Wade Newhouse
Though Mrs. Voorhees and Jason represent the archetypal fear of death by monster, the sylvan setting of summer camp in the original Friday the 13th movies is a particularly contemporary all-American place to stage such anxiety. Michael B. Smith’s account of the summer camp industry emphasizes that the impact of the historical camp experience depends on its remaining parallel to the values of contemporary society; camp is a structured but temporary alternative, “a less artificial world” than the increasingly mechanized one in which American children actually lived.[i] The ersatz “frontier” activities promised by a place like Camp Crystal Lake–boating, archery, living far from comfort–are juxtaposed with the idea of adolescence as a similarly liminal space, a “frontier” on the edge of adulthood. A basic trope of these films is the kids’ awareness that they exist in a place–psychological as well as geographical–that is unequivocally cut off from adult influence, even while the victims, in training to be camp counselors, also see themselves as “grown-ups” who are earning the right to supervise children.
The franchise (and other camp slasher films, such as Sleepaway Camp and The Burning) manages to get away with potentially heavy-handed associations of gore with personal growth because this pairing has been built into the American imagination from the beginning. This essay will briefly discuss two texts–each the first of its respective genre–that align the wild American frontier with graphic violence and depict the fine line between abject victimhood and resilience that has come to define the Friday the 13th formula. Both of these books, moreover, depict their horrors through the eyes of a young woman who survives the onslaught, and thus, in a sense, they may be said to predict the rise of the character we now call the “Final Girl” in the horror genre.
Carol J. Clover first coined the term “Final Girl” in her masterful 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws (which should be required reading for any fan of horror movies). Clover initially defines the Final Girl as “the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril . . . . She is abject terror personified.”[ii] Puritan writer Mary Rowlandson, in her 1682 captivity narrative, and heroine Clara Wieland in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland embody early versions of this iconic character type as they face death and psychological trauma on the literal American frontier. Their stories (one historical, one fictional) demonstrate not only that Friday the 13th grows from old mythic roots but that its primal scenes of danger in the woods lie at the very heart of the American storytelling impulse.
Mary Rowlandson was captured in 1676 by a group of 1500 Wampanoag warriors when they attacked the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts during King Philip’s War. Carrying her wounded daughter, who later succumbed to her injuries, Rowlandson lived with her captors for eleven weeks while they moved throughout the colonies until she was ransomed. In 1682, she published an account of her adventure, which is today referred to variously as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God or A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. The popularity of her book led to the writing and publishing of similar accounts from other colonists, and a new genre of “captivity narratives” was established. As the wife of a Puritan minister, Rowlandson sees her ordeal primarily as evidence of her community’s understanding of divine grace, but much of the story’s popular appeal came from its frank depiction of frontier violence and, in the end, a quiet reflection on her own ability to endure and evolve.
The initial attack on the Puritan settlement that begins Rowlandson’s account establishes imagery of the “barbarous creatures”[iii] who kill innocents in the woods, imagery that took hold in the American imagination and has guided middle-class expectations of what might lurk there ever since. Rowlandson spends only a few paragraphs on the attack itself but describes a harrowing series of graphic assaults: women and children “knocked on the head” (58), men with their bowels split open, and the living “standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels” (60). The point of the narrative is ultimately to note how illusory is the Puritan sense of safety in the new world, but it is hard to believe that Rowlandson was not aware of the grim pleasures afforded by the gruesome detail she provided, such as “one who was chopped in the head with a hatchet, and stripped naked, and yet was crawling up and down” (60). In the end, when she returns to colonial society, she is able to marvel at what she has endured “in the midst of those roaring lions and savage bears that feared neither God nor man nor the devil” (84).
Rowlandson is of course not a literal Final Girl in the slasher film sense of the term; her story represents one small moment in a wide range of battles, captivities, and negotiations that took place between the native tribes and the colonists during the seventeenth century. What Clover calls the Final Girl’s “spirited self-defense” at the climax of a slasher film[iv] is for Rowlandson a much more passive acceptance of God’s will and, eventually, an ability to accept a place for herself within the alien society that abuses her. The impact of Rowlandson’s story on her readership, however, relied upon a presumed recoiling from the native monster, and that repulsion anticipates a “whole category of racial monstrosity” that lies at the heart of the American horror film.[v]
Ned (Mark Nelson) “playing Indian” in Friday the 13th
The first few Friday the 13th movies suggest some complicated ways in which summer camp horror might be seen as a distant descendent of Rowlandson’s tale. First, there is of course the stereotypical association of American summer camps with “Indian” cultures. Although Camp Crystal Lake does not bear a Native American name, in the original film archery is apparently the only camp activity that the kids have time to begin setting up before the murders begin, and the jackass comic-relief character Ned (Mark Nelson) wields a bow and arrow and a ridiculously mass-produced “Indian” headdress. He is offering up a war whoop when a police officer arrives to warn them about Ralph (Walt Gorney), “the town crazy,” another character who helps align the teenagers’ plight with that of Rowlandson’s vulnerable frontier society. Ralph is a sort of prophet, a voice literally crying in the modern wilderness. “I’m a messenger of God,” he says when he surprises Alice (Adrienne King) in her cabin, “You’re doomed if you stay here.” After Ralph is killed off in Part 2, Abel (David Wiley) appears on the road to camp in Part III to perform a similar function, showing off the talismanic eyeball “that His grace has brought unto me.” Though the teens beat a hasty retreat, Abel tries to give them his divine message: “He wanted me to warn you! Look upon this omen and go back from whence ye came! I have warned thee!”
