By Frank Pittarese
More than Halloween and beyond Elm Street, the Friday the 13th franchise holds a very special place in my heart. I’ve seen this series more than any other horror staple, bought every film in every home media format (and upgraded to the various special editions), and even made myself a bunch of Lego minifigures to memorialize Jason, his mom, and their various victims. It’s safe to say that I’m obsessed.
Along the way, as I watched these movies repeatedly, my fanboy mind began trying to make sense of it all, “fixing” sloppy bits of continuity in a series that never intended for such dots to connect. I created my own little mythology to make the franchise more cohesive.
This month, here on Matt’s Horror Addiction, I’ll be doing a Friday the 13th deep dive, reviewing each film — and getting into some of those continuity theories. You might not agree with all of them, but you might see a method in my madness.
This week, I’m checking out the first two in the series. Come with me now, to the sunny shores of Crystal Lake and the story of a boy’s love for his dear mother…
The One with the Mother
The plot is simple (but let’s face it, they all are). 22 years after a couple of unsolved, on-screen murders, Camp Crystal Lake is reopening for business. As a group of young, attractive counselors (including Kevin Bacon) fix the place up, a mysterious “someone” watches, waits…and kills them off in occasionally gruesome fashion.
After all but one counselor remains — the doe-eyed Alice Hardy — the killer is revealed to be (spoiler alert), Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, a character who literally shows up out of nowhere in the final act. Mrs. Voorhees, played to deranged perfection by the wonderfully hammy Betsy Palmer, reveals that in 1957 her son, Jason, drowned while his counselors were allegedly “making love.” So Pam has made it her job to keep Camp Crystal Lake closed and full of corpses, all to avenge her dead (well…“dead”) kid.
This results in a prolonged showdown between Alice and Mrs. Voorhees, in which Alice usually knocks the killer out and hides, only to be found again for another round. Alice, being a soft touch, doesn’t really go for blood until Mrs. Voorhees engages her in a Dynasty-level catfight, which ends when Alice decapitates Pamela with a machete, ending her kill-spree once and for all.
Alice takes a canoe out on Crystal Lake, and in one of the most iconic moments in the series’ history, her moment of calm reflection, just as the cops show up to rescue her, is shattered when a hideously deformed, algae-covered Jason pops up from the water to drag her down into the lake. But, ha-ha…it was only a dream, right? There was no boy, was there?
That holds true until the first sequel, but for now…
This one isn’t my favorite in the series, but it’s up there and it has a lot going for it — like giving us a legitimately likable bunch of characters to care about. Poor Ned! Poor Brenda!! These young actors, on the whole, are likable and endearing, so we don’t actually want to see them die. Later on, we’ll relish every death in a parade of two-dimensional characters, but these kids are people we’d want to hang out with, so we feel for them. Final Girl Alice, as played by Adrienne King, is a bit vacant at times, but that makes it all the easier to worry about her. She’s completely guileless and helpless as these events unfold, and we want to see her triumph.
Tom Savini’s gore effects are awesome — for the kills that we see. A surprising amount of restraint is held in this first entry, with several characters dying off-camera; we see their bodies later, but their gory ends are withheld. Still, what’s there is remarkable to see, with Marcie’s death-by-hatchet a shocking visual standout.
Still, it’s not exactly a fair play mystery, if a mystery was even intended. There are a couple of small visual cues to imply that Bill is “off,” and he’s certainly handy with a machete, but they don’t really lean into that (and someone is clearly watching him chat with Alice early on, via first-person footage, which quickly absolves him of any wrongdoing). So Mrs. Voorhees just plain drives up with a smile and an introduction, eager to engage in some on-screen mayhem.
It would’ve been a fun bit of business to have included her in the background of the early dinette scene — when counselor Annie seeks a ride to camp — just as a silent extra. That little detail would, with future viewings, be a nice little seed, but it’s the most minor of gripes.
With the creative team not actually planning a franchise here, Mrs. Voorhees obviously doesn’t know that Jason is truly alive; he seems to exist only in her head, she speaks in his child-like voice. But on a mythological scale, why, if Jason didn’t drown in 1957, did he remain in hiding? Is it possible that Pam wasn’t the best mom in the world? Was she always a little crazy? Did Jason fear her more than love her? Or was the little mutant boy afraid of returning to the world after being left for dead? Thanks to the sequels, we know that Jason is out there, alive, possibly watching as this movie unfolds. He sees his mother kill and he likely sees her being killed.
A fun notion (for me): What if the early POV shots in this movie aren’t from Mrs. Voorhees perspective (like the aforementioned lakeside chat between Alice and Bill)? What if Jason is watching the counselors?
