Let's talk about Jason Voorhees a little bit.

First off, I've come to the conclusion that Jason is a supernatural creature akin to a yūrei, the vengeful Japanese ghosts best known to American horror fans from the Ju-on and Ringu films. Now obviously Jason Voorhees is not a woman in white with long black hair in her face, but he fits all the other traits of the yūrei: he died violently, his death is directly tied to water, and he is the embodiment of an aimless wrath that cannot be stopped.

Second, I want to share my thoughts on why Jason kills. The motivation for his crimes have always been maddeningly vague and simplistic, but I believe that unlocking the reasons that Jason does what he does will add new insight into his story. As a passionate consumer of all things Voorhees, I’ll attempt to decipher the motivations that enable the hockey-masked goon.

Finally, I’m going to share a bit of a strange theory I’ve come to develop about the setting of the Friday the 13th films. There is something fundamentally wrong with Crystal Lake. It kills its young and traps its killers in an endless cycle of unsatisfied vengeance. I believe that Jason Voorhees is merely the perfect embodiment of the curse, but we see evidence of this theory in subtle ways over the course of the Friday the 13th mythology.

Now, bear in mind that I'm going to have to apply a little bit of head-canon here because the movies aren't exactly the product of a unified narrative vision. When all is said and done, these movies are just profit-minded slasher films that I take far too seriously.  

They’re also some of my favorite stories of all time. They’re a campfire tale, an elemental American ghost story, a myth that had an impact far beyond its creator’s intentions and ambitions. Jason’s hockey mask has now become the cultural signifier for the horror genre.  Tee-shirts, toys, and other Jason Voorhees collectibles are still being created at a staggering rate, and his fandom has only deepened as time goes on. While I suspect a big part of the appeal of these films are their cartoony storytelling and amateur acting, there’s another part of the fandom that takes Jason Voorhees and the carnage he creates far too seriously.

I am one of them.

The character of Jason Voorhees has become a sort of personal avatar of my dark side, in a way that’s not always healthy. We all have our monsters and we let them rampage for a bit before putting them away, but Jason has a hard time staying quiet in the weird little toy box of my brain. I hear him when I get drunk, I hear him when I feel sad or unloved, and I hear him when I feel disconnected from the world and the people around me. He doesn’t say anything – though I do distinctly hear that “ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma” soundtrack – but he empowers me. He says that, if the world discards you, then you can get angry. You can rage against the light and love and joy that you have been denied. You can tear it from others, so they know the pain that you live with.

If given the choice between being invisible and being a monster, there is a fierce black joy in choosing the latter.

These are not good ideas. In the end, Jason’s hatred leaves him drowned at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Anger is always a poison, but it’s one I can understand. I imagine it hurts terribly to be Jason Voorhees, but I don’t think he’s capable of being anything else.

When we talk about the things we love and the stories that move us, we’re actually talking about ourselves.

WATER

To the first point, there are two real tragedies that Jason Voorhees suffered: the first was his drowning in Crystal Lake and the second was after the death of his mother.

Fans of the Friday the 13th franchise tend to separate the evolution of Jason into Living-Jason (Friday 2-4) and Zombie-Jason (Jason Lives through to the remake). While post-Final Chapter Jason is unquestionably supernatural, the Jason of part 2-4 seems to be a living, breathing, and EXTREMELY resilient man. According to the narrative, this Jason did NOT drown in the lake, but somehow swam away, survived in the woods for a long period of time (and how a hydrocephalic child managed to pull THAT off raises a bunch more questions), and happened to watch his mother get decapitated after her murder spree, setting off the rest of the series.

This is where I deviate from the orthodox narrative. Jason ABSOLUTELY drowned in Camp Crystal Lake. He did not swim away, survive, and grow into a backwoods hillbilly slasher.

My big piece of evidence, aside from the sheer improbably of a child like Jason surviving on his own, is his first appearance at the end of the original Friday the 13th. The creature that launches himself out of the water toward Alice is covered in moss and lichen, his body blackened and deformed from years underwater. The boy that emerges from the lake is a dead THING, and that's what makes him so frightening. He’s a callback to the strange story Pamela Voorhees told to explain her rampage.

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The classic yūrei death ALWAYS involves water. They fall down wells, slip into water towers, and die in rainstorms.

Sadako/Samara was pushed into the well by a parent and, while Kayako was sliced and bludgeoned to death, both her son and the family cat were drowned in a tub. Water always plays a part in the formation of the yūrei. It's because death by water invokes a sense of tragedy and melancholy, and it has very specific meaning to Japanese horror fans.

I'm going to paraphrase a section that I read in either "The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa" by Jerry White or "Japanese Horror Cinema" edited by Jay McRoy. In one of the books, the author explained that Japan is a 'wet' culture, as opposed to the 'dry' cultures of the west. The kanji for 'wet' and 'emotional' are the same thing, and Japanese culture favors a more intuitive communication than the west, which means that their horror stories tend to work on a much less rigid way than our own.

