Friday the 13th (1980)

Let me tell you something that genuinely messed with my head the first time I watched this. I came to Friday the 13th as a teenager already knowing Jason Voorhees. I knew the hockey mask, the machete, the lumbering gait. I'd seen Freddy vs. Jason. I thought I knew exactly what I was getting into. And then I sat through the whole thing waiting for him to show up, and he basically doesn't. It's just some old lady doing the killing, and then right at the very end a swamp-boy version of Jason lunges out of the water for a jumpscare that owes more to Carrie than anything else. I remember sitting there genuinely baffled. That's your icon? That's the legend?

Which is a strange thing to reckon with, because Friday the 13th is genuinely one of the most culturally significant horror films ever made, and also, if we're being honest with each other, a pretty average slasher. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Horny teenagers. A creepy camp in the woods. Brutal murders doled out one by one. If you've seen any slasher film from this era, you already know the rhythm: establish the group, pick them off, leave one standing. There's a mechanical quality to it that can feel both comforting and a little dull depending on your mood.

The camp setting does genuinely work though. There's something about the combination of sticky summer heat, dark lakeside water and isolated cabins that the film earns without really having to try. It creates a mood even when the script isn't doing much to earn it. And some of the kill sequences have a nasty, practical energy that holds up. This isn't a film that cheats its audience on that front.

But I keep coming back to the Jason problem. The entire franchise is built around this man, and yet here he barely exists. He's a backstory, a motivation, a ghost story told around a campfire. The actual killer is someone whose connection to the legend only pays off if you already know what the sequels do with it. Watching it fresh, or watching it as I did already steeped in the mythology, produces two completely different kinds of confusion. That's a weird legacy to have. Historically, the film matters enormously. It codified so much of what the slasher genre became, for better and, let's be real, mostly for worse. But strip away the context and the cultural weight, and what you've got is a competently made, thoroughly generic horror picture that happens to have produced one of the great horror icons almost entirely by accident.

I don't want to be too harsh on it. Three stars feels right. It's not boring, it moves along well enough, and there's a reason it clicked with audiences the way it did. But it's also nowhere near as good as its reputation suggests, and even the sequels that actually feature Jason in full are mostly utter dross. The bar was always lower than the legend implied.

If you've never seen it and you're a horror fan, watch it once, for the history. Just don't go in expecting the Jason you know. That version of him took a while to arrive, and this film is really just the strange, slightly awkward origin story nobody quite planned for.

Rating: ★★★ (3/5)

Originally logged on Letterboxd.