Injury, Isolation, and Idleness: The Real Horrors of Friday the 13th Part III

Brennan Thomas

Friday the 13th Part III (or Friday the 13th 3D) is generally regarded as one of the series’ weaker and more forgettable installments. Though it generated higher ticket sales than Part II due to its well-timed 3D marketing campaign, critics panned Part III for its grainy film quality, retro-disco soundtrack, and needless retread of the first two films’ story elements. “More of the same,” wrote Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviewer Marylynn Uricchio, adding that the “magical abilities” of the film’s “hooded cretin [Jason Voorhees] defy reason.”[1] The film currently holds a 12% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the second lowest of the series behind Jason Takes Manhattan, with the consensus that it offers nothing more than a violent flurry of “stab and repeat.”[2]

While these faults do at times detract from Part III’s overall impact, they should not overshadow its contributions to the franchise’s narrative expansion beyond Camp Crystal Lake. Part III is the first film in the series to feature minority characters, including two African American bikers and a young Latina woman. The film also presents issues of body shaming, social isolation, drug addiction, and trauma as real problems faced by its principal cast, particularly female lead Chris Higgins, whose previous encounter with Jason still haunts her. Part III’s treatment of such issues, even against the usual backdrop of Jason-infused mayhem, establishes it as a topically relevant film whose appeal lies not in its gratuitous violence or 3D graphics, but in its frank depictions of contemporary viewers’ real-life horrors. Examining this seemingly unremarkable installment as a socio-historical relic of the post-Vietnam era, therefore, reveals a far more remarkable commentary of the era’s disenfranchised and displaced youth.

Despite being excoriated critically upon its release in August 1982, Part III performed well commercially, grossing $9.4 million in its opening weekend and $36.7 million in its initial run, the second highest of all Friday the 13th films released that decade.[3] Part III’s strong box office performance has been attributed in part to the resurgence of 3D’s popularity in the early 1980s, as evidenced by the releases of Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D the following year. While not overly impressive, the 3D effects of Part III were sufficient enough to draw sizeable crowds and even impress the occasional critic in 1982. Guardian critic John Patterson later wrote that his first viewing of Part III’s infamous eye-popping scene, in which Jason crushes the male lead’s skull until his eyeball flies at the camera, “delighted” him and other moviegoers.[4] Jay Stone recalled that the “[3D] process was so realistic that when someone on screen picked up a long pole and turned it sideways, you flinched to keep it from hitting you in the head.”[5] However, Stone added, the same could not be said for the film itself, which he dismissed as an unrealistic story populated with one-dimensional characters.[6]

Still, a handful of critics, notably among them New York Times critic Janet Maslin, have defended the film’s pacing and character development. Maslin argues that Part III may not necessarily be “more clever” or “vicious” than Parts I and II, but it is “more adept at teasing the audience” due to its more leisurely pace and adequate performances of its principal cast.[7] What also sets this film apart from its predecessors, notes Maslin, is the addition of “an interracial trio of motorcycle gangsters.”[8] The bikers’ group appearance is brief and garners little sympathy, as their principal aim is to burn down a teenager’s barn in retaliation for damage done to their motorcycles. Still, Mason argues, their inclusion suggests that Jason is unaffected by “[r]ace or class” when choosing his victims.

The film’s other minority character, Vera Sanchez, is more fully developed, as is her story arc. Vera is the blind date of Shelly, an overweight drama student who masks his embarrassment about his physical appearance by pranking others. Although it is apparent from their initial meeting that Vera is not romantically interested in Shelly, she makes an effort to get to know him on a platonic level. Vera soon recognizes that Shelly lacks confidence in his appearance and in his ability to handle himself in uncomfortable situations. When he and Vera are harassed by the aforementioned group of bikers at a nearby convenience store, Shelly is rendered ineffectual by the two male bikers, who easily lift him off the ground when he tries coming to Vera’s aid. In the next scene, however, Shelly, inspired by Vera’s outrage, deftly drives backwards over the gang’s motorcycles, leaving the infuriated bikers in their dust. Still needing confirmation of his victory, Shelly asks the genuinely impressed Vera, “Did I do it?” to which she replies, “Yes, you did! You were great!”

