I think that its fairly difficult to adequately access the value of a Friday the 13th film by any sort of conventional means. The series is a great work of art in a whole, but piecemeal they are incomplete and quite unsatisfying. This isn't because following all the sequels, there is a great saga at play here. The Friday the 13th movies are a different animal, from say a season of The Sopranos. They have attempted as such, but it hasn't quite worked out. But as a whole, we basically see variations of pretty much the same thing. And in that repetitiveness; the characters carry less and less emotional weight, and we are taken to some very interesting places. I say this having completed the series up to "Friday the 13th: The Final Friday" (annoyingly, video clerks seem to take this to mean that this is the last in the series. I have been too polite to correct them). My knowledge of Friday the 13th: Part 5 up to Jason X, suggests that The Final Friday was the last of a legacy. People must have gotten smart to the fact that it's the same movie (or the producers believed that people had just gotten smart to the fact that it's the same movie) and so they brought out the gimmicks. Jason fights Carrie, Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes To Hell, Jason Goes to Outer Space, Jason meets Abbot And Costello. It looks like things may have taken a different direction. Assuming that the producers weren't just getting bored, perhaps the gap is from the generational make up of the audience. You know we know that baby boomers were supposed to be "ideological," and Generation Xers are supposed to be "cynical and media savvy." The Jason generation was sandwiched between the two. They remember Vietnam but they didn't have an opinion on it. They're comfortable with violence, (unlike their predecessors), but they understand it (unlike their successors).

This sounds like reaching, and maybe it is. The nature of the teenagers in Friday the 13th, nonetheless seems awfully distinct and is awfully missed. One looks at the teenagers in Friday the 13th and we see that they are displaced without a religion or an identity. There is an almost cheerful sort of nihilism in the film. The characters are shallow and dim. They don't have any past and they don't have any future. Their existence is entirely ephemeral and half-developed. Their lives consist of pot, sex, and menial work. There really isn't anything other point to life.

Early in the movie we are given this exchange:

"Do you think you can get through the summer?"

"I don't think I can get through the week."

We know that they are talking about life, life as a biological process that will probably be ended by the end of the week if not the summer. They think that they are just talking about work and boredom. It is of course, one in the same.

Nobody in the film seems to be particularly ethnic; and that's appropriate. They are products of a culture without roots. The film's best gag is the fact that the teenagers in 1958 are generally undistinguished to those in 1980. The teens in the film are extremely bored. Time can't be wasted quickly enough, and in the film we see them go swimming, sing songs, play strip Monopoly. There is an aggressive anti-intellectualism in the characters; and for that matter anti-spiritualism. A girl tells her boyfriend about a dream that she had, "It's raining very hard and it sounds like pebbles. I put my hands against my ears to try and block out the noise. Then the rain turns to blood." Revelation 8:7 talks about "hail and fire mixing with blood and coming down to the earth." Revelation 8:8 talks about a third of the sea turning into blood. We can recognize that the dream is roughly a vision of one of the signs of the Apocalypse (Cunningham repeatedly shows a black cloud going over the full moon. This image has two other connotations, but in this one could be in reference to Revelation 8:12, where a third of the moon, sun, and stars is smitten.) Needless to say the characters are blind to it. Both the girl and her boyfriend have no idea that what she has seen is a message from God that the end is coming.

Keeping with the Biblical references, take note of the title: Friday the 13th. Friday was the day of the crucifixion, and thirteen is the Judas' number. (Jesus with twelve apostles makes 13.) Of course Christ died for the good of mankind. We can't give any of these characters that sort of credit. The joke in setting the film on Friday the 13th, is of course it is religious significant, but also because hey, Friday is the beginning of the weekend. As with Camp Crystal Lake itself, the characters regard the date as a mark of leisure time and a time to party, and not as the embodiment of evil, or any other such weighty significance. Near the end of the film Mrs. Vorhees sarcastically laments the youths' deaths: "So young, so pretty." The false sentiment of the dialogue adequately conveys the truth that one's life is not valuable because they are young and pretty. The slasher film genre, the idea of having a killer systematically slaughter all but one of these characters in effect re-establishes the fact of their mortality; and underlines the frivolousness in which they piddle it away.

