Friday the 13th (1980)
"They were warned...They are doomed...And on Friday the 13th, nothing will save them."
Plot
A group of counsellors trying to reopen a summer camp called Crystal Lake are stalked and killed off by a mysterious killer who has connections to the camp’s troubled past.
Review
Halloween may have been the film to give birth to the slasher film as we know it today, but it was Friday the 13th which was the one to really popularise the formula by stripping it down to its basic elements. Made as a low-budget imitation of John Carpenter’s classic, this one did more (or less depending on how you want to look at it) for horror than any other film in recent memory. Shot for a measly $700,000, Friday the 13th raked in nearly forty million at the box office – and that’s just the first film, let alone the rest of the franchise combined. We’re talking ten sequels (to date), a remake, video games, comic books, action figures…the list is endless. Yet the reputation this franchise built doesn't match the 1980 film itself. Though I love the slasher sub-genre to death, whenever I watch Friday the 13th I always wonder just how these films became so popular. How on Earth does a low-budget, critically panned horror film, one that barely resembles its own reputation, somehow entirely reshaped 1980s cinema and created a blueprint that Hollywood is still churning out today?
Director Sean Cunningham successfully distilled and frankly stole the formulas of his horror predecessors to create a perfect commercial product. The filmmakers freely admitted that their explicit mission statement was to rip off Halloween, which had come out two years earlier in 1978 and made a fortune (most successful independent film of all time at that point). So, they saw John Carpenter's massive success and wanted a piece of that pie. However, their approaches were different. Carpenter built Halloween on what critics call cascading tension. He was heavily influenced by Hitchcock - the slow build, the framing, the shapes standing in the background shadows where the audience sees the danger, but the characters don't. Cunningham just threw all of that out. He stripped the formula down to its most bare commercial elements. He realised he didn't need Hitchcockian suspense if he just delivered a relentless rhythmic experience and therefore the core concept became ruthlessly efficient. A bunch of unsupervised teens go to the woods, they partake in some vices, and they get summarily dispatched by an unseen lunatic.
And in doing that, they accidentally created the cookie cutter character templates that literally every other horror film copied ad nauseam for the next decade. The survivor discovers the bodies of her friends one by one, and then finally the killer is unmasked. From a screenwriting perspective, that reveal is a bit of a massive cheat. In a traditional whodunit mystery, you have to meet the killer in act one. The audience needs a chance to suspect them. Friday the 13th throws that rule out the window and introduces the killer in the final reel of the movie, violating the basic contract of a mystery. But this cheat ending works because the killer isn't a supernatural force. It isn't an unkillable monster like the Michael Myers of Halloween. The killer is a middle-aged sweater-wearing mortal human being, driven by pure unadulterated parental grief over a drowned child. The events of the film feel like they could happen to you in the woods if you crossed the wrong unstable person and that grounded reality hit a nerve with the public. When you sit down to watch the original Friday the 13th today, it's less like a traditional horror film and more like a pop culture Mandela effect. People go in expecting a blood-soaked massacre led by a famous hockey mask-wearing monster – much like they think the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the goriest film they’ve ever seen. The famous mistake uttered by Drew Barrymore’s character in Scream just highlights how impressionable Jason Voorhees became when he turned up in the sequels. But the character’s tragic drowning back in 1957 merely provides the backstory and is the motive for the real killer. The poster boy for slasher films isn't even the slasher in the film that birthed the golden age of the genre.
If you connect this to the bigger picture, you must look at what the film achieved, not through narrative depth, but through environmental immersion. Friday the 13th wasn't about a complex plot. It was about creating an atmospheric, organic, location-based cinematic experience. The filmmakers put the audience in a very specific, very vulnerable environment – that of Camp Crystal Lake. The setting itself is doing the work that the screenplay isn't. The isolation is palpable and the woods feel deep and legitimately dark. When the rainstorm rolls in, it feels like an omen of Shakespearean proportions. They build this dread organically right from the start, before the characters even reach the camp and through the town loon - Crazy Ralph. He's this eccentric local who corners the characters in town and later at the camp to deliver the ultimate doom-laden warning about the location - "You're doomed if you stay here." It's incredibly campy by today's standards, but it plants the seed of primal dread (that character would also become a trope for future horror films too). Friday the 13th is less like watching a traditional narrative film and more like being strapped into a haunted house ride at a carnival. The script isn't trying to tell you a deep story. It's just the rickety cart moving you from one jump scare diorama to the next. The first seventy-five minutes of this movie is essentially a borderline tedious chronicle of these paper-thin characters just hanging out. They are painting cabins, making coffee, swimming in the lake, etc. Hardly riveting stuff with the occasional murder thrown in. It’s virtually plotless.
But if we're talking about the mechanics of a haunted house ride, the audio is doing so much heavy lifting, especially for those teenage audiences packed into drive-ins and multiplexes on a Saturday night when this hit it big. The minimal score by Harry Manfredini is legendary. It has a simplicity that echoes Bernard Herrmann's screeching violins in Psycho, but it operates on a completely different psychological level. However, it’s not even the traditional score that the audio is most famous for but one simple, but brilliant sound effect. If you ask anyone on the street to do the Friday the 13th sound, they will go, "Cha cha cha, ha ha ha." I mean, I've done it. It's ubiquitous. But that is entirely wrong. It is meant to be, "Ki ki ki, ma ma ma" and it is deeply tied to the underlying psychology of the killer. In the killer's mind, they are constantly hearing the voice of their drowned child commanding them to get revenge. The voice in their head is saying, "Kill her, Mommy." So Manfredini took the syllables ki from kill and ma from Mommy. He spoke them harshly into a microphone, ran them through a heavy delay and echo effect, and created ki ki ki, ma ma ma. That elevates it from just being spooky music to an actual auditory hallucination. We hear the literal voices inside the murderer's head. What makes Manfredini's score so mechanically effective is how it's deployed. He made a strict rule very similar to Spielberg in Jaws. The music only plays when the killer is physically present in the scene, so it acts as a Pavlovian cue for the audience. Without the suspenseful camera work of a John Carpenter, the music steps in to do that job. When you hear these syllables, your brain is immediately conditioned to know that something dire is about to happen, even if the characters on screen are just boiling water for tea.
