Following the success of the 1980s 'Friday the 13th' franchise.
The 1980s is a decade commonly associated with family-friendly, feel-good movies such as 'E.T.', 'Ghostbusters', 'Back To The Future', 'The Goonies' and the first three entries in the 'Indiana Jones' franchise.
Decidedly less feel-good and family-friendly (unless your surname happens to be Addams) was Sean S Cunningham's 1980 release 'Friday The 13th'. Originally released to cash-in on the success of John Carpenter's 'Halloween', this film launched a franchise which saw seven further films, a TV series and other tie-ins released in the 1980s alone.
Sean S Cunningham, who produced the controversial 'The Last House on the Left' in 1972, was struggling to make ends meet as the 1980s approached. In the foreword of 'Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th', he explained his situation: 'I needed to come up with a new idea that I could sell. So why not make a scary movie? I had not revisited the horror genre since Last House on the Left but I had this movie title banging around in the back of my head that I thought would be terrific: 'Friday the 13th'. I had no idea what the movie would be, but with that title I thought, at least, I'd be off to a good start.'
Cunningham raised the money to publish a full-page advert in 'Variety' to announce the imminent production of 'Friday the 13th — the most terrifying film ever made'. The advert intrigued people leading to distribution queries and investment offers, even though there was at this stage no script.
The success of 'Halloween' upon its 1978 release served as inspiration for Cunningham and screenwriting collaborator Victor Miller, who decided to follow the blueprint of young people being picked off by a violent assailant. It was Miller who came up with a summer camp before its opening as the perfect isolated setting.
The cast was made up of relative unknowns largely recruited from the New York theatre scene which, given the budget was in the region of $500,000, was no surprise. However it proved to be the launchpad for one actor who now has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Four years before garnering worldwide fame in 'Footloose', Kevin Bacon played loved-up counsellor Jack in 'Friday the 13th'.
The special effects work on the film was carried out by Tom Savini, who had worked wonders with a stretched budget on 'Dawn of the Dead'. Savini was a combat photographer in Vietnam and was therefore in a unique position for this kind of work as he explained: 'Sometimes people die with one eye open and one eye half-closed; sometimes people die with smiles on their face as their jaw is always slack. That's the way it goes. So when I make fake heads and cadavers, I incorporate the feeling I got seeing the real stuff in Vietnam.'
Another important member of Cunningham's team was composer Harry Manfredini. Inspired by 'Jaws', he came up with the idea to give the killer their own signature. The words 'kill' and 'mother' were chopped in half and run through an echo reverb machine to create the 'Ki, ki, ki. Ma, ma, ma' refrain that accompanies the killer's appearance throughout most of the franchise.
Miller's screenplay revolved around a group of young camp counsellors preparing Camp Crystal Lake for its reopening.
The film begins with a flashback to two murders at the camp in 1958. Then in present day, one of the counsellors (Annie), upon arriving in a nearby town, is warned of the camp's tragic past, including these unsolved murders and the drowning of a young boy. Annie, does not heed the warnings and becomes the first present-day victim before she even arrives at camp.
It was with the closing minutes of the movie that a franchise was launched
Five other teenagers plus the owner of the camp are killed off one-by-one until just one counsellor, Alice, remains. In a state of panic, having found the corpses of some of her fellow counsellors, Alice is relieved when a car pulls up at the camp and a kindly maternal figure called Mrs Vorhees emerges. Mrs Vorhees claims to be a friend of the camp owner, but upon finding the body of one of the counsellors she reminisces about the aforementioned drowned boy, Jason, who was her son. She then attacks Alice and a game of cat and mouse develops until a memorable confrontation at the lake in which Alice attacks the onrushing Mrs Vorhees with a paddle, decapitating her and ending her nightmare. At least that's what she thought …
It was with the closing minutes of the movie that a franchise was launched. Both Miller and Savini admit to being inspired by Brian De Palma's 1976 film 'Carrie' when they decided to give the ending a bit more oomph. As Alice is relaxing serenely after her ordeal on a boat in the middle of the lake a young boy, evidently the drowned Jason, jumps out of the lake and tries to pull her under. We later see her safely in hospital, relaying this on to police, who say that they didn't find any boy.
The media response was generally less than favourable to 'Friday the 13th' upon its Stateside release on 9 May 1980, with film critic Gene Siskel describing director Cunningham as 'one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business?. However since the movie made its modest budget back 10 times over on its opening weekend alone, Paramount — who distributed the movie in the USA — acquired worldwide distribution rights for the franchise and began work on a sequel.
Cunningham, however, was less than enthused: 'I just didn't get it. 'Friday the 13th' was reality based. When you added Jason as a machete-wielding character you're shifting to a mythological base. Since then I have come to understand it, but in the beginning I just didn't get it at all.'
