This special issue celebrates the complexity, artistry, and cultural value of the Friday the 13th franchise, and it does so against four decades of reviewers who have dismissed and decried it. Indeed, the first essay of the issue shows pretty starkly how wrong mainstream film reviewers can be about horror film. In “‘It’s worth recognizing only as an artefact of our culture:’ Critics and the Friday the 13th Franchise (1980-2001),” Todd K. Platts surveys those reviews of the ten films in the main Friday the 13th franchise that appeared in Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. What is apparent from this fascinating survey is that mainstream film critics have little insight or imagination when it comes to horror films. To anyone who knows these ten films, in all their diversity, it is stunning that critics can find nothing to say but the same thing about film after film. It seems these reviewers weren’t watching: they had the purported slasher formula so fixed in their heads (while all the time saying the films themselves did nothing but purvey that formula) that they failed to see how each film actually served up innovations.
A watershed moment in the history of slasher films and their reviewers, and Friday the 13th in particular, was the infamous campaign launched by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert in their 1980 Sneak Previews TV broadcast; in this “special episode,” Siskel and Ebert devoted almost thirty minutes to excoriating what they called “women-in-danger” films.[i] Friday the 13th (1980) was Exhibit A–the prime example of this harmful subgenre, which, Siskel and Ebert proclaimed, was little more than a violent and nasty backlash against women’s liberation. Siskel and Ebert returned to Friday the 13th more than to any other film in this episode–three times–in order to illustrate their major points of discomfort. They show the scene in which Annie (Robbi Morgan) gets a ride to camp from a stranger, which, Siskel and Ebert argued, illustrated how these films punish women for an independence that would be celebrated in men. They show the scene in which Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) goes to the bathroom right after having sex with Jack (Kevin Bacon) in order to demonstrate their claim that the film linked sex with violence and conveyed the message, “Act this way, young women, and you’re asking for trouble.” And they ended by screening the opening flashback scene of the film, the original murder of two camp counselors. Siskel uses this scene to support his assertion that the women-in-danger film can basically be boiled down to one image, “a woman screaming in abject terror.”
Generally, the diversity and complexity of the essays in this special issue, along with the critical tradition on which it builds (which you can see in our bibliography), belie the argument Siskel and Ebert make. However, Cory Hasabeard conducted a fascinating overview of the kills in the Friday the 13th franchise (all 177 of them!) and comes up with some results–about the gender of the victim, the gruesomeness of the deaths, victim penetration, victim objectification, and how long the victim is shown to be in terror–that may well add support, after the fact, to what Siskel and Ebert claimed in 1980.[ii] Critics writing about Friday the 13th should definitely, going forward, reckon with Hasabeard’s data, analysis, and conclusions.
Siskel and Ebert clearly fail, however, to recognize the artistry of Friday the 13th. This omission is all the more striking in that, in the last part of their show, they shift from castigating Friday the 13th and other “women-in-danger” films to lavishing praise on Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). The reviewers admire Carpenter’s film for its “artistry and craftmanship” and for ensuring that “your basic sympathies are always enlisted on the side of the woman.” Siskel and Ebert’s praise of Halloween only highlights their refusal to see Friday the 13th’s complexity, including in the scenes they themselves adduce as evidence of its awful exploitative impulses. They don’t acknowledge, for instance, that the killer of Friday the 13th is a woman, not a sexually frustrated man, that the film actually goes to some lengths to elicit sympathy for Annie and, later, for Alice (Adrienne King), or that the scene in which Marcie is stalked in the bathroom actually involves a series of complex and shifting point-of-view shots. Fraser Coffeen’s essay in this special issue traces the evolution of the point-of-view shot (specifically, the killer’s point-of-view shot) within the horror genre in order to demonstrate how Friday the 13th upends audience expectations. Siskel and Ebert are perhaps the first to identify what critics like Carol J. Clover and Vera Dika will soon explore further–that in these films, “we view the scene through the eyes of the killer.” It’s almost as if, Ebert continues, “the audience is being asked to identify with the attackers in these movies, and that really bothers me.” But it is worth comparing the discussion Siskel and Ebert have about the scene in which Marcie is stalked in the bathroom (17:30 – 19:35) to Coffeen’s analysis of its actual complexity. “Artistry can redeem any subject matter,” Ebert says. But not if you stubbornly refuse to see it, not if your prior assumptions blind you to it.
Here is the “Women in Danger” episode of Sneak Previews. You can see Siskel and Ebert’s discussion of the scene from Friday the 13th, in which Marcie is stalked in the camp bathroom, at 17:30-19:35.