Ghosts in western narratives tend to have very specific rules and goals. They're either stuck in a loop, they're trying to be laid to rest, or they're attempting to fulfill a specific purpose. They are dangerous but can ultimately be reasoned with, escaped, or banished. Japanese ghosts, conversely, will never stop. They are unchecked rage personified. They die in or near water, which is a conduit for raw emotion, and are less trapped spirits than vengeance personified and run amok.

So. Jason.

Jason HAD to have drowned in the water. His death spurred on her mother - probably due to the corrupting influence of Crystal Lake, which I'll address later – and when she died, Jason's spirit rose in a powerful body and a heart full of unchecked violence and hate.

HATE

Jason’s intelligence has largely fluctuated over the years. The first few movies, especially Friday II and III, paint him as a sort of backwoods hillbilly idiot, more Leatherface than Lector, while the later films portray him as either a Terminator (especially C.J. Graham’s portrayal in Jason Lives) or as an angry but otherwise normally intelligent killer. I think the roots of his anger stem from his developmental issues. Bear with me here as I’m covering material that can be difficult and I’m trying to articulate this with sensitivity.

While I was in college, I worked with a developmentally disabled guy at a coffee shop. He was very large and strong, but he struggled with some of the basic tasks around the shop. He usually had someone around to help him work through his assignments, but even then he would sometimes violently lose his temper and lash out at the people around him. When I saw him act out, I felt like his behavior was coming from a place of frustration. Usually something minor had gone wrong that he wasn’t able to fix or people were demanding too much of him too quickly. After witnessing my coworker’s struggle, I extrapolated my observations into Jason’s perspective.

Pretend you're alone in the woods after having been raised by a mother who was overprotective in an unhealthy way, people "invade your space" and you lash out to protect yourself, not entirely understanding the consequences of your actions.

That's who Jason is to me.

In the films, Jason kills to get revenge for his mother, who died trying to avenge him. He predominantly kills teenagers because, well, that's what's around in a slasher film. And he mostly goes after people with some connection to Crystal Lake.

One of the more interesting peculiarities is that Jason seems to favor killing people who have gotten close to his stalking grounds. In Jason Takes Manhattan he ignores or even actively avoids killing scores of New Yorkers in his pursuit of the survivors of the SS Lazarus, the ship full of teenagers on their graduating class trip that departed from Crystal Lake harbor. I have some theories on this behavior, which I’ll get into in the following segment about the Crystal Lake Curse.

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It's also impossible to downplay the fact that sexuality plays a large role in the franchise, especially since anyone who has sex or gets nude on camera is sure to be killed immediately after. This is one of the more odious and regressive aspects of the series. I choose to believe this aspect is more of a lazy cliché than an actual puritanical mean streak, but the fact remains that even Jason's origins are tied to sex. He only died because the camp counselors were too busy having sex to do their jobs.

In all honesty, I believe there’s a strong sex = death thread in these movies because the Friday the 13th series is all about titillation and both sex and violence are titillating in their own ways. However, I once came across a discussion thread on the AV Club’s website where the commentator NakedSnake said that there may be a different set of values at play in the series use of punitive violence:

“For the most part, if you get into the backbone of most of the horror movies, it’s less about the sex and more about the responsibility. Laurie Strode of Halloween, for example, does her job. In fact, she not only does her job, she also picks up the extra responsibility of doing another person’s job so that person can go off and shirk her responsibilities. Unsurprisingly, within the context of the movie, that other person suffers a horrific punishment for her lapse in work ethic. Laurie is then rewarded for her idealized American work ethic by being able to successfully confront Michael Myers on several different occasions. 

When Voorhees’ mother lays out her motivation at the end of Friday The 13th, almost everyone who listened to it glommed on to the sex the teenagers were having when her child drowned, so they believed the teenagers were being punished for the sex. But the reality is that the far more important part of her explanation is that “They weren’t watching my son.” Hence, in America, where refusing to work or fulfill your responsibilities is something to be punished, by shirking their jobs, the teenagers in question, (and by extension every teenager from that point forward by association) became worthy of their grisly fate. 

Friday The 13th was a bit clumsier than Halloween in that it didn’t draw the clear distinctions between the “worthy” teenagers who did their jobs and fulfilled their responsibilities and the “unworthy” ones who shirked their responsibilities and didn’t do their jobs, but it’s still there—at least until the later installments of both series when each of the series lost its focus about what it was really supposed to be about.” 