The sequel was instead helmed by Steve Miner, who was Associate Producer of the original, and was released in the spring of 1981, less than a year after its predecessor.
One of the most controversial deaths in the series takes place in this film
It starts with a recap of the finale of the previous film, before catching up with Alice in her apartment two months down the line. Within minutes she becomes the first of Jason Vorhees' many victims, though as with the first film you don't see the actual killer until the film's denouement. Jason's next victim is creepy prophet of doom Ralph, another character from the original film, before he turns his attention to the young counsellors at a training centre near to the site of the earlier murders.
One of the most controversial deaths in the series takes place in this film, as wheelchair user Mark has a machete buried in his head just before he is plunged unceremoniously down a long flight of stairs.
In the final confrontation you finally see Jason wearing an old cloth sack over his head, living in a ramshackle hut where he has placed his mother's head on a shrine. He is the adult version of the young boy that emerged from the lake in the original film's chair-jumper, so viewers are left to assume that Jason survived his supposed drowning and has lived in the woods ever since, before having his fury stoked by the death of his mother.
With opening weekend takings in the USA of over $6 million from a budget of $1.25 million, the sequel built on the success of its original, and Paramount had no hesitation in greenlighting a third film in the franchise. Steve Miner, who directed the sequel, was again at the helm for the 1982 'threequel', which was originally intended to complete a trilogy and end the series.
It is particularly noteworthy for three things. Firstly it is a 3D film, and Miner explains his thought process behind this decision: 'With the Friday the 13th films, we had always made a conscious decision to make the same movie over again, only each one would be slightly different. As a kid, one of my earliest memories is of my father taking me to see 'Fort Ti', a three-dimensional film. So it occurred to me that a Friday Part 3 and 3-D would be perfect combination.'
The film utilised 3D with its opening credits leaping out of the screen, as well as gimmicky scenes involving juggling and a yoyo and a particularly family-friendly death scene involving a popping eyeball. Secondly, and more significantly, it was the film that united Jason with his iconic hockey mask. Having dispatched the practical joker Shelly off screen, Jason dons his victim's hockey mask for the rest of the film, and indeed throughout the films that followed. Finally it was the first film in the franchise whose Stateside release coincided with an actual Friday the 13th (it was released on Friday 13th August 1982).
As with its predecessor the film showed Jason to be indiscriminate, this time dispatching a pregnant lady. The film also implies for the first time that Jason may be more than human, as he survives a hanging and an axe to the head during his battle with plucky final girl Chris. In spite of a poor critical reception the film knocked 'E.T.' off the top of the box office, and the continued success of the series meant that the bandwagon rolled on.
Two years later the franchise looked like it had come to an end with the fourth film in the series, directed by Joseph Zito and subtitled 'The Final Chapter' (spoiler alert — it wasn't). For the first time it featured a final boy in the shape of Tommy Jarvis played by 1980s star Corey Feldman who, along with sister Trish, battled Jason in what was meant to be the series' finale. Tom Savini returned, hoping to kill off the creature he created at the end of the first film.
Quite simply, the public still wanted to see these films
The film, released in the US on Friday 13 April 1984, began with Jason rising from the dead to escape from hospital before going on his trademark killing spree. Before he was George McFly in 1980s classic 'Back to the Future', Crispin Glover appeared as Jimmy, one of Jason's victims. Glover's character did however survive long enough for the actor to improvise a truly awful dance routine (search for 'Crispin Glover dance' online and prepare to wince). Ultimately Jason met his match in 12 year-old prosthetics prodigy Tommy, who made himself up to look like a young Jason during the film's final confrontation, before offing the killer with a machete.
And that should have been that. However, as Paramount Chairman and CEO at the time, Frank Mancuso Sr, explained, public opinion kept the franchise running:
'It was our sincere intent for 'The Final Chapter' to be the last film in the series. And then, of course, it had this huge opening success, and we had to rethink it all. This was a bottom line-based reality. Quite simply, the public still wanted to see these films. So until they really stopped coming, why not continue to make more?'
A fifth entry in the series was shortly in production and released in cinemas less than a year after the supposed end of the franchise. 'Friday the 13th: A New Beginning' was intended to be just that, as Paramount intended to launch a new trilogy of films with a different killer in each. In fact the film was cast under the fake name 'Repetition', with would-be cast members kept in the dark that it was in fact part of the 'Friday the 13th' series. Lead actor John Shepherd recalls: 'I remember then finding out it was a 'Friday the 13th' and being really disappointed … I was counselling kids at a church up in L A. I had all these moms who were going to freak out if they saw my picture in the paper with a machete. And that's exactly what happened.'
The film, directed by Danny Steinmann and released on 22 March 1985, opens with Tommy, again played by Feldman, witnessing a pair of young punks digging up the body of Jason. Feldman filmed this cameo during a brief break from filming 'The Goonies', arguably his breakthrough role. However this is merely the dream of an older Tommy, played by Shepherd, as he is driven to a halfway house for troubled youths, which is the film's setting.