Their shared euphoria is short lived, as Vera later rejects Shelly’s romantic advances when he tries scaring her with an ill-timed prank. Still, there remains the possibility for a blossoming friendship, if not a romance, when Vera finds in Shelly’s wallet (which he had loaned to her at the store) a photograph of him and his mother. The effect the photograph has on her attitude towards Shelly is evident when, after accidentally dropping his wallet in a pond, she takes off her shoes and wades into the mucky water to retrieve it. Vera likes him, perhaps not sexually, but enough to get dirty for him. Metaphorically speaking, one could argue that Vera’s willingness to get her feet wet symbolizes her recognition of Shelly’s dignity and compassion.

Unfortunately, viewers will never learn whether these two might have become something more. Just as Vera reaches Shelly’s wallet, Jason Voorhees, wearing the hockey mask Shelly had used to scare her with earlier, shoots her in the eye with a spear gun. We later learn that Jason had slit Shelly’s throat off-screen and taken his mask before killing Vera; Shelly appears briefly onscreen several scenes later, gushing blood from his mouth and throat before dying in front of another young woman named Chili who assumed (incorrectly) that he was pulling another prank.

One might argue that Shelly is partially responsible for his and Vera’s demise. As the boy who cried wolf one too many times (though he pulls only two onscreen pranks), Shelly is ignored when he stumbles into the cabin and dies. His hockey mask also provides Jason with the perfect cover to move about unnoticed. Jason is able to get quite close to Vera before she realizes that it isn’t Shelly pointing a spear gun at her. After killing her, he walks freely about the cabin searching for more victims.

However, the catalyst of Shelly’s death isn’t his proclivities for mischief or hockey masks. It is his embarrassment of his body and general appearance, exacerbated by the belittling comments of others. Although Vera never mentions his weight, Shelly’s roommate Andy teases him that he’s “always hungry,” and Chili calls him a “butterball.” Shelly’s greatest fear, which he expresses privately to Vera, is being dismissed as “a nothing.” It is this same fear that prevents Shelly from partaking in skinny-dipping and other sexually driven activities. Had Shelly been a female, his refusal to undress in front of others might have spared him (at least until the film’s third act), as most other “final girls” of the series are shown to be modest and sexually unavailable. As a frustrated, overweight male, however, Shelly’s reluctance to become more socially involved only makes him an easier target for Jason. After his final misguided prank with Vera fails miserably, he walks off towards the barn—and his death. Unwilling to reveal himself or his body, he seeks refuge in solitude and thus becomes the first teenager to fall victim to Jason.

Body shaming wasn’t part of the vernacular of the early 1980s, but it certainly colors Shelly’s on-screen interactions with other characters, as well as his sense of self-worth. “Would you be yourself if you looked like this?” he asks Andy when his roommate begs him to stop pranking others. Shelly views himself as an aberration when measured against the rest of the group’s standards of thinness and beauty. Unable to stand with or among them, he forces himself to stand out through juggling or other clownish antics, and when this, too, fails, he becomes invisible to them. Shelly’s marginalization due to his outwardly otherness mirrors that of many Vietnam veterans who had been disfigured in combat and felt invisible or uncomfortable around others.[9] As noted by biographer and journalist Myra MacPherson in her book Long Time Passing, “That awkwardness and distaste for the physically ‘different’ create[d] barriers for many disabled Vietnam veterans.”[10] Like Shelly, some might have even invented new personas for themselves to redirect people’s focus away from their physical appearances, while others turned to drugs and alcohol for sanctuary.[11] Regardless of which methods they utilized, however, their struggles for recognition and respect went largely unnoticed. This massive indifference to their plight is symbolized by Shelly’s quiet death in front of Chili, the group’s oldest female and one-half of the film’s joint-smoking “stoner” couple.

