GoodTrash Media

Ah, summer camp… Truly there is nothing like the scent of marshmallows roasting over an open campfire, swimming in the lake by day and stumbling through the woods by night, tripping and running away from an unknown machete-wielding psycho. Oh, you didn’t go to Camp Crystal Lake? How very fortunate for you. Most of us are familiar with slasher tropes at least on a pop culture level. Scantily clad coeds fighting for their lives against an omnipresent larger than life masked villain, usually wielding heavy tool shed machinery and hacking hot blonds to pieces in the most creatively brutal manner, leaving only one resourceful and chaste female behind to tell the tale. Surely there is no more misogynist genre of horror available.

Most of us know Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13^th as the 1980 film that launched a thousand sequels. Cunningham spent only slightly more than a cool half mil on the production, and has himself admitted to intentionally riding the success of John Carpenter’s ’78 slasher Halloween. It worked; the film raked in just shy of $6 million in its opening weekend alone. For a low-budget film, this one never comes off as cheap or cheesy. Utilizing first person shaky cam to conceal the killer and filming at a real life campground helped save the film money without sacrificing style. The writing is predictably cheesy, which actually suits the film perfectly. It’s campy without coming off childish. One can certainly see where Sam Raimi took some of his inspiration for Evil Dead. Fans of the slasher genre, if you’ve never taken the time to watch this original, you are doing yourself a disservice. Everyone else, I definitely recommend watching this film with friends, perhaps with the aid of some sort of fermented beverage. The pacing is kind of bizarre, but never boring. Overall, the film’s weaknesses are overlookable in return for a few truly glorious shots and moments.

For being one of the first in its genre, this film steers clear of many of the tropes that would come to be inherent to the slasher genre. Annie, the bright-faced unafraid camp cook we meet hitchhiking to camp for the first 20 minutes of the movie is (spoiler alert) literally the first victim, completely innocent and undeserving. She doesn’t get to set foot on camp property, much less participate in any of the camp counselor-on-camp counselor debauchery that ensues.
Hero Guy Jack (played adorably by Kevin “I’ve Had The Same Haircut for 40 Years” Bacon) is stabbed through the throat without so much as seeing his attacker. Asshole Ned, the piece of shit racist who regularly dons a Native American headdress, shoots real arrows at his friends, and fakes drowning, y’know, FOR FUN, has the audacity to DIE QUIETLY OFF-SCREEN. In fact, while many of the teens “have it coming,” as horror genre dictates (Sex! Drugs! MONOPOLY!), very few are allowed to struggle or fight for their lives, and their deaths come across as pretty weightless. With the exception of Alice, the Final Girl who ultimately gets ahead of her attacker, and Bill (Harry Crosby, whose Irish eyes are no longer smiling when Alice discovers him arrowed to the other side of a door), no one so much as discovers another body or suspects anything’s awry before themselves meeting their own demise. And the final trope-subverter (SPOILER!!! …Unless you’ve seen the movie Scream. DAMN YOU SCREAM!), the pièce de résistance, is that our slasher is not only a lady, it’s just some old broad the audience has never even seen! I am sure many of you already know that Jason doesn’t even show up for real until the second movie, and first takes up the iconic mask in part III. Suffice it to say, this film was certainly unexpected.

While the slasher genre typically has a bad reputation for its treatment of women, things get complicated when the slasher turns out to be one. The only downside is she doesn’t get to kill anyone on-camera. As soon as we meet Mrs. Voorhees (played by the incomparable Betsy Palmer) in her ‘50s haircut and blue cable-knit, the kill-count grinds to a halt. To be fair, at this point she’s murdered all but one person. I still have to wonder if the filmmakers were uncomfortable having a woman slasher slash onscreen. She reaches for her machete when she reveals herself to Alice, and later does attempt to straight up murder a bitch WITH HER BARE HANDS, but she ceases to be successful. One could make a case either way, but at the end of the day I was disappointed that we never get to see Pam Voorhees do some good ol’ Jersey throat slicing.

The final question is, are Mrs. Voorhees’ motives sexist? A bereaved mother who lost her only son to camp counselor negligence two decades prior, Mrs. Voorhees takes the mama bear defending (avenging) her cub image up to eleven. Talking to herself in the voice of her dead (?) son, Pamela V. is clearly unhinged. We have this image of a woman who would do anything for her children, regardless of logic. Is that image problematic? Is this depiction misogynist? Truthfully, I don’t know. When Liam Neeson’s daughter was Taken, he took the rational approach of hunting down the terrorists or whatever and killing the shit out of them, or something, I don’t know, I’ve never seen that film and I’m too lazy to google it. But when Norman Bates’ mother died in Psycho (a film with its own set of Freudian problems), he took to somewhat less reasonable methods of dealing. I hesitate to deem Mrs. Voorhees’ portrayal anti-feminist, if only for my overwhelming happiness to have a lady slasher. If we horror fiends know anything, it’s that slashers are gonna slash.