunningham) on cable (the first of the Fridays I saw in the theater was part 3). I stayed up until two in the morning to see it. This was back when HBO was squeamish about showing hard R rated movies before 10 pm, and exploitation movies like this one showed even later as a rule. I don't remember watching it with my brothers (and I certainly wouldn't have watched it with my parents). I vaguely remember staying up even later than the movie to catch the feature afterwards, which I recall being Without Warning with Jack Palance and Cameron Mitchell. I liked that movie better than Friday the 13th. It had an alien big game hunter and nasty little parasites that it threw like shuriken. Friday the 13th had a bunch of dumb kids being bumped off one after another in a replay of Halloween, only without John Carpenter's sense of style and restraint. I remember the trailers for the film, too: they played all over independent television back then, and occasionally on the network stations after the networks were shut down for the night. The trailers made the film look fantastic (even if they had a Crown International feel to them rather than a big studio look). Part of my reaction to the movie may have some element of feeling cheated by the trailer. Exploitation trailers were masters of bait and switch.
I think I may have seen the film a second time in a party atmosphere sometime in 1983. My friends at the time were big into all night horror marathons, the video revolution still being somewhat novel. My family had a VCR by then, a top loader. I remember checking out of the film and dozing. It happened sometimes during these sessions. Over the years, my memory of the film has become a fractured thing. I remembered individual images, but not the movie as a whole. I remembered Kevin Bacon getting skewered from under the bed. I remembered the shock moment at the end. I remembered the creepy old man. Not much else.
So I sat down this morning--I'm writing this on Friday, July 13, 2012--to re-watch the movie with the the preconception that it's a rotten movie. I've been badmouthing the thing for years and I needed to see for myself if I'm talking out of my ass when I do this. My younger self is an unreliable witness sometimes, and I wanted to give the movie a fair shake. I really did...
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