Whilst you have Manfredini manipulating the audience's ears to create dread, for the payoff you needed to focus on their eyes and thus you have the special effects guru Tom Savini, who truly set the bar for the entire subgenre here. The theatrical release was toned down by the MPAA, but the uncut versions that survived on bootleg VHS show his absolute mastery of practical effects on a shoestring budget. Savini brought a level of visceral, tactile realism to the violence that completely shocked 1980 audiences. Because before this, violence in mainstream horror was often implied. The camera would usually cut away at the last second. Savini forced you to watch the impact. He couldn't rely on CGI, so had to build an array of prosthetics and using sheer ingenuity and determination, manages to make these kills look as authentic as anything anyone has ever done in the industry. For arguably the film’s most infamous kill (arguably the series’ too given the actor involved), he had to build a latex prosthetic neck, matched it to the actor’s skin tone, and literally had the actor lay underneath the bed with his head poking up through a hole in the mattress. When the fake spike pushes up through the latex neck, Savini himself is under the bed furiously pumping a syringe full of fake blood. And that ingenuity extended to all the kills. In the scene where a character takes an axe to the face, Savini made a life cast of the actor's head, created a hollow dummy, and filled it with stage blood. He would go on to do even better special effects in other 80s slashers such as Maniac and The Burning, but here is Savini in his simplistic peak.
Which really makes me wonder, in a way, were Tom Savini and Harry Manfredini the actual lead actors of this film? Because the human cast is fine, but it feels like the music and the practical makeup effects are carrying all the emotional weight. They are the ones delivering the massive payoffs where the script itself lacked substance. The teenage characters were designed to be disposable and thus the familiar array of character tropes were created (the final girl, the practical joker, the doomed lovers, etc). They provide just enough personality for you to recognise the archetype, but they exist primarily as fodder. Having watched all the sequels, sometimes it can be hard to remember which disposable teen came from which film, but you never forget which film featured which kill. The lasting impact, the elements that stuck in the viewer's mind and defined the experience, were the auditory dread created by Manfredini and the visual shock created by Savini. They were the true stars driving the machinery of the film. The filmmakers intentionally cast unknowns here. They wanted a fresh-faced ensemble so the audience would have absolutely no idea who the final girl or survivor would be (and the fact that they were a ton cheaper). Out of all these young theatre-trained actors playing the camp counsellors, only one of them escaped the pit of low-budget slasher stereotyping – Kevin Bacon. He went on to have a pretty good career, right? In 1980, no one would have imagined he would become such a star but watching Friday the 13th back over forty years later and its hard to distinguish pre-fame Bacon from the capable actor we know he became.
The famous film critic Gene Siskel, who alongside Roger Ebert wielded massive cultural influence at the time, absolutely hated the film. He hated it so much that in his 1980 review in the Chicago Tribune, he purposefully spoiled the ending. He printed the identity of the killer in the newspaper just to try and stop people from buying tickets - a desperate attempt to kill the film's momentum by ruining the surprise. But the momentum was unstoppable. The true curse of Camp Crystal Lake wasn't the fictional deaths on screen. The true curse was the aftermath it unleashed on the industry. Studio heads saw the massive profits from that meagre investment and realized they didn't need brilliant directors, intricate scripts or famous actors; they just needed the formula. They just needed unknown teenagers, a secluded location and sharp objects. They flooded 1980s drive-ins and multiplexes with the absolute dregs of the slasher genre, becoming an assembly line. The film proved that the blueprint worked, and in doing so, it birthed a decade of copycats that chased the same profit margins, usually with severely diminishing returns. But even with the flood of copycats, none of them quite nailed the final punch of the original – the infamous jump scare on the calm waters of the lake. Now I won’t spoil this, even though most of you will have seen this already. It is a masterclass in disrupting tension and is so effective, it’s become one of the greatest jump scares in cinema history. It's ultimately revealed to be a hallucination, a dream the final girl has while in shock, but it completely shatters the safety the audience just felt.
Final Verdict
Friday the 13th was, at its core, a cheap cash-in with thin characters that somehow managed to bottle lightning. It succeeded not through complex storytelling or a massive budget, but through a primal campfire tale simplicity elevated by psychological music cues and groundbreaking practical effects. It created a formula so potent that it outlived its own creator's intentions and birthed an icon that wasn't even the star of the original film. Whilst this is not my favourite of the series, nor is it the best one, it is a pivotal film, a landmark of horror. You may question just what Friday the 13th did to the horror genre over the next few decades and whether it as a positive or negative influence, but few films in any genre have had greater impact on the rest of its ilk than this one.
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Friday the 13th Director(s): Sean S. Cunningham Writer(s): Victor Miller Actor(s): Adrienne King, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, Kevin Bacon, Betsy Palmer, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson Duration: 95 mins |  |
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