Cory Hasabeard
Like a lot of horror fans, I find slasher film kill counts and gore metrics to be fascinating look at how the genre engages with spectatorship. An inventive kill may not be able to save a movie, but it can at least make it memorable. Films once forgotten, such as Deadly Friend (1986), The Burning (1981), and Sleepaway Camp (1983) are enjoying a resurgence in popularity fueled in no small part due to their creative death sequences. From basketballs imploding heads to gardening shears laying waste to a boat full of campers to curling irons being inserted into places they do not belong, inventive kills can provide just the right amount of shock and awe to keep audiences glued to their seats and can ultimately, save a film from the dust bin of horror obscurity.
Friday the 13th and its following nine sequels are filled with grizzly memory makers that straddle the line between perverse and comedic. Fans are unlikely to forget Kevin Bacon being stabbed through the back of the neck or the bloody spectacle of death by liquid nitrogen. These kills have endeared Jason, the Crystal Lake mutilator, to horror fans and have birthed one of the most celebrated and reviled franchises in horror cinema. In a recent rewatch of the franchise, I noticed that male characters seemed to die by far-less brutal means when compared to their female counterparts and that female characters were more likely to be penetrated in death. It was a startling revelation that made me question the gender dynamics at play in these kill sequences. Are women more likely to die on screen in a more gruesome way? Are the men less likely to be penetrated in their murder? With these questions in mind, I set about quantifying what it was that I was seeing play out on my screen.
Existing scholarship has grappled with these questions to varying degrees. In his research examining whether slasher films classify as sexually violent, J.B. Weaver III concluded that there is no significant difference in the number of victims based on gender.[1] Similarly, the research of Burry S. Sapolsky, Fred Molitor and Sarah Luque found that 56% of victims in slasher films are male and that 33% of sexual moments are intertwined with violence.[2] Sapolsky, Molitor and Luque also accounted for the duration that victims were shown in terror and they discovered women were depicted in fear twice as long as men.[3] While these studies provide a concrete understanding of the gender dynamics at play in slasher films like Friday the 13th, they fail to consider the implications when the means of death is directly tied to sex.
And so, I set about to conduct my own study of the Friday the 13th franchise. Keeping track of the total number of kills, I then examined each kill for the following: gender of victim, gruesomeness of death, victim penetration, victim objectification, and duration victim is shown to be in terror. What I discovered was more than a little surprising.
Findings
Female characters are twice as likely to die as male characters.
The total number of kills in the franchise is 177. I did not include any demise of Jason, but I did count any death depicted in a flashback, hallucination, or dream. Of the 177 victims 100 (56%) of them were men and 77 (44%) were women. My findings align with those of Sapolsky, Molitor and Luque but I wanted to dig deeper into the numbers in order to account for gender disparity in the cast. Of the 200 male characters in the Friday the 13th franchise, 50% are killed. Of the 103 female characters, 74% are killed. In this franchise, a female character has only a 26% chance of survival.
Female characters are more likely to die a gruesome death.
How gruesome a scene reads is subjective but I attempted to quantify my findings using a zero through four rating system. When a murder was off-screen or out of frame, the kill received zero or one rating. The famous Kevin Bacon and liquid nitrogen scenes are examples of a four on the gruesome score. Male characters have an average gruesome score of 1.86 per kill. Women have an average score of 1.92 per kill. Out of 177 kills, 106 were rated at a two or lower on the gruesome score. These deaths are so prevalent in the series they become ubiquitous and forgettable, but they are an effective way to increase the overall kill count. Several characters are brutalized out of frame, or off-screen. Women are significantly more likely to be murdered on screen. 74% of female victims are murdered on screen while men are killed on screen only 61% of the time. Many victims are characters never introduced to the audience. In Jason Lives, Jason Voorhees kills an unknown couple driving in the woods, a second anonymous couple enjoying a picnic, and four victims from a business retreat unrelated to anything we had previously seen on-screen. Out of the 18 people killed in Jason Lives, we have only met 56% of the victims before their murder. Arguably, these eight characters are merely slasher fodder and are present simply to boost the kill count.
Female characters are objectified three times more than male characters.
I subjectively kept track of the objectification of characters. I interpreted these depictions by looking for evidence of the male gaze. As it turns out, male victims are objectified 8% of the time and female victims are objectified 29% of the time.
Female characters are more likely to be killed via penetration.
