Friday The 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan

Friday The 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan

Follow in the bloody wake of Jason Voorhees, the "man behind the mask", on his endless quest for revenge against irresponsible teenagers like the ones who let him drown as a boy in Crystal Lake. Heralded as the original slasher film, Friday the 13th spawned many sequels (and many imitators), but what this viewer found most interesting was not so much the suspense and the wanton carnage, but rather Jason's transformation through the series; he begins as a somewhat human, back-woods child of horror and misfortune bent on revenge, and as the series progresses, Jason seems to become more proficient and more coordinated in his killing--this really becomes apparent from the moment he first dons the hockey mask in Part III. In fact, his transformation takes him fully into the supernatural (assuming he wasn't to begin with), so that his natural human physical vulnerabilities slowly fall by the wayside as he evolves into an unstoppable killing machine, able to be anywhere and everywhere and to survive just about anything despite his outward physical deterioration. In short, he becomes the ultimate "bogeyman". There's sure to be some subtext in these films as well about the questionable social legacy our Puritanical forefathers left us in this country, and how "deserving" of violence each of Jason's victims is in their own way for their supposed "sins", but in the end, these movies are meant to be enjoyed for their scare value, interspersed with the occasional bit of gallows humor, that makes us all glad we aren't singing kumbaya around a campfire at Camp Crystal Lake while something unseen and sinister circles close by us in the dark.
-Will