This special issue celebrates the complexity, artistry, and cultural value of the Friday the 13th franchise, and it does so against four decades of reviewers who have dismissed and decried it. Indeed, the first essay of the issue shows pretty starkly how wrong mainstream film reviewers can be about horror film. In “‘It’s worth recognizing only as an artefact of our culture:’ Critics and the Friday the 13^th Franchise (1980-2001),” Todd K. Platts surveys those reviews of the ten films in the main Friday the 13th franchise that appeared in Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. What is apparent from this fascinating survey is that mainstream film critics have little insight or imagination when it comes to horror films. To anyone who knows these ten films, in all their diversity, it is stunning that critics can find nothing to say but the same thing about film after film. It seems these reviewers weren’t watching: they had the purported slasher formula so fixed in their heads (while all the time saying the films themselves did nothing but purvey that formula) that they failed to see how each film actually served up innovations.

A watershed moment in the history of slasher films and their reviewers, and Friday the 13th in particular, was the infamous campaign launched by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert in their 1980 Sneak Previews TV broadcast; in this “special episode,” Siskel and Ebert devoted almost thirty minutes to excoriating what they called “women-in-danger” films.^[i] Friday the 13th (1980) was Exhibit A–the prime example of this harmful subgenre, which, Siskel and Ebert proclaimed, was little more than a violent and nasty backlash against women’s liberation. Siskel and Ebert returned to Friday the 13th more than to any other film in this episode–three times–in order to illustrate their major points of discomfort. They show the scene in which Annie (Robbi Morgan) gets a ride to camp from a stranger, which, Siskel and Ebert argued, illustrated how these films punish women for an independence that would be celebrated in men. They show the scene in which Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) goes to the bathroom right after having sex with Jack (Kevin Bacon) in order to demonstrate their claim that the film linked sex with violence and conveyed the message, “Act this way, young women, and you’re asking for trouble.” And they ended by screening the opening flashback scene of the film, the original murder of two camp counselors. Siskel uses this scene to support his assertion that the women-in-danger film can basically be boiled down to one image, “a woman screaming in abject terror.”

Generally, the diversity and complexity of the essays in this special issue, along with the critical tradition on which it builds (which you can see in our bibliography), belie the argument Siskel and Ebert make. However, Cory Hasabeard conducted a fascinating overview of the kills in the Friday the 13th franchise (all 177 of them!) and comes up with some results–about the gender of the victim, the gruesomeness of the deaths, victim penetration, victim objectification, and how long the victim is shown to be in terror–that may well add support, after the fact, to what Siskel and Ebert claimed in 1980.^[ii] Critics writing about Friday the 13th should definitely, going forward, reckon with Hasabeard’s data, analysis, and conclusions.

Siskel and Ebert clearly fail, however, to recognize the artistry of Friday the 13th. This omission is all the more striking in that, in the last part of their show, they shift from castigating Friday the 13th and other “women-in-danger” films to lavishing praise on Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). The reviewers admire Carpenter’s film for its “artistry and craftmanship” and for ensuring that “your basic sympathies are always enlisted on the side of the woman.” Siskel and Ebert’s praise of Halloween only highlights their refusal to see Friday the 13th’s complexity, including in the scenes they themselves adduce as evidence of its awful exploitative impulses. They don’t acknowledge, for instance, that the killer of Friday the 13th is a woman, not a sexually frustrated man, that the film actually goes to some lengths to elicit sympathy for Annie and, later, for Alice (Adrienne King), or that the scene in which Marcie is stalked in the bathroom actually involves a series of complex and shifting point-of-view shots. Fraser Coffeen’s essay in this special issue traces the evolution of the point-of-view shot (specifically, the killer’s point-of-view shot) within the horror genre in order to demonstrate how Friday the 13th upends audience expectations. Siskel and Ebert are perhaps the first to identify what critics like Carol J. Clover and Vera Dika will soon explore further–that in these films, “we view the scene through the eyes of the killer.” It’s almost as if, Ebert continues, “the audience is being asked to identify with the attackers in these movies, and that really bothers me.” But it is worth comparing the discussion Siskel and Ebert have about the scene in which Marcie is stalked in the bathroom (17:30 – 19:35) to Coffeen’s analysis of its actual complexity. “Artistry can redeem any subject matter,” Ebert says. But not if you stubbornly refuse to see it, not if your prior assumptions blind you to it.