As I mentioned above, previous studies have examined sexual depictions and their relationship to violence. These studies found 33% of sexualized moments are connected to violence. There has yet to be a study that accounts for the means of death as sexual. Phallic objects and penetration are commonly used to kill in the Friday the 13th series and should be defined as sexualized violence. 75% of women and 57% of men are killed via penetrative death in the franchise.
Female characters are seen in fear nearly three times more than men.
Lastly, I kept track of the length of time we watch a character in terror. Men are in terror for an average of seven minutes and twenty seconds (7:20) per film. Women are depicted in terror for an average twenty minutes (20:00) per film. Based on Sapolsky, Molitor and Luque’s research, women take twice as long to die than men. In the Friday the 13th franchise, women are shown to be in terror nearly three times as long as the male characters. Notably, the Tommy Jarvis character significantly skews these numbers. In Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Jarvis is shown in a prolonged state of terror for nearly thirty minutes. The one female outlier is Jason Lives (1986), which depicts women in terror for five minutes and fourteen seconds (5:14). Jason Lives is also the only film in the franchise to show men in terror more than women. Women in Jason Lives are also depicted as possessing agency, approaching danger with pragmatism and believing previous victims of Jason.
Discussion
In considering the data, I believe that the numbers that offer the most insight concern the duration of time characters are depicted as being in a prolonged state of terror. Here, women are depicted in terror for longer, as well as being penetrated, objectified, and killed in gruesome fashion. And these numbers become more pronounced as the franchise develops.
The first installment of the franchise is inventive as a bloody whodunit. Sean S. Cunningham apes first-person shots from Psycho (1960) and Halloween (1978), but he also allows the characters to interact with the unknown killer. The camera lingers on would-be victims pleading for their lives and this creates a palpable sense of dread in the first film that preys upon the emotions of the audience.
As the franchise progresses, point-of-view shots shift from the maternal rage of Pamela Voorhees to the sexually curious Jason. Men are physically and sexually a threat to Jason and he has to dispatch the male characters as quickly as possible. Audiences are positioned to leer at female bodies throughout the films and to derive enjoyment from the agony expressed by female characters as they are stalked and then killed. In multiple installments, the Final Girl stumbles into a puddle, runs through the water, swims in a lake, or is chased through rain which forces wet cotton to cling to breasts. These creative choices reflect the male gaze and a directorial intent to sexualize female pain, terror, and violence. Often, the aforementioned depictions coincide with the Final Girl gaining agency. By doing this, the director undermines the autonomy of the character by transitioning her from victim of the attacker to victim of the male gaze. Statistically, every aspect of the film is slanted towards the objectification and punishment of the female body for the audience’s enjoyment.
Watching the Friday the 13th franchise with fresh eyes was unsettling. My enjoyment of the films decreased and I was curious to see how it compared to 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM) and 1996’s Scream. When compared against one another, the films reveal some contradictory characteristics. Both Scream and TCM have far fewer kills, but they elevate the brutality of the deaths seen on screen. All of the characters killed in both films are established before they are killed. With fewer kills, elevated brutality and an established victim pool, the audience is positioned to identify and empathize, rather than detach for entertainment’s sake.
Another difference between TCM and Scream is the survival rate. In TCM, 66% of women survive and 73% of men survive, while in Scream, 70% of men survive and 80% of women survive. Compared to the Friday the 13th franchise, 50% of men live while a mere 26% of women survive. Interestingly though, Scream, TCM, and Friday the 13th all depict women in terror at a rate significantly greater than their male counterparts. TCM shows Final Girl Sally Hardesty in terror for a solid thirty-six minutes, thereby out-doing the most egregious Friday film by a full seven minutes.
Yet, while Scream and TCM have similar, if not worse, evaluation scores to that of Friday the 13th films, I would not hesitate to rewatch either movie. The same cannot be said for Friday the 13th. In Scream and TCM, the audience is positioned to feel the terror of the victims and this results in greater empathy for the characters and their plights such that when the camera shows the abject agony on Casey Becker’s face as she flees from the masked killer, or Sally Hardesty’s torment as she continually hits roadblocks in her attempt to escape, the audience empathizes with the victim and not the killer. As the following comparison of Friday the 13th and TCM illustrates, aligning of audience sympathy for the characters creates an emotional investment in the film that triggers audience response at a deeper level than when characters are dispatched simply for the spectacle.