The killings in the Friday the 13th movies have often been explained as the uncontrolled id at work, the Jason (or I suppose his mother) character being animalistic and amoral. The film sometimes leans towards this sort of interpretation. A cop tells the camp manager that all the loonies come out during the full moon. We see a full moon frequently. The killings are predestined by natural, biological forces, underlying the animal nature of the killer. The murders have often been explained as the uncontrolled superego, punishing horny teenagers for their horniness. Sometimes its been interpreted as both, the killer representing the unconscious sex wishes of the surviving virgin; simultaneously acting out her wish and punishing those who are not as repressed. I generally don't think that any of this plays out very well in this particular film. Virgins get killed along with the sexually active. The surviving girl may be virginal, but we realize that she may not, and the boy that she is in love with gets it good. It seems that there really isn't much of a reason for them to die. They die, I suppose, because they have not produced a life worth protecting. They mean nothing. The motive for the killer, when it is revealed, proves wholly independent from any of their actions. The psychology of motivation becomes frankly rather inconsequential, because the whole drama takes place in a sort of void.

Friday the 13th is a very minimalist and laid-back film. Horror film critic and scholar Mike Bracken described it as "lazy." "Lazy" is a sort of partial criticism, and I think Bracken intended it as such. Laziness doesn't have the lift, the sort of stimulating nature, of a really great film. But it still has it's own sort of aesthetic. The film has the sort of nihilism that you can only find in a vacuum; a real poetry or sense of hope isn't able to seap in. There are a handful of transcendent moments. A pre-sex scene with the girl simply lying on the bed in her panties, breathing, actually has a considerable eroticism to it. The score by Harry Manfredini seems to mimic Bernard Herman's Psycho score; of course. The angrily psychotic dissonance is especially fascinating and powerful however when it takes an added somber regret in the canoe sequence at the end, however. It manages to be sappy; but coldly and intentionally unconvincing. The sequence ends with a rotting young Jason dragging the heroine underwater. The film then cuts back to reveal that it had all been a dream. The gag was added during the filming process by the suggestion of makeup artist Tom Savini; and of course they stole it from Brian De Palma's "Carrie". In both films, the effect is cheap, heartless, and cruel. It manipulates us, and the victimized heroine; into developing a sort of peace and even sympathy for the monster that she had been fighting. In Carrie, the argument is that Carrie is a "shit-eating" monster, always has been, and Amy Irving is foolish for even thinking otherwise. It has a similar effect in Friday the 13th. When Friday's heroine expresses concern that Jason is still out there, we realize from her dream that she asks not out of sympathy, but because there is another monster out there on the loose, putting everyone in danger.

I have been discussing Plan 9 From Outer Space as a satire to some people, without much luck. (It's not a satire if you didn't intend it as such, I've been told.) I argued that the main characters in Plan 9 From Outer Space are figures of ridicule. They are flat and generally unintelligent. The interesting characters in Plan 9, exist in the periphery. The villains, the aliens, are the more interesting characters and even the more sympathetic characters. Friday the 13th works sort of the same way. The film gets a rush of life when Betsy Palmer's Mrs. Vorhees comes onto the scene. It's true that she is a campy, over-the-top character and that she is clearly insane. The character invites the film's worst laughs. Her Tammy Faye Baker looks, shiny lips and bright white teeth makes it difficult for the audience to relate to her from the very start. It becomes close to impossible when she starts talking to herself, most particularly in her "Jason voice". The performance is over-the-top, even baroque, like she wandered in from another movie. But it's alive. Her son was drowned, because the camp counselor's were too busy making love, instead of watching him. This has made her crazed on both revenge and in keeping the camp closed. There is something tragic and ironic with the fact that she has made it her life's work to avenge her son's death by killing camp counselors. Whereas most of the camp counselors seemed to get in the business simply because they needed a job for the summer. She has far more emotional involvement in killing then any of her victims have in living.