[7.1/10] Sometimes you just come to something too late to fully appreciate it. Friday the 13th didn’t necessarily start the slasher genre, but it certainly codified it. So coming to the horror movie after seeing films like Scream, which deconstructed and rebuilt the slasher movie tropes (and, incidentally, spoiled this movie for me), or Cabin in the Woods, which remixed them in trippy meta fashion, it’s hard for the 1980 originator to rise above “enjoyable but rote” for a viewer raised on its inheritors.
When you know what the rules are, how the sinful must be punished in a slasher film, how the crazy old guy must give warnings that will never be heeded, right down to who the woman behind the knife is, it’s just hard to be emotionally invested. That’s no fault of the movie. If anything, it’s a sign that Friday the 13th did its job too well, that it become too embedded in our pop cultural DNA that something once innovative retroactively becomes playing it straight, which makes it hard to quicken the pulse of jaded scary movie watchers like me.
The interesting thing is that while, by that standard, Friday the 13th feels a bit quaint, it never reaches the levels of cheesiness or hokiness that, for instance, its future franchise combatant Freddy Krueger does in Nightmare on Elm Street. As silly as some scenarios like a game of “strip monopoly” are, and as shopworn as the slasher beats seem to the modern eye, the film never gets cartoony, which makes it easier to appreciate on a craft level even it doesn’t quite move or scare you.
Part of that comes from the tone and style of the film, which is an interesting blend of stylistic flourishes but also a cinema verite feel. As banal as some of the interactions between the steadily mowed-down counselors are, there’s definitely a sense of director Sean S. Cunningham just pointing his camera at a pack of teenagers at a summer camp and watching them go. Portions of the dialogue get hammy, but everything from horsing around by the lake to a collective flip out over a snake in a cabin feel true to the way unsupervised young adults act around one another.
And that ties into the movie’s theme, such as it is, with Mrs. Voorhees as an instrument of karmic punishment for the way such adolescent indiscretions can lead to neglect or, in this extreme case, tragedy. It’s hard to take the psychotic revenge tale told in the film too seriously given its outsized bent, but there is a sense that Friday the 13th is, like much of great horror, reflecting the anxieties of its teenage audience back at them. The notion that the carefree and exhibitionist vibe of youth is not, in fact, weightless, and that the ignored authority figures are right and a day is going to come when you’ll face consequences for your actions builds some social subtext into the undercarriage of the film’s scares that give them a bit more weight than they might have otherwise.
But much of that is a small layer of extra meaning given to the various kill and chase sequences that make up the main focus of the film. And these are where the film feels like a well-done blend of tones, as the realness of the kids’ interactions gives way to any number of stylistic flourishes meant to heighten the horror and suspense of each gory scene. Images like a close-up of a hand grasping flesh, or a cadaver strung up in horrifying detail evince an intention to use the movie’s cinematography to convey the film’s pleasure and pain motifs in an artistic way.
The peak of this is the way Friday the 13th uses point-of-view shots to obscure who the killer is until the big reveal. While the “ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah” is so hardwired into the horror genre that it’s hard to take it seriously, and while Halloween used the same trick earlier and better, putting the viewer behind the killer’s eyes serves both to allow us to see the killer’s deeds without knowing her identity, and to make us distantly complicity in the grisly acts put up on the screen.
The twist itself -- that Mrs. Vorhees is out for revenge on the sorts of teenagers who let her beloved son die nearly 25 years prior -- is neat enough. The fake out and explanation is a little Twilight Zone in its tidiness, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Knowing the twist lessened its impact, but there’s still something laudable about how Mrs. Voorhees shows up to the camp and seems to be the savior, only to turn around and unveil that she is, in fact, the cause of all this murder and mayhem. Her schizophrenic orders from “Jason” himself come off more corny than scary, and she has the “thought I killed you already” fake out that a modern viewer is inured to, but she makes for a solid antagonist to anchor the last act of the film.
That’s the worst you can say about Friday the 13th. In 2017, its tricks have become old hat, and it’s incapable of spooking or scaring a horror fan coming to it so late in the game. But it’s still a solid, well-made picture, with just enough thematic material to make it interesting, and enough cinematic touches to make it an interesting study in how to use images and editing to create satisfying horror set pieces.
It may not carry the same oomph it once did, with thousands of (mostly pale) imitators sapping the power of its tropes and beats, but it’s still hard not to admire the film in an academic sense if nothing else. Friday the 13th is a sturdily-built little horror machine, one that manages to feel both real and outsized in turn, and delivers its kills and twists with aplomb, even if they can’t quite keep you on the edge of your seat anymore.
An immigrant child in a new school battling hormones and her mother's Senegalese traditions tries so hard to fit in she breaks.
Cuties / Mignonnes is everything but cute. It's rough, hard, brutal, tragic and very real. Director Maïmouna Doucouré paints the gut wrenching portrait of the young lady and the clique she's dying to enter with sensitivity, soul and a touch of magical realism that mark the reader like a dark tattoo.
Amy is a complex character (terrifically written by Doucouré and played to a T by Fathia Youssouf) because in the same instant she elicits our sympathy, our anger and our disgust. She makes all the wrong decisions for all the right reasons and because for an 11-year-old on the threshold of puberty, there is only right now and desires that blind them from seeing any consequences of their actions.
As for the ridiculous controversy launched by those who haven't seen the film and fueled by blind ignorance: I find it interesting that people will criticize a female woman of color for directing a film based on her personal experiences, whereas when Woody Allen makes a film about young women throwing themselves at older men, he's hailed as a genius.
Shame on those who shame someone for trying to tell their story. Cinema is meant to be a stage for sharing, not an arena for executing artists we judge despite knowing nothing about them or their art.