That doesn’t ignore the fact that the series in inexorably tied into the death of sexually active teens. The eros and thanatos urge, the twining of sexuality and death is part of the series. One could argue that Jason is the ultimate outsider, a character enacting dark urges because more positive ones would forever be denied him. Horror author Nancy A. Collins no doubt agreed, as she started her Jason vs. Leatherface comic book miniseries with Jason at the bottom of the lake, staring at his machete, compelled to hunt his victims because they could smile and laugh and love in the sunlight and he could do none of those things. The only succor he had was his hate, which kept him warm in the inky darkness of Crystal Lake.

As satisfying as that idea can be, and as much it ties into the romantic idea of the neglected child carving up campers in the woods, it's ultimately a far too complex of a motivator for Jason. The one time the movies really directly help us look at the world through his eyes is in his opening scene in Freddy vs. Jason, where one of his victims morphs into a litany of others, each extolling the sins of recklessness, selfishness, and irresponsibility that lead to their fatal meeting with Jason. The scene ends with the voice of his mother (or rather Freddy impersonating his mother) goading him onward towards more mayhem. When Jason goes off-leash, Freddy-as-Pamela later vents his rage on him, calling him a big dumb dog incapable of stopping. This suggests that there is very little conscious thought left in Jason Voorhees anymore. He's not longer a person, but a force of nature, an unchecked and indestructible emotion running loose in the world.

An unstoppable hate. A curse on Crystal Lake.

A death curse.

Jason Voorhees curse.  

THE CURSE

I believer that ultimately the curse on Crystal Lake isn't contained just in Pamela and Jason Voorhees. I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with Crystal Lake itself. It is a place of tremendous pain, a place where sins are revisited and vengeance extends far past the original offender. I want to illustrate this theory by discussing Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning, the only Friday film featuring a killer in a hockey mask who wasn’t Jason Voorhees.

Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning is rightly considered an inferior Friday film. There's something uncomfortably sleazy about it. Characters are introduced and killed off moments later, and the film has an icky, predatory feel that comes from hiring a porn director who stripped the story down to the most garish components.

The film received the most notoriety for the fact that the killer in A New Beginning wasn't Jason himself. Instead, the man behind the blue-triangle mask was Roy Burns, the ambulance driver whose son was chopped up by a fellow troubled teen at the halfway house where the story takes place. The film is structured like a mystery, but Roy's obvious shock at the sight of the boy's corpse and his constant knowing appearances around the crime scenes project his guilt pretty clearly. He chases after and is eventually killed by Tommy Jarvis, the child who hacked Jason Voorhees to pieces in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, who seems to take up the mask and mantle of Jason Voorhees by the end of the movie.

I joined many Friday fans in dismissing A New Beginning until recently, when I realized that Roy Burns hadn't tried to become Jason Voorhees. Instead, he'd successfully become Pamela Voorhees.

I always felt that part of Pamela Voorhees's homicidal fury came from misplaced guilt. Sure, the counselors weren't watching her son, but she wasn't either. Obviously, it's impossible to keep an eye on your child ALL the time, but that kind of incandescent fury is a complicated thing. I think that Roy Burns must have felt the same thing when he looked at the butchered body of his son.

Both Pamela and Roy were single parents. Both were blue collar, serious types. Both had boys with special needs (Jason was deformed and hydrocephalic, Joey Burns had a childlike mind), and both died at the hands of bullies while in the care of young adults. After both murders, the grieving parents attacked anyone they felt to be responsible. The parallels run too close to be ignored. There is something at Crystal Lake that forces this kind of tragedy to repeat itself, where parents take their sorrow and hatred on the young, and the dead can rise to pursue their vengeance further.

There's a phenomenal Friday the 13th comic miniseries called Bad Lands, written by Ron Marz. It describes two parallel stories, one in the past and one in modern day Crystal Lake. The historical story features a Native American man whose family is murdered by fur trappers seeking shelter from a storm, and the modern story is about three young adults trapped in a sudden snowfall. Snow replaces water in both scenes, but both stories are fraught with tension and grief. Both stories end with the killer dragging the final victim into the waters of Crystal Lake, the poor victims realizing that they've trespassed in a corrupted place. The curse of Jason Voorhees can therefore be more accurately described as Crystal Lake Curse, a legacy of murder in shadowed woodland and moon-white faces peering through the trees.

I believe this explains why Jason predominantly goes after Crystal Lake residents. In Jason Takes Manhattan he has an entire city of potential victims, but he spends the rest of the film pursuing the handful of survivors from the SS Lazarus. Most of the New Yorkers he kills are simply people who get in his way or who try to harm his intended targets. He seems just as willing barrel past New Yorkers than engage them, including a scene of surprising self-awareness where he frightens off a trio of punk rock kids in Times Square by showing them his unmasked face.

