Films: 1980s
(1980) Friday the 13th
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Friday the 13th
Director: Sean S. Cunningham
Release: 1980
Dreadfully overshadowed by the reputations of its sequels, Sean S. Cunningham's "Friday the 13th" stands apart from its descendents as an artfully photographed and well-acted thriller.
Cunningham is clearly hungry, driving "Friday the 13th" to the screen with an immediacy and atmosphere worth several viewings. "Friday the 13th" shows the marks of a director early in love with the camera, the scenery available to his lens and the freedom to make an aggressive subject matter resonate in ways that suggest attention to Alfred Hitchcock.
The story, much like 1978's "Halloween," from which it drew its commercial inspiration, is simple. Camp Crystal Lake in lower New Jersey is closed after the brutal slaying of two counselors in 1958.
Three decades later, a Crystal Lake native reopens the site and hires staff to prepare it for business. In the space of an afternoon and evening, on the date of the movie title, these new counselors are murdered until one survivor remains.
In the course of confronting the killer, our survivor learns the secret motivation for the murders. A final, shocking scene elevates the tale from the purely psychological to the potentially supernatural.
"Friday the 13th" works.
First, it is suspenseful. Cunningham keeps his camera in the woods. Much like Hitchcock he implicates the audience as voyeur, following the killer's quarry through branches and perches above the beach, through windows and from behind curtains and doorways. The viewer is drawn into the plot, knowing the plans and strategy of the killer before the characters in the film.
Second, it is visually arresting. Not only do Cunningham and make-up effects artist Tom Savini create some disturbing and shocking murder sequences, Cunningham knows how to linger.
"Friday the 13th" is suffused with atmospheric shots by cinematographer Barry Abrams. His lens studies details of the camp for longer than is purely economical. It might be a bridge and a gas pump, or a counselor disappearing around the bend, or the way light plays across the water of the lake. Cunningham and Abrams offer compositions, not just narrative.
Cunningham is also clearly in love with the sexual crackle of his young and beautiful actors. There is an essentially innocent sexual revelry in the way he lets actor Kevin Bacon's torso and face look gorgeously young, or in the bikini-clad bodies of his actresses. There is little outright lasciviousness in Cunningham's display of fit and youthful bodies, just a summertime freedom that goes far in suggesting the theme of "Friday the 13th."
That theme is ugly and in evidence at every turn. Over and over again in the film, its initially carefree and vigorous cast encounter each other in death. The impaled, lacerated and bloody bodies of their peers are thrown through windows, propped up in cars, nailed to doors and swung from ceilings.
Death is the repetitive motif. Innocence is its antidote.
The script's chief protagonist, Alice (Adrienne King) is sexually disinterested. She is stronger for her lack of diffusion, not distracted by the urge to cavort. Sex leaves other characters vulnerable to the lurking killer in "Friday the 13th." Abstinence is self-preservation.
But more complicated than simply stabbing teenagers in-coitus, the murderer in "Friday the 13th" must complete the act by displaying the victims, placing them around the camp following their sexual encounters. Given the motive, revenge for a lost child, this display of the kids' bodies is a kind of symbolic explanation for the acts. The death of youth must breed the death of more youth, and the killer is making Crystal Lake a museum to this ethos.
Escape from Crystal Lake, then, is a complicated event. On the one hand, Alice's survival represents evasion of adolescent traps and terrors. On the other hand, it is a fantasy, for the submersion of Alice's lustful years is only that, burial of the thing that will reemerge in unexpected place.
"Friday the 13th" wins on every front, and leaves the story on a peculiar shot - Crystal Lake and the strange disturbance of its surface that suggests future horror. While other filmmakers would run with that suggestion and transform Cunningham's initial story into something eventually base and less beautiful, this is the real thing. A triumph.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