The prophetic warnings offered by Ralph and Abel, as well as the absolute certainty on the part of the audience that these dire predictions will come true, are part of the larger moralistic tone to these films that has itself become a camp/campy trope. In Rowlandson’s time and in 1980, the murderer lurking in the woods is presented as a sort of moral corrective, a Puritanical vengeance that seems to delight in punishing bad behavior. While sex is the activity most famously certain to lead to a gruesome death in slasher movies, not every murdered kid ever gets that far (so to speak); what really separates the Final Girl from her murdered friends is most consistently a respectful attitude toward herself and others, an attitude that Rowlandson inaugurates in her account.
“What if there is a Jason?” asks Ginny (Amy Steel) when the others drunkenly ridicule the idea in Part 2. “I mean, let’s try to think beyond the legend, put it in real terms.” Alone among her friends, Ginny is able to think through the psychological process of suffering and trauma that might create a Jason, in effect lending credibility not only to the film’s own exposition but to the logic by which Mary Rowlandson’s fear of the wilderness can be transferred to a contemporary world that no longer relies on a stark demarcation between Christian and heathen. “He must have seen his mother get killed,” Ginny muses with earnest sympathy, “and all because she loved him.” In a parallel scene in Part III, Final Girl Chris (Dana Kimmell) offers up a psychology not of the murderer but of the victim, explaining her reluctance to be a fun-loving camp teenager by telling a story that bears all the hallmarks of a Rowlandson-inspired story of Indian attack. In her story, Chris commits the original teenage sin of staying out too late with boyfriend Rick (Paul Kratka): “I knew my parents would be waiting for me but I didn’t care.” She is punished for this transgression by being chased through the woods by a murderous figure “so grotesque he was almost inhuman.”
What sets Chris apart from the other counselors isn’t any particular moral code but an awareness of herself, an ability to reflect upon her experiences that continues to haunt her. “All I want is to just forget it,” she confesses to Rick, “but I can’t.” This scene has shown her to be in a sense worth saving because her introspection marks her as unique in a world of otherwise generic teenagers. Rowlandson, too, ends her narrative with a similar awareness of herself as distinct, marked by God to dwell relentlessly upon experiences the rest of her community merely apprehends from a distance; she recognizes that “the Lord had His time to scourge and chasten me.”[vi]
The elder Wieland spontaneously combusts in the summer house
If Mary Rowlandson provides an early historical account of “monsters” in the American woods, Charles Brockden Brown provides the first novelized version of this fear. His 1798 novel Wieland; or, the Transformation tells the story of a brother and sister who, with the brother’s eventual wife and children and a good friend, establish a little community of religious and philosophical free-thinkers on the Pennsylvania frontier. After a series of bizarre encounters with disembodied voices that give them strange commands and threaten them with murder, the loving brother, husband, and father Theodore Wieland kills his wife and children at the behest of what he believes to be the voice of God.
This strange novel is convoluted, illogical, and frustratingly wordy (even for its time), but it marks a turning point in the culture of American horror. Its alignment of religious fanaticism with violence and primitive psychoanalysis borrows some of the archetypal American fears laid out by stories such as Rowlandson’s and, unfettered by the need to be historically accurate (though Brown’s story was inspired by an actual event from 1781), commits itself fully to imagining their implications for the new republic. Moreover, it anticipates some of the basic narrative architecture of Friday the 13th by describing the horror from the point of view of a young woman, Clara Wieland, aware of her own constant proximity to danger and setting the action in a liminal space that is neither entirely social nor entirely personal.
The novel’s setting is “an imaginary landscape consisting of a rural estate composed of a main edifice and a number of subsidiary structures”[vii]–not unlike a summer camp. It was established by the father of the novel’s protagonists as a way to “retire into solitude, and shut out every species of society”,[viii] and here the elder Wieland eventually dies as the result of spontaneous combustion. The book only gets weirder from here, but at its heart it is the story of Clara and her victimhood at the hands of men who are by turns cruel, manipulative, ignorant, and murderous. Living in their insulated community on the banks of the Schuylkill River, Clara and her family and sometimes-suitor Henry Pleyel are stalked by voices that echo between rocky crevices and threaten from dark bedroom closets; gradually everyone comes to doubt their sanity and Clara, the most level-headed of the group, declares herself to be “tortured by phantoms of my own creation” (76).