Here is the “Women in Danger” episode of Sneak Previews. You can see Siskel and Ebert’s discussion of the scene from Friday the 13th, in which Marcie is stalked in the camp bathroom, at 17:30-19:35.

Film critics have, of course, consistently found value in the slasher subgenre in general and the Friday the 13th films in particular. Perhaps no critic has done more to shape the conversation around the slasher film than Carol Clover, who took films that were, as she put it, “at the bottom of the horror heap,” and launched a complex analysis of their gender politics.^[iii] Clover coined the term “Final Girl” to describe the character who is “chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again”–who is “abject terror personified.” Yet she survives.^[iv] The Final Girl is, Clover argued, both fear personified and the hero of her own story, thus serving as the ambiguously gendered point of identification for both female and male viewers. Through the Final Girl, the slasher film constitutes, Clover claims, “a visible adjustment in the terms of gender representation.”^[v] Not surprising, Clover adduces two Final Girls from Friday the 13th films to make her argument–Alice from the first and Ginny (Amy Steel) from the second.^[vi]

The contributions to this special issue join an ongoing and vibrant critical conversation, then, about gender in the slasher film.^[vii] And they join this conversation by exploring the Friday the 13th films, which have, to adapt Clover’s phrase, found themselves “at the bottom of the [slasher]heap,” languishing in the shadow of “better” films like Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). Dustin Dunaway uses R.W. Connell’s Masculinities and John Bowlby’s description of relationship attachment styles in order to explore the evolving formations of masculinity in the first four Friday the 13th films, arguing that Part 2 and Part III doubled down on the masculine types featured in the first film, while The Final Chapter did something new. Dunaway ends by considering Jason as conventional masculinity’s abject negation. Ethan Robles continues Dunaway’s recognition of the distinctiveness of The Final Chapter but looks not at Ted and Jimmy but at the important character of Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman). Indeed, Robles argues that this 1984 installment represented the first incarnation of the “Final Boy” in the slasher subgenre. Finally, David Ruis Fisher details the narrative potential in queering the Friday the 13th films–including taking up the central fact that the franchise was booming during the 1980s, at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic–and how such a reading creates a constructive form of representation.

The next set of essays in this special issue offer readings of specific entries in the franchise, highlighting their narrative and aesthetic innovations; in many cases, these essays consider how various Friday the 13th installments evince an intriguing generic hybridity. Wickham Clayton has already offered an important analysis of the complexity of Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning,^[viii] and here he argues for the distinctiveness of Part III in the ways it presents “uncomfortable death” and, at the same time, a complicated politics. Brian Fanelli then takes up Friday the 13^th Part VI: Jason Lives, exploring how this entry is distinctive in the ways it draws on the conventions of Universal’s Monster movies from the 1930s and 40s, mixing a Gothic seriousness with a significant comedic touch. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. also explores the franchise’s genre hybridity, reading Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan as very much akin to the high-school sex comedy / romance (think The Breakfast Club). Despite the fact that it takes place (mostly) on a ship and (partly) in Manhattan, this installment is every bit a high-school film, Wetmore argues. Stella Castelli applies a vaudeville aesthetic framework to the titular characters in Freddy vs Jason and, in doing so, demonstrates how the relationship between these two iconic characters reads as purely performative. Lastly, extending beyond the films themselves, Caitlin Duffy explains how Friday the 13th: The Game incorporates and challenges narrative elements of the film in order to expand the storytelling potential of the cinematic franchise.

