Friday the 13th review – original teen horror classic now looks bizarrely innocent

Sean S Cunningham’s teen horror classic from 1980 is now rereleased: this is the original movie, the ancestral prequel or origin myth machine-tooled to create a franchise, that readies the noisome and mostly offscreen figure of Jason Voorhees as an almost supernatural surviving villain of the future series – although this went against the idea of his supposed death in this film as the premise for a more rational psychological thriller. This franchise clearly arose from the wild popularity of John Carpenter’s Halloween, although Friday the 13th openly borrows from a much more venerable model, Hitchcock’s Psycho, in the screeching Herrmannesque strings and the oedipal complex behind the horror – although this one being rather ingeniously showed from the point of view of the mother, Mrs Pamela Voorhees, played by Betsy Palmer.

The action of the movie now seems markedly, even experimentally slow, as the summer camp counsellors (that is, the young adult supervisors hired to look after the children) show up early on the fateful date to help with last-minute building and decorating work on the recently re-opened Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey. The site is an Edenic paradise but notorious for being the location of an unsolved 1958 murder of two teenagers who were having sex; this outrage is shown in flashback from the killer’s point of view.

The young people in the present day (including a fresh-faced Kevin Bacon) fulfil their narrative function by hanging around in swimsuits or underwear until they are picked off one by one, generally with gruesome prosthetics work: seeping slash wounds on the throat and a decapitation revealing a horribly meaty circular stump. And of course there is the “final girl”: the character who is revealed to have artistic skills and a more substantial inner life, and whose final ordeal takes place on the rippling lake itself. Plus there is broad comedy in the figure of Crazy Ralph, played by Walt Gorney, a cranky old-timer who hangs around predicting disaster for everyone involved in Camp Crystal Lake like Pte Frazer in Dad’s Army, telling the incredulous kids: “You’re all doomed!”

There’s some bizarre fun in this (almost innocent) film, but maybe the fanbase are the ones to get most out of a revisit.