This counterpart to the disabled war veteran—the drug-addled hippie—is epitomized in Part III by Chili and her boyfriend Chuck, who, apart from their mutual interests in marijuana and partying, have little in common with the rest of the group. Of the eight main characters featured in this film, Chili and Chuck are the last two introduced, sitting passively in the back of Chris’s van smoking weed. When Shelly reproachfully tells them, “There are better things to do with your time [than smoke dope],” Chili and Chuck insist that they can’t think of anything they’d rather do than smoke—and smoke they do. As the group’s two oldest members (presumably in their mid-twenties, though Chuck looks closer to thirty), they seem to have bypassed those adult responsibilities such as work and parenting that would have been ascribed to them had they been born into an earlier generation. What little work there is to do at Chris’s house is done by every other character except Chuck and Chili: Vera and Shelly shop, Andy and his girlfriend unpack the van and fix up each other’s rooms, and Chris and her boyfriend tidy up the barn. Chuck and Chili, by contrast, lie around sleeping or stoned most of the film. Like a couple of deadbeat parents whose children shoulder the household duties, the two stoners seem content allowing others to do what needs to be done without offering help or direction.

In this state, they remain oblivious to Jason’s presence until it is too late. By the time Shelly stumbles into Chili and Chuck’s cabin and dies on the floor, three of their companions—Vera, Andy, and his pregnant girlfriend, Debbie —have already been killed by Jason. Chuck and Chili are themselves soon dispatched, via electrocution and a red-hot fire poker, respectively. Their deaths, which unlike the other victims’ involves heat, arguably symbolize their destruction from drugs—a metaphorical and literal frying of their minds. In contrast to other characters with greater concerns, such as kindling a potential romance, reconnecting with friends, or conquering personal fears, Chuck and Chili seem to have no goals or interests, and they don’t even appear invested in one another. What little dialogue they share usually hints at their age, such as when Chuck yells at Chili, “Between you and Shelly, I’m lucky I haven’t had a heart attack!”, or their nostalgia for the past, such as when Chuck lustfully gazes at an early 1960s-era pinup he discovers in Chris’s basement. They seem utterly disconnected from the present and spend most of their onscreen time escaping it in their drug-hazed state. Out of apathy or malaise, they continue smoking marijuana as their friends die around them until they, too, are murdered.

Following Chili’s death, Chris and her boyfriend, Rick, who had been out driving during the film’s second act, return to the cabin and find it deserted. After the pair split up to look for their friends, Rick is caught and killed by Jason in gruesome fashion, his death being the previously mentioned eye-popping scene that “delighted” John Patterson. Now alone, Chris wanders around the cabin trying to figure out what happened to Rick and her friends until she is confronted and nearly killed by Jason.

As the film’s most vulnerable character both physically and emotionally, Chris embodies the traumatized war veteran of the post-Vietnam era. During their drive, she had revealed to Rick that she was attacked by Jason two years prior to the start of the film’s events; she cannot recall what Jason did to her or how she was rescued. She tells Rick that her parents refused to discuss the incident, so viewers would surmise that Chris never received any support or treatment for her trauma and still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Even early on in the film, she exhibits several symptoms of PTSD, from recurring visions of Jason kidnapping her to her inability to express her fears to her closest friends. Chris remains on high alert throughout the film, channeling the audience’s growing sense of dread as Jason moves stealthily from one victim to the next before cornering Chris in the film’s showdown.

Because of her emotional vulnerabilities, Chris initially appears far more terrified than “final girl” Alice (from the original Friday the 13th) or Jenny (from Part 2). As noted by Maslin, “[Chris’s] nerves are so rattled that she shrieks at the sight of a mallard.”[12] Yet, like Jenny and other “final girl” characters of the early to mid-1980s (most notably Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street),[13] Chris is resourceful and repeatedly strikes back at Jason, from dumping bookshelves on him to slashing at him with a knife that she had pulled from her friend Debbie’s corpse. The film’s treatment of PTSD through Chris’s transformation from passive damsel to infuriated attacker is most pronounced when she must repeatedly overcome her own terror to find new ways to stop or destroy her would-be killer.