The next two essays, like those before, each take up a particular Friday the 13th film, but they both do so in the larger context of the ecological implications of the franchise, something that definitely warrants further analysis. Friday the 13th quite clearly and repeatedly associates Jason with nature: he is associated with the water, with storms, with forest. In his brilliant reading of the film’s roots in Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971)^[ix], Adam Lowenstein argues that both films evince a narrative drive to clear the landscape of characters: “Those humans whose lives disturb the landscape are methodically removed, until only the landscape itself and a token living (or perhaps undead) presence remains.” Lowenstein calls this the “pleasure of subtractive spectatorship,” and it encourages the audience to “integrate themselves with the landscape.”^[x] In the first film, Mrs. Voorhees is the force of “depopulation”–but then Jason takes over the task. Jason seems eerily bound with nature and inimical to the human, embodying an ecological critique.

Jason J. Wallin explores the connection of Jason and nature in a close reading of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, noting that the “rising sense of dread evoked throughout the body of the film is composed largely through the ‘inhuman gaze’ of the camera withdrawn under the cover of the woods”–a strategy used, of course, in numerous installments of the franchise. Wallin provocatively, and convincingly, coins the term “eco-stalker” and goes on to connect the strain of monstrous nature running throughout The Final Chapter with consumer culture.  Matthew Jones locates Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives as a similarly ecogothic text, beginning by pointing out how this particular entry in the franchise was released in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Jones reassesses the iconic slasher as “a force of monstrous nature, the result of materialized fears stemming from environmental poisoning and mutation,” reading Jason Lives as a “collective ecological nightmare.”

The last set of essays address the franchise more generally in relation to US culture. Wade Newhouse offers an insightful analysis of how the Friday the 13th films draw on myths of frontier violence and female survival that have long been a part of the American tradition. Newhouse specifically reads the Friday the 13th films, especially their Final Girls, as a continuation of Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity narrative and of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), one of the first gothic novels published in the US. Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles’ essay also reads the Friday the 13th films–and Jason in particular–within enduring American traditions, specifically the figure of the hillbilly and the more recently emergent figure of the “berserker,” which has become a powerful symbol of the Right. Brennan Thomas explores how Friday the 13th Part III, despite its 3D gimmick, is a topically relevant film exploring social issues reflective of a post-Vietnam America, specifically the era’s disenfranchised and displaced youth. And finally, Erin Harrington considers the reverberations of the first four Friday the 13th films, read alongside The Baby-sitters’ Club Super Special #2. This unlikely pairing, Harrington argues, discloses how both have demonstrably contributed to shaping views of American adolescence.

Some of these essays are personal, some are academic, some are both, but they each offer a new way to think about an important horror franchise that has been going strong for forty years. We hope you enjoy them!

Notes:

^[i] Ebert also published an article that covered the arguments he and Siskel made on their show.

^[ii] For other content analyses of the slasher film generally, see Cowan and O’Brien, Linz and Donnerstein, Sapolsky, Molitor and Luque, and Weaver.

^[iii] Clover, 21.

^[iv] Clover, 35.

^[v] Clover, 64.

^[vi] Clover, 38, 39-40.

^[vii] See Dika, Lizardi, Pinedo, and Rieser for discussions of gender in the slasher film.

^[viii] Clayton, 37-50.

^[ix] Turnock (pp. 183-96) also analyses Friday the 13th’s relationship to Bay of Blood.

^[x] Lowenstein, 138.

Bibliography:

Budra, Paul. “Recurrent Monsters: Why Freddy, Michael and Jason Keep Coming Back.” Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, edited by Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg, University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Clayton, Wickham. “Undermining the Moneygrubbers, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Friday the 13th Part V.” Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, edited by Clayton, Palgrave Macmillan,  2015, pp. 37-50.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Conrich, Ian. “The Friday the 13th Films and the Cultural Function of a Modern Grand Guignol.” Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, edited by Ian Conrich, I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Cowan, Gloria, and Margaret O’Brien. “Gender and Survival vs. Death in Slasher Films: A Content Analysis.” Sex Roles, 23, 1990, pp. 187-96.

Dika, Vera. Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.

