Directed by Sean S. Cunningham
Written by Victor Miller
Cast: Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Jeannine Taylor, Laurie Bartram, Kevin Bacon, Mark Nelson, Robbi Morgan, Peter Brouwer, Rex Everhart, Ronn Carroll, Walt Gorney, Willie Adams, Debra S. Hayes, Sally Anne Golden, Betsy Palmer, Ari Lehman
Soundtrack: Harry Manfredini
I have to admit, I have a personal affinity for Friday the 13th, because as a Boy Scout in North Jersey, I spent multiple weeks and weekends at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco where the original film was shot. So, I’ve swum, sailed, and canoed on that pond; I’ve seen black rat snakes on the grounds; and I’m pretty sure I’ve even been up where the opening murders are set (which is not a common area).
Fortunately for my psyche, I didn’t actually see the movie until after I’d dropped out of Scouting, which was probably for the best.
I’ve talked about this before, but I came to actually watching horror films later in life, because until I reached a certain age, I was simply too scared (and with good reason, because the one time I did catch a Friday the 13th marathon on FX, I was so jacked up that I had to turn on my radio just to get to sleep). And yet, I had a fascination, so I could have told you the elevator pitch for each F13 movie before I ever saw any of them, which brings us to the film at hand.
If Halloween (1978) lit the match for slasher films, then Friday the 13th (1980) was the fuse (and 1981 was the stick of dynamite).
However, for a film that at its core is little more than a cynical cash grab, Friday the 13th is pretty artfully done. I mean, just on an aesthetic level, I love the look of this movie (director of photography Barry Abrams obviously knew how to get a lot from a little, in multiple senses).
And I love how un-Hollywood it all feels, no doubt in part because it’s an East Coast production, but even with the presence of future star Kevin Bacon, the characters just look and feel like regular people, as opposed to a cast of LA models (although that can be fun, too, with the right story), which makes it more compelling. They’re not dumb kids just fooling around and waiting to be murdered, they’re ordinary people onto whom the horror is thrust, and that’s frightening.
Also, unlike almost every proceeding film in the franchise, there’s an Agatha Christie element to the original Friday the 13th that gives it a slightly different twist.
It’s not my personal favorite, but it’s undoubtedly one of the strongest in the series (despite some blatant filler).
Rating: ★★★½ (out of five)
P.S.
I’ve always associated F13 Parts I through VIII as Paramount movies, but in picking out a poster image for this post, I discovered that Warner Brothers had international distribution, which really threw me for a loop.
I ended up choosing the UK quad poster because I liked it the best, but little did I know at the time that the print Exhumed Films would show at the Mahoning Drive-In actually came from the Warner UK archive (Friday the 13th ran uncut in the UK, which is why it carried an X rating over there).
I love little details like these.