Last up, let’s talk about the awesome and iconic canoe scene at the end of the film. That is not reality. Some folks think that’s actually Jason jumping out of the water, but it has to be a dream or a vision. Jason would be 38 years old at this point, but Alice sees a child. In fact, she sees a deformed child. Mrs. Voorhees never said anything about Jason’s appearance. So how would Alice know what Jason looks like? Are supernatural forces already in play at Crystal Lake? I’ll circle back to this idea in a sequel or two!
Favorite scene: Alice frantically barricading a door that opens outward. Delightful! It gets me every time!
The One with the Sack-Head
The second in the series is one of the best — and there’s lots of nerdy bits to unpack here, so let’s get to it. Heads up for 40-year-old spoilers!
In a prologue that takes place two months after the first movie, sole survivor Alice Hardy is putting her life together in the wake of beheading a crazy lady. But Jason Voorhees doesn’t care about Alice’s problems. She killed his momma, and thus, Alice is quickly dispatched.
Five years later, Packanack Lodge — located on the lovely shores of Crystal Lake — is prepping for camping season. A group of counselors, including soon-to-be Final Girl Ginny Field (the fantastic Amy Steel), gather for their training session…but they’re in Jason’s territory, and he’s still not over his personal trauma. He picks off the youthful gang one (or two) at a time, until only scrappy Ginny is left, for a chase scene that’s a thrilling step up from the previous film’s showdown between Alice and Mrs. Voorhees.
Ginny and Jason face off in one of the series’ best moments, where she — wearing the moldy sweater of the late Mrs. Voorhees — impersonates the dead woman in an effort to trick (and kill) Jason once and for all. Does it work? Well, there are a lotta movies after this one, so no, it doesn’t work by any means.
In a callback to the end of the first film, the final moments showcase a maybe/maybe-not-a-dream-sequence, in which Jason’s deformed mug is revealed as he smashes through a window in an attempt to snatch Ginny as “Final Boy” Paul looks on.
This is a rare instance where a sequel exceeds the quality of the original. Apart from a somewhat lengthy opening flashback, full of clips from the first film’s final scenes, the pace is steady. The kids are a likable bunch, again played by actors with enough personality to make their characters feel like more than two-dimensional victims (well, mostly — sorry, Sandra!). Comic relief character Ted (Stu Charno), despite being a reboot of Ned from the first movie, is an endearing, surviving standout, and it’s a shame he didn’t come back for Part 3. Most of the kills are generic stabbings or slashings, but a couple — the double impalement of Jeff and Sandra (sorry again, Sandra!) and the brutal machete-kill of wheelchair-bound Mark — are especially memorable.
That said, even with this second entry, questions are raised…
In the opening prologue, Jason has tracked Alice down to an apartment. But where is this apartment? Well, it’s definitely not California, where Alice apparently lives. My guess is that she’s renting a place in the Crystal Lake-adjacent town seen at the start of the first movie. It’s walking distance from “Camp Blood,” and close enough that Jason can drag Alice’s body back unnoticed (look for her dried-out corpse in the climactic shack scene.) Why return to Crystal Lake? In a tense phone call, Alice tells her mom, “I just have to put my life back together and this is the only way I know how.” Alice’s quest for mental health was her undoing.
The five-year time-jump means Jason is now 43 years old. I’m on board with Ginny’s theory that he didn’t actually drown, but grew up wild in the woods. It’s a solid, clean theory. The Jason seen in this movie is very much human. He groans and he grunts, and he’s terrified of the chainsaw Ginny points toward him. But his story — his history — has officially become a campfire legend. He might be “a child in a man’s body,” but at Crystal Lake, Jason is already larger than life.
The ending of this one is notoriously problematic. Ginny and Paul leave Jason for dead in his shack with a machete embedded in his shoulder. That machete is still stuck in him when he jumps through the window to grab Ginny. But at the start of Part 3, we see Jason holding that machete as he crawls away, still in the shack. It doesn’t track. And Muffin (Terry’s dog) is positively dead – we see the mangled body – so the pup’s “return” at the end of this film can’t be anything more than a fantasy.
I assume Ginny’s memory of those moments is chaotic mush, a confused recollection of actual events — and that’s what we see on screen. For me, Jason did indeed crash through the window, machete in hand (not in his body). The last time we see Ginny, she’s being packed into an ambulance. “Where’s Paul?” she asks. Where indeed? Her memories and thoughts are jumbled, as illustrated by that impossible window-smash, jump-scare scene.
The newscaster at the start of Part 3 says “Eight corpses have been discovered.” That almost makes sense: six counselors, Crazy Ralph, and the cop. (Never mind that Alice’s body in the shack should bring the total to nine.) Regardless, that’s enough to convince me that Paul is fine; carted off in another ambulance and living a happy life with Ginny to this day (even though he’s sort of a jerk).
And for the record, Jason’s hockey mask is iconic, but Sack-Head Jason is the scariest Jason. Full stop.
Favorite moment: “Paul, there’s someone in this fucking room!!”
Return to Camp Blood will return…