Ebert, Roger. “Why Movie Audiences Aren’t Safe Anymore.” American Film, vol. 6, no.5, March 1981, pp. 54-6.

Hills, Matt. “Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures.” Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Sconce, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 219-39.

Kvaran, Kara M. “’You’re All Doomed!’ A Socioeconomic Analysis of Slasher Films.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 2016, pp. 953-70.

Linz, Daniel, and Edward Donnerstein. “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: A Reinterpretation.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol. 38, no. 2, 1994, pp. 243-46.

Lizardi, Ryan. “Re-Imagining Hegemony and Misogyny in the Contemporary Slasher Remake.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 38, no. 3, 2010, pp. 113-21.

Lowenstein, Adam. “The Giallo/Slasher Landscape: Ecologia del Delitto, Friday the 13th and Subtractive Spectatorship.” Italian Horror Cinema, edited by Stefano Bachiera and Ross Hunter, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 127-44.

Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.

Petridis, Sotiris. “A Historical Approach to the Slasher Film.” Film International, vol. 12, no.1, 2014, pp. 76-84.

Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. SUNY Press, 2016.

Rieser, Klaus. “Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 3, no. 4, 2001, pp. 370-392.

Rockoff, Adam. Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. McFarland, 2011.

Sapolsky, B. S., F. Molitor, and S. Luque. “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: Reexamining the Assumptions.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2003, pp. 28-38.

Turnock, Bryan. “The Slasher Film.” Studying Horror Cinema. Auteur, 2019, pp. 181-201.

Weaver, James B. III. “Are ‘Slasher’ Horror Films Sexually Violent? A Content Analysis.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol. 35, no. 3, 1991, pp. 385-92.

Stella Castelli holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics and Theory and History of Photography as well as an MA in English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Zurich. She wrote her MA thesis on Aestheticized Representations of Death in American Literature and Film: Poe, Hitchcock, Craven, exploring repressions of death and their symptomatic reappearance in contemporary American culture. She is currently affiliated with the University of Zurich where she is working on her doctoral dissertation Death is Served: American Recipes for Murder – A Serial Compulsion furthering her research within this field with a specific interest in the serial depiction of death. Among articles she has published are texts focusing on the ambiguous figure of the clown, the representation of the female body in The Stepford Wives and Her as well as Foucauldian reading of Ida Lupino’s film noir Hitchhiker. Her research interests include American cultural studies, seriality and the serial, film, in particular cinematic renditions of horror, terror, fear and death, literary and cultural theory in particular Benjamin, Freud, Foucault, Blanchot and Kristeva.

Wickham Clayton is a Lecturer in Film Production at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. He is author of See!Hear!Cut!Kill!: Experiencing Friday the 13^th (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), and editor of Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and The Bible Onscreen in the New Millennium: New Heart and New Spirit (Manchester University Press, 2020).

Fraser Coffeen is a former staff writer for Sports Blog Nation affiliate Bloody Elbow and one of the founding editors of LiverKick.com. His work has been published in One Night Only magazine and the book How to Analyze and Review Comics (coming in 2020 from Sequart), in addition to numerous websites. In addition to writing, he has worked as a comic book model, professional wrestling ring announcer, human blockhead, theater blood FX artist, and, by day, middle school principal. Fraser is a former member of Chicago’s critically acclaimed Defiant Theater, and a graduate of Northwestern University and the National College of Education at National Louis University.

Caitlin Duffy is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Stony Brook University in New York. Her scholarly interests include 19^th century American gothic literature and American horror cinema. She is particularly interested in exploring how capitalism and liberalism influences and colors gothic texts. Her work has been published in The Journal of Dracula Studies and Poe Studies. Caitlin currently teaches courses in film, literature, and writing at Stony Brook University.

Dustin Dunaway is the Chair of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Pueblo Community College in Pueblo, Colorado. He holds a Masters Degree in Communication from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His other publications include “Hypermasculinity as Power Currency in the Post-Apocalyptic Political Economy” in McFarland’s The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics. He also creates video essays as part of Cool Channel Classroom, presents at several conferences as part of the Colorado Coalition for Popular Culture Scholarship, and appears as a regular guest on The Deconstruction Workers podcast.