Still, despite her resourcefulness, Chris’s past demons, embodied by the masked Jason, relentlessly pursue her. During the film’s penultimate sequence, Chris lures him into the barn and hangs him with the hay pulley. When Jason lunges at her even after she hears his neck snap, her sanity is all but destroyed. Jason then lifts the mask, revealing a grotesque contortion of rubbery skin and drooling fangs grimacing at her in recognition. Chris suddenly realizes that this is the man-creature who had terrorized her two years prior. When she lands the final axe blow to Jason’s head only for him to reach out for her with zombie-like persistence, Chris, now weaponless, flees into the darkness.

The film’s final sequence reveals Chris’s abandonment by any support systems that might help her cope with this latest trauma. After being escorted by two armed male officers to a squad car and pushed inside, she can only scream hysterically as they attempt to quiet her. There are no ambulances or medical personnel, not even a paramedic to offer comfort. As she is driven away, the camera pans towards the open barn where Jason’s body lies motionless, bloody but intact, symbolizing Chris’s permanent traumatized state. For her and her companions, all killed before their crises of confidence or apathy could be solved, there is no resolution. As suggested by the film’s ambiguous closing scene, the psychological and social problems that plagued many young men and women of the post-Vietnam War era—from veterans suffering from PTSD and body disfigurement to drug-addled youths without a movement or community to which they could belong—could neither be fled from nor buried. Like Jason’s soon-to-be reanimated corpse in the film’s closing shot, such problems were lying in plain sight, waiting to wreak havoc again. And that may be one of the most disturbing subtexts of the entire Friday the 13th franchise.

Notes:

[1] Uricchio,  13.

[2] “Friday the 13^th Part 3.”

[3] Spillman, 5D.

[4] Patterson, 17.

[5] Stone, D6.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Maslin,  C4.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Gerber, 545.

[10] MacPherson, 326.

[11] Wedding, 74-76.

[12] Maslin,  C4.

[13] Piepenburg.

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Works Cited:

Friday the 13th Part III. Directed by Steve Miner, Paramount, 1982.

“Friday the 13^th Part 3.” RottenTomatoes.com, n.d, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/friday_the_13th_part_3.

Gerber, David A. “Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in ‘The Best Years of Our Lives.’” American Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4, Dec. 1994, pp. 545-574. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2713383.

MacPherson, Myra. Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. 1984. Indiana University Press, 2001.

Maslin, Janet. “‘Friday the 13^th Part III-In-3-D’ Opens.” New York Times, 13 Aug. 1982, p. C4.

Patterson, John. “Horror Remakes Are Often Seen as Proof of the Movies’ Creative Bankruptcy, But They’re Really Honouring Genre Traditions.” The Guardian, 7 Feb. 2009, p. 17.

Piepenburg, Erik. “In Horror Films, the ‘Final Girl’ Is a Survivor to the Core.” New York Times, 22 Oct. 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/movies/in-horror-films-the-final-girl-is-a-survivor-to-the-core.html.

Spillman, Susan. “A Good Omen for ‘Friday the 13^th.’” USA Today, 13 May 1988, p. 5D.

Stone, Jay. “Look Out, 3D’s Back.” The Gazette [Montreal], 18 Apr. 2007, p. D6.

Uricchio, Marylynn. “‘Friday the 13^th—Part III’ Is More of the Same—In 3D.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 16 Aug. 1982, p. 13.

Wedding, Danny. “Substance Abuse in the Vietnam Veteran.” American Association of Occupational Health Nurses (AAOHN) Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, Feb. 1987, pp. 74-76.