So, if he's not simply taking a machete to all of New York, why does he go after these specific kids? I believe it's because they're connect to the Crystal Lake Curse as much as he is. Young people who set foot into Crystal Lake are all marked for death. He repeats this behavior in Jason X, primarily hunting the members of the scouting party that went planet side to retrieve his cryogenically-frozen body. If no one bearing that mark is immediately around him then he'll go to work on whoever is nearby (as seen in Freddy vs. Jason, though he was also under Freddy's influence), but otherwise he always prioritizes the youth of Crystal Lake.

It's tough to pin down exactly where this curse came from. Maybe it's the violent history of the place, as the Bad Lands comic suggests. Maybe it's the strange Lovecraftian elements that are hinted at in the mostly-ignored Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Either way, there is something horrible and self-repeating happening in that tiny lakeside town. Jason is simply the purest incarnation of its wrath, but it would have found a different host otherwise

Had Tommy Jarvis not dug up Jason's body, I can imagine Joey Burns rising from the dead to take up the mask and the machete.

A KILLER BURIED, BUT NOT DEAD

The dark truth about the horror genre is that the monsters are always the most compelling and most identifiable characters within their stories. They get the dark inversion of the hero narrative, where we get to vicariously experience their rampages before they're put down and order is restored again.

I believe that Jason Voorhees endured because, of all the 1980s serial killers, his backstory is the most tragic. Michael Myers is more of blank slate than a person, Leatherface is too feral and crazy, and Freddy Krueger - while more entertaining - is also the most mean-spirited. Jason is an outsider, a victim of bullying, the kid who wasn't allowed to participate, and the kid who missed his mother so much that he tried to rebuild her in his lonely woodland home. He is also the personification of the campfire ghost story, the dead thing whose anger can be understood but can't be reasoned with.        

Hang around the Jason Voorhees fandom and you’ll see a lot of people strongly identify with Jason. He’s an easy character to project onto. Everyone feels isolated, rejected, and angry, and it’s not hard for those emotions to grow into a very dark and destructive rage. For me, part of growing up was learning to make peace with those feelings, but there was a long stretch of time when my darkest impulses needed an avatar. I know that probably makes me sound like some kind of embittered psycho, but I think we all connect to power images, even for the worst aspects of ourselves.

I love Jason and the Friday the 13th series, but part of getting healthy meant putting him back in the box. Even then, at the bottom of my soul, there’s a deep dark lake.

And he’s down there.

Waiting.

Why I like Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

Why I like Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

1) It was weirdly kid-safe for a slasher film. FF13:7 was maybe the second or third horror movie I rented for myself, and I picked it because it was supposedly tamer than the rest due to strict MPAA interference. The movie is a master class in editing violence, with all the kills done either quickly or off-screen. As such, it was a good gateway introduction to the genre. 

2) The movie marks the first appearance of Kane Hodder as Jason Voorhees. The definitive actor to assume the role, Hodder brought a lot of elements from the previous incarnations together while adding his own unique touches to the character. Hodder's Jason is an interesting combination of Frankenstein's Monster and an angry pro-wrestler, but he also has an impeccable sense of timing. I recently re-watched the film and noticed the unique way Hodder goes in for the kill: he raises the weapon slowly, giving the viewer a moment of tension, before bringing it down with tremendous force. It's those small touches that make the character effective. 

3) Jason meets Carrie is a great idea. 

4) As a child of divorce, the image of the dead father rising from the water to save the child he had previously abused resonated with me. 

5) Bad News Crews and evil yuppie Melissa. The F13 films always had the best dirtbags.

6) Eddie the science fiction writer, with his stupid story ideas and naive optimism towards women. I knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up and Eddie felt like he was made for me. "Rejection? Fine. I can take it. I've been rejected by some of the finest science fiction magazines in the country." 

7) Maddy. Poor, poor Maddy. The Friday movies seldom had an ugly duckling and they never had one with a character arc. I really liked Maddy's boost of confidence. She's the one I'd have picked to survive. Alas, Jason is a poor judge of human potential.

8) The telekinetic battles between Jason and Tina that take up the final third of the movie. I grew up on superhero comics, especially Jim Lee-era X-men, and it felt like the movie tied in my love of superheroes and monsters. The battles are really effective and visually interesting, given the film's low budget, and they end with the biggest non-CGI explosion in any Friday film.    

9) As a kid, I'd always been curious about what Jason looked like under the hockey mask. He goes bare-faced the longest in this film. He also kind of looks like Reptile from Mortal Kombat.

10) Did anyone else love the exposed spine and bones in the Jason suit? I did. It's the best interpretation of Zombie Jason I've seen. 

11) The sleeping bag kill, probably the most famous kill of the series. 

Conclusion: Friday the 13th Part VII is probably my favorite of Hodder's roles. It does a lot of the slasher conventions right while mixing in fanciful supernatural elements and an excellent final battle.

How to have a Friday the 13th Marathon

HOW TO HAVE A FRIDAY THE 13TH MARATHON: 

Hi folks. 