As the body count rises and Tommy disappears, it seems as though he may have taken on the mantle of his former tormentor. However, he appears in the nick of time to save remaining survivors Pam and Reggie from their masked assailant who, in a call back to the original film, is in fact a grieving parent. The film concludes with Tommy donning the hockey mask, seemingly to murder Pam.
Such was the lukewarm reception to the film that the plan to begin a new trilogy of standalone films fell at the first hurdle, and the next entry in the franchise saw the resurrection of Jason. Tom McLoughlin, director of 'Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives', admitted to being given 'carte blanche' with only one real caveat — that he bring Jason back to life. McLoughlin decided to make the film a follow up to Part IV, and disregard events of 'A New Beginning'. Released on 1 August 1986 it began with Tommy, played by another new actor, being released from an asylum and carrying out a strange form of therapy — namely digging Jason's body up, impaling him with a metal sign and then throwing his hockey mask in the grave alongside him for good measure. Of course lightning strikes and, before you can say 'Mary Shelley', Jason does indeed live.
Crystal Lake has been renamed Forest Green in a bid to erase its unfortunate past, so when Tommy runs into the local sheriff's office to warn of Jason's revival, he is dismissed as a troublemaker. As the bodies start piling up it is Tommy who is the scapegoat. However Tommy ends up the hero as he wraps Jason in chains and returns him to his watery grave of Crystal Lake.
The closing theme, 'He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask)', was written specially for the film, and performed by shock rocker Alice Cooper. A 'Friday the 13th' video game was also released across home computing platforms between 1985 and 1986, underlining the extent to which Jason was becoming a pop culture icon.
The next high-profile project to use the 'Friday the 13th' name was somewhat out of leftfield. Due to the desire of Paramount to get involved with syndicated TV it was decided to use the 'Friday the 13th' brand to launch a TV series in 1987. However, in order to avoid paying the rights to use the Jason character, the show had no connection with the film series beyond the name and some of the minds behind it. Instead it was about two distant cousins who inherited an antiques shop from their uncle, Lewis Vendredi (if you know your French you'll spot the Friday connection). All the antiques had been cursed by the devil and in each episode the cousins teamed up with Jack, an old friend of Lewis, in order to track down the antique that had been sold by Lewis and was causing death and destruction.
The series ran for three seasons until it was contentiously cancelled by Paramount in 1991 due to threats from the religious right in the USA, in particular Donald Wildmon, who was essentially the US equivalent of Mary Whitehouse. In spite of it being one of the highest-rated series in syndication in the USA, sponsors began to get cold feet in their association with the show when Wildmon and his associates started lobbying. The protests were largely about the name of the show and its perceived connection to the film franchise, as co-creator Larry B Williams explains: 'The title was both the thing that sold the show and the thing that killed the show. I was so offended when I'd read the stuff they were saying about it, because it was apparent that the people on the religious right did not watch a single episode.' However Paramount decided it was more hassle than it was worth to fight back, and cancelled the show.
With 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' and its wisecracking villain Freddy Krueger beginning to eclipse Jason as the horror icon du jour in the latter years of the decade, Paramount knew that they needed to up their game.
While horror fans clamoured for a Freddy vs Jason face-off 1988's 'Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood' instead saw a film that was dubbed 'Jason vs Carrie'. It was also the first film in which Kane Hodder, considered to be the definitive Jason, donned the iconic hockey mask. The role had been played by a host of different people (mostly stuntmen) over the course of the series, including multiple actors in two of the films. The role had even been uncredited in 'The Final Chapter' because the actor, Ted White, to put it delicately, compared the film to a bowel movement and therefore did not want his name attached to it. Hodder would reprise the role of Jason in the next three entries in the series.
The film was released on Friday 13 May 1988, but was in truth a bit of a mess, with screenwriter Daryl Haney and director John Carl Buechler later blaming it on the control freakery of associate producer Barbara Sachs. Its main protagonist Tina is a telekinetic (hence the Carrie comparisons), a talent that first manifested when staying at Crystal Lake as a child, and which led to the death of her father. She returns to Crystal Lake on the advice of her self-serving psychiatrist, and inadvertently uses her ability to loosen the chains around Jason allowing him to escape from the Lake. The inevitable bloodbath ensues before Tina finds her mother's dead body and takes the fight to Jason, using her telekinesis to assault him in a variety of ways, before the grounded ending in which her father jumps out of the lake and drags Jason back down with him. 'Citizen Kane' it ain't.
