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.
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.
I've been hacking away at this blog for about a year now and I haven't said much about Freddy Krueger, the dream slasher from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. If I were being honest with you, it's because I never connected to him as much as I did to Jason.
A passion for horror seems to be the flower that grows from the loamy soil of early adolescence, particularly troubled ones where a person feels powerless. I know I developed a certain degree of sympathy for Jason because of what was going on in my own life. I felt like an ugly outsider who couldn't connect to people and I used to imagine that Jason felt the same way, only he had the power to lash out against that. It made logical sense to my crazy 14-year-old head; no girl is ever going to sleep with me, no group is ever going to accept me, so they might as well fear me.
In commenting about an essay I wrote on the ordinariness of my street name, my writing instructor observed that I treat it like a cipher I can inhabit. To a large extent, that's true about the character of Jason. He's a cipher. You can make of him whatever you want, because he doesn't do much but lumber around and kill. Freddy is an actual character, with his own quirks and foibles, and doesn't have the same kind of role-playing possibilities. It's not to say I didn't love his movies, but when I started getting into the genre I was looking for heroes as much as stories.
Time has given me new respect for the series.
I think that everyone goes through period of bad taste, a point theoretically contained in their formative years where they enjoy the vulgar and the obvious. Watching The Hangover yesterday (or, indeed, most of the dreck that passes for "comedies") I'm inclined to believe most of us never bother to outgrow that stage. I know I was deep in that particular worldview when I started getting into horror and I favored the wilder, more ostentatious later entries in the series than the modest, restrained film that started it all.
Perhaps I'm giving the movie too much credit. Perhaps it was simply a new idea and they hadn't completely felt their ways around the borders of Freddy Krueger. But the fact remains that NoES feels almost completely different from the rest of the series, even beyond the budgetary constrictions. Freddy (or "Fred", as the movie calls him) isn't center-stage in the movie, which instead finds its scares through a really uncomfortable sense of surreality. As the movie goes on, we start losing track of when Nancy is asleep or awake, the bizarre effects Freddy causes start leaking into the real world, and the movie begins to take the shape of a non-linear, too-clever-by-half, foreign film.
I'm not going to pretend this is a perfect movie. The disco-club soundtrack is completely ridiculous, Nancy's dead mother sinking into the disco-ball bed while waving is laughable, and the notion of Nancy tricking out her house strikes me as part Vietcong, part Home Alone. Most of these quibbles are specific to the era, and are kinda petty given the pleasure I received from the work. Still, gotta pretend I'm not COMPLETELY fawning over it.
There is a remake coming up, and the new Freddy has been cast. It's done by the guys who did the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th remakes. I liked their previous work, but I worry that they're going to miss the potential with this franchise.
A big part of the reason Freddy appeals to people is that the movies are so much more visual and imaginative. Killing someone in the delirium of a dream is such a wonderful, wonderful concept, but most of the actual dream sequences are very literal and structured and shallow. The video game fan gets killed in a video game while working out his previously-alluded father issues, the gamer nerd gets killed pretending to be a wizard, etc.
If I could get the budget and the clout to hire my dream team, it would be either Michel Gondry or Neil Gaiman. Both men have created beautiful, surreal stories set in the dream world, and a chance for either of them to play in that particular sandbox would give me the biggest geekgasm ever. When all is said and done, Jason is completely formulaic. With Freddy there's potential to create something amazing.
As a side note, it's sometimes challenging to write this blog because I often find myself poking delicately at the bruises of my psyche. For me (and I'm sure for a lot of other fans) horror becomes inexorably tied to the strange sides of our souls.
I once met graphic novelist and personal hero Adrian Tomine and he told me that one of the hesitations he had in being honest with his work was a powerful desire to be liked. Sometimes I think about the way my audience will view me when I talk about idolizing monsters. It doesn't mean I am a particularly unpleasant or sinister person. I'm quite affable in public, truth be told. But my passions don't necessarily come from a place many people will understand or be comfortable with. I think that some of you understand where I'm coming from, though.
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.
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: controversialF13V 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.
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:
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.
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.
Posts