Hooper’s TCM revels in a number of broader cultural themes: social anxiety, the violence of capitalism, and the long-term impact of generational trauma post the Vietnam War. Hooper forces the audience to witness a confrontation between the values of free love idealism and systemic capitalism. Throughout the film, Hooper specifically highlights scenes of the hippies’ faith in humanity. They pick up a hitchhiker, trust the words of a stranger, and believe they can enter a person’s home without consequence. Each of these three events put their lives in danger and sends them towards their horrific demise. They initially pick up a hitchhiker, Nubbins Sawyer, who is quickly dispatched by the group when Nubbins cuts one of the hippies with a knife. After a series of events that strand the group, the hippies enter a house uninvited only to discover it is the home of Sawyer and his deranged family.
Once inside Leatherface, the youngest brother of Sawyer, subjects the hippies to the brutal reality of a dehumanized class. The idealism, trust, and privilege of the hippies essentially created lambs to be led to slaughter; lambs completely unaware of the existence of predatory capitalism and its manipulation. The violence that plays out on screen demonstrates an unawareness of the class warfare waged on the poor by the hippies. When we see the poverty-stricken Sawyer family turn violent, we are disturbed by their ability to dehumanize the victims into consumable and profitable parts out of need. The commoditization of the human body for mass consumption is an apt allegory for capitalism. All the more disturbing is that Leatherface does not appear to want to participate in the violence. Leatherface does not relish the violent acts like the rest of his family; he simply engages in the cultural milieu and is an apt metaphor for our complicity in the violence of capitalism. The brilliance of Hooper is that he allows the audience to have empathy for Leatherface and the hippies. The real monster of the film isn’t those characters trespassing against societal norms, but is the systemic oppression of capitalism in which we all participate.
Friday the 13th, on the other hand, utilizes the dehumanization of the human body (particularly the female body) as a means of active participation in capitalism. According to Cunningham on the film’s director’s commentary, “The most important thing you can do in a film career is make money.”[4] In the documentary Crystal Lake Memories, Cunningham also said, “if I had a film titled Friday the 13th, I could sell that.”[5] The original film’s writer, Victor Miller, recounts discussing the project with Cunningham: “Halloween (1978) is making incredible money at the box office, let’s rip it off.”[6] Cunningham secured funding for the film by ripping off Halloween (1978) and by leveraging his producer credit in the groundbreaking Wes Craven film, Last House on the Left (1972). And so, it should not be surprising to anyone that the Friday the 13th franchise is largely void of deft social commentary. Almost every frame of the franchise feels like a cynical cash grab. Friday the 13th is Reagan-era exploitative capitalism clothed in Reagan-era rebellion. Hyper violence and hyper sexualized depictions give the air of a subversive, anti-establishment, and anti-Moral Majority franchise, but at the series heart is exploitation for financial gain.
Conclusion
Friday the 13th is a product of nostalgia. It beckons us to simpler times when we spent Friday nights lurking the horror section of a Blockbuster, scanning VHS covers for something chilling, before sneaking home to the basement to watch movies your parents would never approve. More than anything, it calls many of us back to our first taste of horror and a time when watching a film felt rebellious and even a little bit dangerous.
It is normal to have fond memories of your first crush, first kiss, and first romantic relationship, but we would be foolish to idealize these moments. As we get older, what once moved our hearts, we may now see as juvenile; but we will always cherish the impact of our first feelings of excitement and titillation. The Friday the 13th franchise is an example of a toxic middle school relationship. What originated for many young fan as titillation now reads as measurably and categorically sexist. As an adult, I am unable to not view the film as misogynistic in its attempts to fetishize violence against women and to generate entertainment by exploiting the pain of its characters. While various studios, writers and directors have attempted to rekindle the franchise through a fairly popular reboot, the end result failed to create demand for a sequel. It seems as though Jason Voorhees is destined to forever remain in the nostalgic dustbin of our hearts. And perhaps, that is where he belongs.
Notes:
[1] Weaver, 389-390.
[2] Sapolsky, Molitor and Luque, 32-33.
[3] Ibid, 29-30.
[4] Cunningham
[5] Ibid
[6] Cunningham
Works Cited
Cunningham, Sean S., director. Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection. Warner Bros., 2013.
Miller, Victor, writer. Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection. Warner Bros., 2013.
Sapolsky, Burry S., Fred Molitor, and Sarah Luque. “Sex and violence in slasher films: Re-examining the assumptions.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80.1 (2003): 28-38.
Weaver III, James B. “Are “slasher” horror films sexually violent? A content analysis.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 35.3 (1991): 385-392.