If you're like me, you LOVE Friday the 13th. It's the creepiest day short of Halloween. It's also the title of the longest running horror franchise in the United States. What better way to celebrate the day than to watch the movies? 

But which ones to choose? The task can be daunting for the Jason neophyte, especially since half the movies are fun-bad and the other half are just bad-bad. So, in order to help you make the most of this Friday the 13th, I've curated a list of the Friday the 13th films you SHOULD be watching. 

FIRST FILM. Toss-up. Friday #1 or Friday #2

The long and short is that the first Friday is a better pick for a campy good time, whereas the second Friday is one of the most scary and effective slasher movies of the early 80s. 

While both films followed and expanded upon the formula laid down by John Carpenter's Halloween, the series had not yet settled into the familiar rhythms of the Friday the 13th series. 

Friday 1 hasn't aged well as a horror film. While Sean Cunningham uses the primordial darkness of the woods to great effect, the film iss tame enough to be shown uncut on TV and the ending fight between the middle-aged women and the screaming camp councilor quickly descends into delightful farce. This is the one to pick for a campier good time. 

Friday 2 is more conventionally scary. Director Steve Miner, who would go on to make a career as a slasher director, knows how to work the premise of the lone madman in the words to great effect. We see pre-hockey mask Jason for the first time and this film has Ginny, the psychology major who turns out to be one of the best Final Girls of the series. 

SECOND FILM Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter. 

A personal favorite of the pre-zombie Jason films, Final Chapter has a lot of good stuff going for it. First, the story is genuinely strong. Sure, it has all the generic touches of a Friday film, but the characterization is much stronger. People go through story arcs, the teenage drama has a sharper focus, Crispen Glover dances like a spaz, and the story holds together better. It also introduces Cory Feldman as Tommy Jarvis, Jason's only consistent nemesis. A horror effects enthusiast with a gift for getting inside monster's heads, he makes an effective foil for the killer.

As this was supposed to be the final film in the series, make-up effects master Tom Savini returned to do the effects work of this film and they work brilliantly. Most of the gore is saved for Jason's death, but it's fantastic work. Tom White, the stuntman in Jason's shoes, delivers my favorite interpretation of the human version of Jason. Jason in part 4 is at once heavy but spry, and White imbues the character with strength and menace. 

WHY NOT PART 3

Aside from the fact that the movies REALLY follows the slasher-victim stereotype (stoner hippie, prank playing idiot) and the 3D effects are occasionally fun, the movie is mostly unpleasant people dying off. Worth seeing for the moment Jason gets his hockey mask and for a solid final fight. 

THIRD FILM: Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives. 

Working off the strongest script of the series, director Tom McLaughlin attempted to fuse elements of the classic Universal Horror films into the Friday film series. Tommy Jarvis returns to accidentally resurrect Jason with a poorly-placed iron pole and a bolt of lightning, creating the first appearance of Zombie Jason. The character is now overtly supernatural and former Marine C.J. Graham portrays the character as a vengeful automatic, moving Jason with surprising grace and sudden violence. 

There's a lot to really like in this film. The movie is genuinely funny, although the humor stops when Jason appears. The cinematography is gorgeous and evocative of the fog-shrouded hills of Transylvania. The town of Crystal Lake has evolved in order to forget it's horrible past. Tommy makes for a fantastic, haunted Ahab character and he teams up with my favorite final girl of the series, the playful sheriff's daughter Megan. Finally, it's the most 80s film of the series. You can use it as a time capsule for the styles and sounds of the mid-80s. 

WHY DID YOU AVOID PART FIVE? 

Aside from the fact that there's an impostor masquerading as the killer, there's a real meanness of spirit in this film. The director, Danny Steinmann, came out of pornography and he shoots the film very much like a porno. People appear, say a few horrible things, and get killed. It has the highest body count of any Friday film (if you exclude the off-camera slaughter of part  

It is worth seeing for the crazy gothy/new wave dance scene and the evolution of the Tommy Jarvis character. 

FOURTH FILM: Friday the 13th Part Seven: The New Blood. 

It's Jason vs. Carrie!

This film has easily the best fight scene of the Friday series, as the emotionally damaged psychic Tina unleashes her full powers against Jason. The storyline is fairly standard slasher stuff (though it does have the best Bitchy Rich Girl of all slasher movies) but Friday Seven also marks the debut of the definitive Jason actor, stuntman Kane Hodder. 

Most of the stuntmen who took the Jason role had a fairly mercenary outlook on the role, but Hodder approached the role as an actor. His Jason is Fury Incarnate and all later interpretations of the role owe something to his work. 

This is also an excellent film for people adverse to gore. By this point, the backlash against the violence of the series had it's effect and the average episode of CSI has far more gore. 

