Kids These Days Don't Go To Summer Camp Anymore
Reflections on Friday The 13th on the day of.
It would be untrue to say that Friday The 13th started it all. In fact, it was rather late to the party, slashing its way onto screens on May 9, 1980, two years after Halloween, six after Texas Chain Saw, and a whopping twenty after Psycho. No, it didn’t start it all. But it did open the floodgates. The next ten years saw an infamous spike in horror movies, especially slashers. Friday The 13th made the way for Sleepaway Camp, Child’s Play, and Hellraiser. It opened the doors for A Nightmare On Elm Street, Children of the Corn, My Bloody Valentine, and The Evil Dead. So today, on Friday the 13th itself, I’m going to look at why this was, and what has given Friday The 13th its lasting fear factor and impact to this day.
To look at Friday The 13th, we must first look at Halloween, which you can do here. Halloween set the stage for Friday The 13th. It created the premise and established the tropes. Friday The 13th took those tropes and ran for the hills.
The first trope to look at in regards to these movies is the ‘have sex and die’. Friday The 13th took this one to a new level by adding depth to the revenge behind it. Jason Voorhees drowned because his counselors were too busy having sex to notice he was in danger. Driven mad by her grief, his mother makes it her mission to kill all counselors that try to reopen the camp - especially if they’re having sex. This is made evident in the second and third kills, those of Jack and Marcie. They both die almost immediately after sex, like Bob and Lynda in Halloween before them. Then, Friday The 13th adds the further rule ‘be a dumbass and die’. Bill, the first to die, makes a joke of pretending to drown, among many other gags, which is an obvious sore spot for Mrs. Voorhees. Now, not only can you not have sex, you can’t goof around.
The other main trope in Friday The 13th is the ‘listen to your elders’. Halloween had Dr. Loomis. Friday The 13th has Crazy Ralph. As his name suggests, Crazy Ralph is not a man who is taken seriously. He attempts to warn the kids of the dangers that come with reopening Camp Blood, bursting out in front of Annie to yell about murderers and hiding in a closet to mutter portends of doom to the rest of the counselors. Admittedly, these aren’t the best methods of getting a serious point across. However, the kids still die because they didn’t take him seriously. The past must be listened to in a slasher, even - or especially - if it seems insane. As well as Crazy Ralph and his rants, Friday The 13th also has a place with a history. Everyone knows things go south every time someone new tries to reopen Camp Crystal Lake since that little boy died there. Two counselors were killed one year, the water was poisoned the next, and so on. But still, they keep trying, ignoring their past to walk right into their demise.
Now, Friday The 13th’s success and staying power doesn’t just come from its use of tropes. This was a movie that came at exactly the right time to start what it did: a cultural avalanche.
I’ve spoken about the relationship between AIDS and the slasher revival before, in my post about A Nightmare On Elm Street, but I’m bringing it up again now, because Friday The 13th was the first big slasher to come out after the AIDS epidemic began. 1980 was the year that sex and blood became death in real life, and right smack dab in the middle of it, along came this movie where all the deaths were set in motion by sex, in one way or another. Mrs. Voorhees’ whole vendetta against the camp was rooted in her belief that sex killed her son. Any kind of sexual activity from actual intercourse to strip monopoly is punished by death. And not just any death - a gruesome, bloody, splattered one. Sex is death is blood is death in the case of the AIDS epidemic, the spread of a disease that created several massive cultural shifts and fears. So it makes perfect sense that a movie about sex causing death just as these fears were beginning to spread opened a floodgates for other stories of that same nature.
While Friday The 13th may not have been the first movie to do what it did, it was both good enough and timed just right to set off a domino effect that changed cinema forever. Its simple plot and now-familiar formula, while not groundbreaking anymore, are the reason we have slasher like Scream, Sleepaway Camp, Child’s Play, and countless others. So the next time you’re watching a slasher, wondering at their formulaic nature and just how many of them there were in the eighties, look to Friday The 13th for your explanation.