Film critics have, of course, consistently found value in the slasher subgenre in general and the Friday the 13th films in particular. Perhaps no critic has done more to shape the conversation around the slasher film than Carol Clover, who took films that were, as she put it, “at the bottom of the horror heap,” and launched a complex analysis of their gender politics.[iii] Clover coined the term “Final Girl” to describe the character who is “chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again”–who is “abject terror personified.” Yet she survives.[iv] The Final Girl is, Clover argued, both fear personified and the hero of her own story, thus serving as the ambiguously gendered point of identification for both female and male viewers. Through the Final Girl, the slasher film constitutes, Clover claims, “a visible adjustment in the terms of gender representation.”[v] Not surprising, Clover adduces two Final Girls from Friday the 13th films to make her argument–Alice from the first and Ginny (Amy Steel) from the second.[vi]
The contributions to this special issue join an ongoing and vibrant critical conversation, then, about gender in the slasher film.[vii] And they join this conversation by exploring the Friday the 13th films, which have, to adapt Clover’s phrase, found themselves “at the bottom of the [slasher]heap,” languishing in the shadow of “better” films like Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). Dustin Dunaway uses R.W. Connell’s Masculinities and John Bowlby’s description of relationship attachment styles in order to explore the evolving formations of masculinity in the first four Friday the 13th films, arguing that Part 2 and Part III doubled down on the masculine types featured in the first film, while The Final Chapter did something new. Dunaway ends by considering Jason as conventional masculinity’s abject negation. Ethan Robles continues Dunaway’s recognition of the distinctiveness of The Final Chapter but looks not at Ted and Jimmy but at the important character of Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman). Indeed, Robles argues that this 1984 installment represented the first incarnation of the “Final Boy” in the slasher subgenre. Finally, David Ruis Fisher details the narrative potential in queering the Friday the 13th films–including taking up the central fact that the franchise was booming during the 1980s, at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic–and how such a reading creates a constructive form of representation.
The next set of essays in this special issue offer readings of specific entries in the franchise, highlighting their narrative and aesthetic innovations; in many cases, these essays consider how various Friday the 13th installments evince an intriguing generic hybridity. Wickham Clayton has already offered an important analysis of the complexity of Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning,[viii] and here he argues for the distinctiveness of Part III in the ways it presents “uncomfortable death” and, at the same time, a complicated politics. Brian Fanelli then takes up Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, exploring how this entry is distinctive in the ways it draws on the conventions of Universal’s Monster movies from the 1930s and 40s, mixing a Gothic seriousness with a significant comedic touch. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. also explores the franchise’s genre hybridity, reading Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan as very much akin to the high-school sex comedy / romance (think The Breakfast Club). Despite the fact that it takes place (mostly) on a ship and (partly) in Manhattan, this installment is every bit a high-school film, Wetmore argues. Stella Castelli applies a vaudeville aesthetic framework to the titular characters in Freddy vs Jason and, in doing so, demonstrates how the relationship between these two iconic characters reads as purely performative. Lastly, extending beyond the films themselves, Caitlin Duffy explains how Friday the 13th: The Game incorporates and challenges narrative elements of the film in order to expand the storytelling potential of the cinematic franchise.
The next two essays, like those before, each take up a particular Friday the 13th film, but they both do so in the larger context of the ecological implications of the franchise, something that definitely warrants further analysis. Friday the 13th quite clearly and repeatedly associates Jason with nature: he is associated with the water, with storms, with forest. In his brilliant reading of the film’s roots in Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971)[ix], Adam Lowenstein argues that both films evince a narrative drive to clear the landscape of characters: “Those humans whose lives disturb the landscape are methodically removed, until only the landscape itself and a token living (or perhaps undead) presence remains.” Lowenstein calls this the “pleasure of subtractive spectatorship,” and it encourages the audience to “integrate themselves with the landscape.”[x] In the first film, Mrs. Voorhees is the force of “depopulation”–but then Jason takes over the task. Jason seems eerily bound with nature and inimical to the human, embodying an ecological critique.
Jason J. Wallin explores the connection of Jason and nature in a close reading of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, noting that the “rising sense of dread evoked throughout the body of the film is composed largely through the ‘inhuman gaze’ of the camera withdrawn under the cover of the woods”–a strategy used, of course, in numerous installments of the franchise. Wallin provocatively, and convincingly, coins the term “eco-stalker” and goes on to connect the strain of monstrous nature running throughout The Final Chapter with consumer culture. Matthew Jones locates Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives as a similarly ecogothic text, beginning by pointing out how this particular entry in the franchise was released in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Jones reassesses the iconic slasher as “a force of monstrous nature, the result of materialized fears stemming from environmental poisoning and mutation,” reading Jason Lives as a “collective ecological nightmare.”