WHY DID YOU AVOID PART EIGHT

First, despite the title, most of the action takes place on a boat. Second, a lot of stuff DOES work, but the elements that do are done better in other films. Third, the sewers of New York City don't flood with toxic waste every evening. Fourth, Jason spends the movie looking like a wet trash bag. 

Worth seeing for another Kane Hodder performance, Kelly Hu's overtly supernatural death scene, the rooftop boxing match, and the vision of pre-Giuliani Times Square. 

FIFTH FILM: JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY

This is an odd pick because it's the most unconventional of the Friday the 13th series. Jason is blown apart in the beginning of the movie by an FBI team with apparent shoot-to-kill orders, but his essence hops from body to body in order to be reborn by inhabiting one of his relatives. 

JGTH is essentially The Terminator in plotting and Twin Peaks/The X-Files in tone. Jason chases his one living family member, which leads to an amazing police station massacre, and the pursuit is genuinely suspenseful. It goes a little too far off the reservation, but I like it all the same. Also, wait for the surprising Freddy Krueger cameo. 

WHY DID YOU AVOID JASON X 

It's Jason in Space! It's Space Jason! 

This is sadly Kane Hodder's final film as Jason and he spends most of it combating the tone. Though the film had been filmed years before Scream, it shares Scream's meta-tone but melds it with sci-fi campiness. The tone is jokey, nobody takes the action seriously, and the film has the breezy tone of a SyFy channel film. It's a good time, it's just a little bit too campy for me. 

Worth seeing for the cryo-face smash and the Cronenberg cameo. 

SIXTH FILM: FREDDY VS. JASON 

While this is far more of a Freddy film than a Jason film, director Ronny Yu invests the film with nightmarish visual style. Made during the influx of Hong Kong directors that followed in John Woo's stead, Yu creates one of my favorite visions of both Springwood and Crystal Lake since part 6. We really get inside Jason's psychology in this film, courtesy of Freddy's manipulations, and the final fight between the two titans of horror is absolutely brutal. 

WHY DID YOU AVOID THE REMAKE?

I didn't really. It's worth seeing, especially since Derek Mears does the best interpretation of Jason since Kane Hodder. But it's a Platinum Dunes remake, and there's something slick and soulless about it. 

Worth seeing for Aaron Yoo's fantastic death scene, Jarad Padalecki's non-Winchester horror turn, and a solid final fight. 

FINALE

Well, by this point, you've seen the best that the Friday the 13th has to offer. You're in the clear. Smoke some dope, have some premarital sex, and don't worry about getting slaughtered.

Happy Friday the 13th

In all the rigamarole of work and classes and grad school applications, this little Creature completely forgot that today is Friday the 13th! Every year, this usually means cheesy slasher movie marathons with my friends, but I didn't realize or prepare for it. So tonight it's just me and my DVD collection. For the rest of you gleeful ghoulies, I wish you all a safe, fun, and stabby little Friday the 13th.

In celebration of the day, check out Final Girl's awesome post on Friday the 13th posters from around the world.

Friday the 13th Cake

Y'know, fan expression is a strange thing. The internets are full of fan art, fan fic, fan movies, fan clothes, fan this, fan that.

Never seen a fan cake before.


I kinda love it. Check it out in greater detail here.

Thanks to reader Julia for sending this my way. If you get a bit of horror burnout wander over to fellow blogger Cake Wrecks for further cake-related madness.

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th

Crap. If I keep this up, this blog is going is going to turn into yet another Friday the 13th site. Okay, after this post there will be a moratorium on slasher-related postings. Besides, I just got Quarantine from my company's nifty free video rental service. I'll try to put together something clever for that. Anyway, this one is on His Name Was Jason, the recently released documentary on the F13 series.

I love horror-themed documentaries. I'm the kind of guy who watches the special features on DVDs, who goes to conventions and asks all the nerdy questions, and who loves to pick apart the stories I love and see what makes them tick. Horror, with all it's wonderful taboo-breaking charm, always has the most fascinating behind-the-scenes stuff going on. Sometimes you pull back the curtain and find the backstage logic distasteful (I'm looking at you, See No Evil), but by and large I really enjoy these glimpses into the construction of the genre.

Anyone who's ever read Peter M. Bracke's Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (and if you're a fan, you really should) will find HNWJ to be similar in form and scope. A bunch of former Jasons and former victims chat about their experiences, their memories, and what being a part of the F13 legacy has meant for them. As you can imagine, the movies are made by a bunch of amateurs, shooting late at night in uncomfortable locations. Tempers flare, mistakes get made, the wrong people get credit for things, and somehow out of all of this chaos a movie gets made.

The whole endeavor is hosted by the ever-charming Tom Savini, who frames the interviews with amusing little skits, chatting with the viewer as some poor girl runs for her life. Each segment is split into general themes, talking about the production, the effects, the character, and the impact on their lives. There's a lot of stuff covered, and nobody ever stays on camera long enough to get boring.