Like Rowlandson, Clara Wieland comes to represent less a unique personality than a particular kind of consciousness, an ability to narrate evil and suffering that is unavailable to the rest of her community. Christine Hedlin claims that Clara articulates a reaction to “the spiritual and intellectual instability of the early republic,”[ix] giving voice to a tension between logic and superstition, between rationality and panic in the face of horrific events that make her a heroine to the reader but a stranger to herself. Clara explains, “I used to suppose that certain evils could never befall a being in possession of a sound mind . . . How was it that a sentiment like despair had now invaded me, and that I trusted to the protection of chance, or to the pity of my persecutor?” (83). Perhaps most applicable to a comparison of Clara to Final Girls in horror films, Wieland suggests that a young woman’s reputation for virtue might matter more than her actual life: before the strange voices convince Theodore Wieland to murder his family, the same voices trick Clara’s suitor into believing–with no evidence whatsoever–that she is sexually fallen and therefore of no use to him. Like Alice and Ginny and Chris in the first three Friday the 13th films, Clara can only fully earn the reader’s (or viewer’s) sympathy by having her sexual appetite assessed and declared safe; the “cross-gender identification” upon which the Final Girl’s narrative function depends requires that she pass a virginity test.[x]
Wieland ends with a violent confrontation between Clara and her murderous brother in which Theodore, trapped between competing impulses pushed on him by the voice-throwing villain of the piece, prepares to kill her but at the last moment stabs himself in the neck. Anticipating the crazed astonishment that will mark the Final Girl’s awareness of her own survival, Clara gazes at the blood-spattered corpse of her would-be murderer and exclaims, “For a spectacle like this was it my fate to be reserved!” (216). The novel’s final chapter explains how Clara reflects upon the experience of surviving mass murder much as Rowlandson had done before her: “It is true that I am now changed; but I have not the consolation to reflect that my change was owing to my fortitude or to my capacity for instruction” (220). As Alice and Ginny and Chris will discover in their summer camps almost two hundred years later, living through bloody violence is as much the result of luck as inner strength, and yet Rowlandson’s and Wieland‘s first-person narration tells us from the start that she must survive to tell the tale.
Part of the narrative architecture of the Final Girl is precisely that she is somewhat pre-scripted to prevail, and the stories of Mary Rowlandson and Clara Wieland demonstrate that this representation of female survival is not a product of the 1970s slasher film industry–it has been built into American horror from the beginning. Meanwhile, if the summer camp industry attempts to capture a fleeting pre-industrial wilderness experience, it only achieves that goal when it also provides the threat of frontier violence that Rowlandson and Wieland insisted must be there. In both fiction and nonfiction, then, American history crafted the core of the Friday the 13th experience centuries ago, and the apparently endless appeal of this franchise testifies to the endurance of a uniquely American metaphor.
Notes:
[i] Smith, 74.
[ii] Clover, 35.
[iii] Rowlandson, 61. All other references to Rowlandson’s narrative will be cited parenthetically in the text.
[iv] Clover, 36.
[v] Halberstam, 142.
[vi] The Dover edition of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative used throughout this article removes this final reflection; the quotation cited here is from the Project Gutenberg version found online.
[vii] Bennett, 372.
[viii] Brown, 9. All other references to Brown’s novel will be cited parenthetically in the text.
[ix] Hedlin, 738.
[x] Clover, 46.
Works Cited:
Bennett, Bridget. “‘The Silence Surrounding the Hut’: Architecture and Absence in Wieland.” Early American Literature, vol. 53, no. 2, 2018, pp. 369-404.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland; or, the Transformation. 1798. Dover, 2010.
Clover, Carol. Men, Woman, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Friday the 13th. Directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Paramount Pictures, 1980.
Friday the 13th Part 2. Directed by Steve Miner, Paramount Pictures, 1981.
Friday the 13th Part III. Directed by Steve Miner, Paramount Pictures, 1982.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.
Hedlin, Christine. “‘Was There Not Reason to Doubt?’: Wieland and its Secular Age.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 48, no. 3, 2014, pp. 735-56.
Rowlandson, Mary. “Narrative of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Who was Taken Captive by the Wamponoags Under King Philip, in 1676.” 1682. The Account of Mary Rowlandson and Other Indian Captivity Narratives, edited by Horace Kephart, Dover, 2005, pp. 58-86.
Smith, Michael B. “‘The Ego Ideal of the Good Camper’ and the Nature of Summer Camp.” Environmental History, vol. 11, no. 1, 2006, pp. 70-101.