The last set of essays address the franchise more generally in relation to US culture. Wade Newhouse offers an insightful analysis of how the Friday the 13th films draw on myths of frontier violence and female survival that have long been a part of the American tradition. Newhouse specifically reads the Friday the 13th films, especially their Final Girls, as a continuation of Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity narrative and of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), one of the first gothic novels published in the US. Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles’ essay also reads the Friday the 13th films–and Jason in particular–within enduring American traditions, specifically the figure of the hillbilly and the more recently emergent figure of the “berserker,” which has become a powerful symbol of the Right. Brennan Thomas explores how Friday the 13th Part III, despite its 3D gimmick, is a topically relevant film exploring social issues reflective of a post-Vietnam America, specifically the era’s disenfranchised and displaced youth. And finally, Erin Harrington considers the reverberations of the first four Friday the 13th films, read alongside The Baby-sitters’ Club Super Special #2. This unlikely pairing, Harrington argues, discloses how both have demonstrably contributed to shaping views of American adolescence.
Some of these essays are personal, some are academic, some are both, but they each offer a new way to think about an important horror franchise that has been going strong for forty years. We hope you enjoy them!
Notes:
[i] Ebert also published an article that covered the arguments he and Siskel made on their show.
[ii] For other content analyses of the slasher film generally, see Cowan and O’Brien, Linz and Donnerstein, Sapolsky, Molitor and Luque, and Weaver.
[iii] Clover, 21.
[iv] Clover, 35.
[v] Clover, 64.
[vi] Clover, 38, 39-40.
[vii] See Dika, Lizardi, Pinedo, and Rieser for discussions of gender in the slasher film.
[viii] Clayton, 37-50.
[ix] Turnock (pp. 183-96) also analyses Friday the 13th’s relationship to Bay of Blood.
[x] Lowenstein, 138.
Bibliography:
Budra, Paul. “Recurrent Monsters: Why Freddy, Michael and Jason Keep Coming Back.” Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, edited by Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg, University of Toronto Press, 1998.
Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Clayton, Wickham. “Undermining the Moneygrubbers, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Friday the 13th Part V.” Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, edited by Clayton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 37-50.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Conrich, Ian. “The Friday the 13th Films and the Cultural Function of a Modern Grand Guignol.” Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, edited by Ian Conrich, I. B. Tauris, 2009.
Cowan, Gloria, and Margaret O’Brien. “Gender and Survival vs. Death in Slasher Films: A Content Analysis.” Sex Roles, 23, 1990, pp. 187-96.
Dika, Vera. Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.
Ebert, Roger. “Why Movie Audiences Aren’t Safe Anymore.” American Film, vol. 6, no.5, March 1981, pp. 54-6.
Hills, Matt. “Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures.” Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Sconce, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 219-39.
Kvaran, Kara M. “’You’re All Doomed!’ A Socioeconomic Analysis of Slasher Films.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 2016, pp. 953-70.
Linz, Daniel, and Edward Donnerstein. “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: A Reinterpretation.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol. 38, no. 2, 1994, pp. 243-46.
Lizardi, Ryan. “Re-Imagining Hegemony and Misogyny in the Contemporary Slasher Remake.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 38, no. 3, 2010, pp. 113-21.
Lowenstein, Adam. “The Giallo/Slasher Landscape: Ecologia del Delitto, Friday the 13th and Subtractive Spectatorship.” Italian Horror Cinema, edited by Stefano Bachiera and Ross Hunter, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 127-44.
Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.
Petridis, Sotiris. “A Historical Approach to the Slasher Film.” Film International, vol. 12, no.1, 2014, pp. 76-84.
Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. SUNY Press, 2016.
Rieser, Klaus. “Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 3, no. 4, 2001, pp. 370-392.
Rockoff, Adam. Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. McFarland, 2011.
Sapolsky, B. S., F. Molitor, and S. Luque. “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: Reexamining the Assumptions.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2003, pp. 28-38.
Turnock, Bryan. “The Slasher Film.” Studying Horror Cinema. Auteur, 2019, pp. 181-201.
Weaver, James B. III. “Are ‘Slasher’ Horror Films Sexually Violent? A Content Analysis.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol. 35, no. 3, 1991, pp. 385-92.