One of the things that struck me was the amount of sympathy the cast had for Jason. When you go back and read interviews with stuntmen who assumed the role early in the series, it's pretty clear that the filmmakers weren't too interested in what makes Jason tick. As the series wore on and Jason became the star of the show, a sort of internal life grew from the character's patchwork origins. Now he's become victim-as-villain, an outsider avenging his mother's death and his social banishment. This aspect of the character is a big part of his appeal, as opposed to the more ethereal and distant Michael Myers.

Anyway, if you're one of those goofballs who would find a two hour long discussion of a B-movie boogeyman interesting, go check this one out. Side note: controversial F13V director Danny Steinmann has some iiiinteresting violence-as-impotency theories going on. Also Kane Hodder, once my childhood icon, is starting to creep me right the fuck out.

Wondercon 2009

So, this is the first in my new collection of horror-themed autographs to be placed on this blogadoo, courtesy of Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives Jason, C.J. Graham.

Some point I should write about illustrious part six. The "funny one" of the franchise, six has both fans and detractors. Generally, humor in horror turns me off, but I thought six was the most entertaining and accessible, with the series' best final girl and the presence of ever-dependable Thom Mathews.

Anyway, I picked this up at Wondercon, San Francisco's premiere pop-culture event. Kane Hodder and Tony Todd were supposed to be there, but they were apparently no-shows. C'est la vie.

Not a whole lot of horror content this year. I did attend the panel of Alien Trespass, a retro-50s atomic horror pastiche. I got a feeling this movie, like Psycho Beach Party, is gonna be more wacky than actually good. Still, I love fifties nostalgia. Check out the trailer here:



Catch y'all on the flip.

Friday the 13th Remake

Sometimes when I go see horror movies I feel like one of those Olympic judges.

Horror is such a visceral experience, it goes so directly for the gut, that once you've seen enough of these you become somewhat inured to the experience. You know exactly when the killer is gonna step out of the shadows or when the ghost is gonna appear in the reflection that you find yourself dispassionately grading the methodology. Good scare here, good use of lighting, oh there's a scare that relies too heavily on a music spike. 8.5

On one hand, I think I'm better able to evaluate the storytelling merits without being overwhelmed by the simple tricks of the genre. On the other hand, I lose the ability to really get sucked into movies, especially when they have as much emotional resonance with me as Friday the 13th.

If you're the type to poke around horror message boards like yours truly, you will see that the people have a strong affinity for the Friday series, often completely out of proportion to the actual quality of the movies. A lot of people enjoy the pure laughable cheesiness of the series, especially the earlier iterations, but there are a lot of people who really love Jason Voorhees, who try to puzzle out his motivations and set him up as the representative for their id.

I totally get that. I'm one of those people who take Friday the 13th a little too seriously.

I came across Friday the 13th when I was in my tween years, when I was enrolled in the most elite private school in San Francisco at the time. My parents were going through an ugly divorce and I hit puberty surrounded by the richest, prettiest little bastards in the city. I felt like an outsider and I channeled that negative mojo into adoration of this larger-than-life monster. Those times are long past and I cleaned up well, but there's enough of that shy introverted kid in me to still love monsters. And Jason stands at the top of the heap.

And man, did he come back in style.



The filmmakers decided to ditch the hulking zombie that Jason has become since part six and re-imagine him as an intelligent, fast moving hunter, setting traps and baiting his victims. He's human again, still trapped in the state of arrested development and mother-worship, and the subterranean lair he's made for himself is one of the coolest creepy locales I've seen in awhile. Derek Mears, the actor who dons the hockey mask in this incarnation, has the right predatory physicality and rage for the role, imbuing the character with the most style since Kane Hodder made the role his own.

As for the movie itself, I'm struck by how old-school the whole experience was. Sure, the camera work is much more modern and stylized than the static-camera shots were in the original series, the acting is several steps better, and dialogue is more punchy and beat-beat-beat than the talking-heads exposition scripts from before, but the basic conventions of the genre remained intact. People still find the same hoary old reasons to wander off alone, couples still venture into places no sane person would go, people still say the same old groaning cliche shit they've said for twenty years. The clothes are different, the cell phones have to be acknowledged, and the male leads' hair gets more feathered, but the story tropes essentially remains the same.

The movie is very lean, as befits its low budget roots. There isn't a whole lot of set-up, the main action is confined to a couple of sets, and the filmmakers don't pad out the pacing Scream-style with a whole bunch of teen drama style. I liked director Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and he manages to make the scares effective, with a good mix of tension and jump scares. There is one really good, really sudden arrow-in-the-head scare that dropped the shock train on me.