In spite of creative differences, tensions on set (the actors who played the lead couple did not get on) and cuts from the ratings board, the film hit the top of the box office on its opening weekend. It did not, however, have the same level of success as some of the earlier films in the franchise, nor did it have the same success as the fourth film starring a certain badly-scarred dream demon upon its release later in the year (its box-office takings were more than double). Clearly a new way was needed to re-energise the franchise.
Rob Hedden, who had worked for 'Friday the 13th : The Series' was approached to write and direct the eighth movie. When he met with the Paramount bigwigs he expressed his desire to 'take Jason out of Crystal Lake' and 'take him and put him in a big city'. Once it was agreed that the film would be subtitled 'Jason Takes Manhattan' Hedden had grand plans: 'There was going to be a tremendous scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. A boxing match in Madison Square Garden. Jason would go through department stores. He'd go through Times Square. He'd go into a Broadway play. He'd even crawl onto the top of the Statue of Liberty and dive off.'
However budgetary constraints meant that only the final third of the movie was set in New York (and most of the filming for this took place in Vancouver) with the majority of the action set aboard a cruise ship as a graduating class set sail from Crystal Lake. In the film, which was released on 28 July 1989, Jason is awakened when the anchors of a houseboat damage some cabling and shock him back to life. Jason sneaks on board the SS Lazarus (evidently SS Frankenstein was unavailable) and starts doing what he does best, dispatching teenagers in a variety of imaginative methods.
The ship sinks when fire breaks out following a particularly grisly death, though a handful of survivors do escape on a lifeboat and arrive in the Big Apple. Jason finds his way there too, and between tangling with street gangs and an amusing double-take at an ice hockey billboard, still finds time to whittle down the survivors to just two — Rennie and Sean. Jason is finally vanquished by a flood of toxic waste in the sewer system. When the waste clears, the killer is dead and has been transformed back to a child, in a sense bringing the series full circle.
In spite of the novelty of Jason leaving Crystal Lake and rampaging through New York, the film had the lowest box office returns of any film in the franchise to date (though it is a personal favourite of mine).
Tobe Hooper's 1974 release 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' is widely credited as being the film that started the slasher movie cycle, but it was only in the wake of 'Friday the 13th' that the sub-genre went into overdrive. This is largely because 'Halloween' and 'Friday the 13th' created a template that a number of other films could follow on a relatively low budget — namely, to put a group of teenagers together for a specific occasion, usually in an isolated setting and with minimal adult presence, and have them picked off one-by-one by their assailant. Often the killer would be unseen until the end, and on a mission to gain revenge for a past trauma (in these cases the film would usually open with a flashback scene). The final girl or boy would normally be relatively chaste or innocent (the slasher movie survival equation is sex and/or drugs equals death).
To underline the influence of 'Friday the 13th' in particular, other slasher films set in holiday camps, including 'The Burning' and 'Sleepaway Camp' and its sequels, were among the wave of slashers to be released in the 1980s. Commentators have suggested that the popularity of slashers tapped into the zeitgeist of the era which Valerie Wee described as 'a declining faith in family and the adult world' in her article 'Resurrecting and updating the teen slasher'. It was natural that films such as these which heavily featured teenagers would appeal to a teen audience, and the teens in peril scenario proved strangely cathartic for young people in this era. If you add in the reliability and predictability of the model (you usually knew what you were going to get with a slasher movie) as well as the suspense that was generated over who would die next and how, you had a potent cocktail for teenage audiences.
However as the decade wore on and the 1990s dawned, this sub-genre's popularity waned. Frank Mancuso Jr, who was heavily involved with the franchise through his roles at Paramount and Hometown Films, described the decision to give the franchise a break in the wake of the eighth film's disappointing performance: 'It was the law of diminishing returns. There was no bigger reason than that. They were doing progressively less and less box office, and I just felt that everybody had had their fill of Jason.' The series did, inevitably, make a comeback, but with a slow trickle of releases compared to the steady stream that hit the market in the 1980s.
It wasn't until 1993 that Jason (sort of) rose again in the shape of 'Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday'. In this film, the spirit of Jason possesses various people while Freddy Krueger's hand makes an appearance at the end to set up a Freddy and Jason mash-up, which eventually appeared a decade down the line. The film starred John D Le May, who played one of the main characters in the first two seasons of 'Friday the 13th: The Series'.
It was a nine-year jump until 'Jason X' (2002), in which Jason finds himself on a spaceship in the future, and a year later the long-awaited 'Freddy vs Jason' finally appeared. The original's director, Sean S Cunningham, returned to produce both. The film series was rebooted in 2009 by Marcus Nispel (who had also refreshed 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' in 2003), simply titled 'Friday the 13th'. Both a TV series and further films have been mooted since then, but nothing has been released, marking a decade since the last film in the franchise — the longest gap between releases since the series' inception.
But given Jason has bounced back from drowning, hanging, a machete in the head, burial, toxic waste and incineration, it's surely only a matter of time until the man behind the mask rises again.