The script, by Freddy vs. Jason scribes Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, wasn't as strong as I'd hoped. I thought their FvJ script was punchy and surprisingly engaging, but this one was a wincer. There's always a little bit of social tension between slasherbait in these movies but the core group of doomed campers don't actually seem to like each other and it's hard to imagine they'd spend five minutes in the company of Lead Asshole, let alone go up to his cabin for the weekend. The token black guy got stuck with the same "it's because I'm black" race baiting jokes you've seen before, there's a whole bunch of "I don't think we should be here..../Oh relax, no one's gonna see us....", and people merrily wander off into the dark in search of missing comrades even knowing they're most likely dead.

Worst of all, the wrong people wind up dead.

This was a problem I had with FvJ. The leads were both unmemorable actors and uninteresting characters. The secondary characters, particularly the token boozer played by Ginger Snaps' Katharine Isabelle, were much more engaging and interesting. This time around it's Aaron Yoo, playing unfortunately-named stoner Chewie.



I really liked Aaron Yoo in other roles, particularly his turn in the otherwise forgettable Disturbia, and he was easily the best actor in the movie. They didn't give him much to do, aside from the typical comedy relief/slaughtered lamb thing, but he was interesting and engaging and natural in a way the other performers weren't. He does a fantastic job projecting the nervous, insecure energy of young people and he made his victim an actual character.

The movie lost me when he was killed off, particularly since it was the most horrible, punishing death of the movie. We're instead supposed to sympathize with Danielle Panabaker's character Jenna, who is the one type of final girl I dislike the most: the one who KNOWS her boyfriend is an asshole, spends screen time apologizing to other characters for his behavior, but never stands up or confronts him for it.

So, yeah, the characterization sucks. Even poor Jared Padalecki, who I met at Comic-Con and was very nice, doesn't get much to work with. He's a fine actor and his exchanges with Lead Asshole are the best character moments of the movie, but the writers give him nothing to do but bug people about his sister and ride around on a rickety motorcycle with the most feathered hair I've ever seen on a male lead.

Come to think of it, this was the most male-feathered-haired movie I've seen in ages. It's a wonder Jason could get any weapons through those luxurious males to the sweetmeats nestled inside. Watch and discuss.

Also, this movie has the loudest flashlights I've ever seen. Every time they pass over the screen there's a lightsaber wooosh.

Anyway, those are my nickels and dimes. In the end I liked it. It held to the form and had some good jump moments, even if many were sound-spike cheats. It's probably only going to have lasting appeal with the die-hards, but it's a fun night at the slasher flicks.

Bloody Good Horror's Top Ten "Friday The 13th" Deaths.

NSFW

The fine folks at Bloody Good Horror put together this retrospective of their favorite deaths from the Friday the 13th series. I'm really looking forward to the movie's release and I hope you guys enjoy the video. Also, check out their podcast, it's one of the best round-table discussions available on the horror genre.

New Friday the 13th Trailer

All I want for Christmas is Jason friggin' Voorhees.

Friday the 13th Trailer

Friday the 13th is tremendously important to me.

I am fully aware that the movies weren't actually GOOD. But they were central to my imaginative development, in the same way that comic books and Star Wars. They were the playground my dark side took root.

I think Slasher monsters have this superhero appeal to kids. They're not removed from the action like the Jigsaw killer is. They're doing the dirty work. They're strong and tough and capable. And they scared the CRAP out of people. They're essentially cyphers, so you can pretty much ascribe any kind of motivation you wanted to them.

There were elements to the broadly-sketched mythology of Jason that I clicked into, specifically that Jason was ugly and he was tormented by the other kids. Having been a city kid who went to summer camp, I couldn't think think of a scarier place to be stalked. And the fucking hockey mask, that goddamn, bone white hockey mask. Before I was brave enough to see the movie myself, I asked other kids what Jason's face looked like. One kid told me he had no skin on his face. I stayed up all night on that one.

I think the movies had a strange two-sided appeal for me. On one hand, when I wanted to be a monster, I was Jason. I got to live the vicarious thrill of hacking up pretty people that I didn't feel that I could be. On the other hand, I was one of those kids and there was this impossible, terrifying monster after me. How would I run away? How would I fight? Would I be brave, or would I cower and completely lose my cool?

Plus, god help me, they were titillating. By today's standards, the sex and violence of Friday The 13th is tame by comparison, but when I was a kid it was the only place to see boobies and violence, both things my mom would have disapproved of.

I get that there's a lot of hostility in the Internet horror community to the idea of remakes, as if the fucking original series is some saintly work of underground art that needs to be preserved and kept in the underground horror ghetto and kept away from mainstream appeal. I am in complete disagreement. It's a new age. Make him scary again.

Watching this filled me with a fine dark glee. Will you join me?

There's a legend around here. A killer buried, but not dead. A curse on Crystal Lake. A death curse.

Jason Voorhees curse.

ia ia cthulhu fhtagn

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