Elizabeth Erwin is a writer, assistant professor/librarian, and digital storyteller. She is currently working on her PhD in English and received her MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and her MA in American Studies from Lehigh University. Her research interests include American horror, serialized storytelling, LGBT+ media representation, nostalgia and digital literacy. A former blogger for Entertainment Weekly, she has presented her research at various fan and academic conferences and has worked on a number of digital history projects, including The Veterans Empathy Project and Beyond Steel. She co-edited (with Dawn Keetley) The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018) and her next co-edited collection (with Gwen Hofmann) on horror-comedy films is under contract (LUP). You can find her podcasting and writing about all things horror at www.HorrorHomeroom.com, a website she co-founded.

Brian Fanelli is a previous contributor to Horror Homeroom. He also writes about the genre for Signal Horizon, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and HorrOrigins. His creative writing has been published in The Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today, Paterson Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Blue Collar Review, and elsewhere. Brian has an M.F.A. from Wilkes University and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He is an assistant professor of English at Lackawanna College. Recently, he joined Twitter.

David Ruis Fisher is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Kansas where he has taught classes in Acting, Public Speaking as Performance, Introduction to Theatre, and Theatre History II. Recent publication includes a performance review of Luis Valdez’s revival of Zoot Suit for Theatre Journal (June 2018). Research interests include: Latinx Theatre and Performance, African American Theatre and Performance, Dramaturgy, Performance Studies, Staging Intimacy on Stage and in Film, Popular Culture Studies, and Acting/Directing Theory.

Erin Harrington is a lecturer in critical and cultural theory at the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (Routledge, 2017). Recent publications and works in progress consider genre in the New Zealand web series Ao-terror-oa, televised funeral practice in the reality series The Casketeers, female-helmed horror anthologies, the appropriation of horror comedy mockumentary series Wellington Paranormal by the New Zealand Police, theatrical adaptations of Evil Dead, and the affective potentials, aesthetics and rituals of slow horror. She also works as a theatre and arts critic, and appears regularly as a speaker and panelist.  

Cory Hasabeard is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and Memphis Theological Seminary, where he focused on Liberation Theology and the Political Ideology of Jesus. He is currently a theologian in residence at Borderland Mission in Nashville, Tennessee.  Cory brings his background in Black Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, and Queer Theology to his cultural analysis. He seeks to expose the systemic oppression white straight men have benefited from by using cultural artifacts and writing in a way that elicits a change in the oppressor.

Matthew Jones is an independent film scholar and film studies, photography and media teacher at Arizona Conservatory for Arts and Academics and Estrella Mountain Community College with a focused interest in genres and genre films, most notably horror, classical gangster and the Western. His latest writing on the Western, Demystifying the Myth: The Western’s Classical Phase, can be seen at Deep Focus Review, while his most recent study, Antagonistic Nature: The Loss of Anthropocentric Authority in Eco-Horror of the 1970s and 1980s is about to surface. He is also a cinematographer, photographer and associate member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars who tweets @ghostofFire. Matthew received his BA in Media Studies from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and his MH in Art and Visual Media from Tiffin University.

Dawn Keetley is professor of English, teaching horror/gothic literature, film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has most recently published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Horror Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Popular Television, Journal of Film and Video, and Gothic Studies. She is editor of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press, 2020) and We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (McFarland, 2014). She has also coedited (with Angela Tenga) Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016), (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017), and (with Elizabeth Erwin) The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018). Her monograph, Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Keetley is working on essays on ecohorror and on the contemporary horror film as well as a monograph on folk horror. She writes regularly for Horror Homeroom, which she co-founded, and her personal website is here.

Kom Kunyosying completed a PhD in English at the University of Oregon where he studied the overlap between iconic and ethnic representation in U.S. comics in relationship to other visual and prose media. He has published essays on the rise of geek culture and the hyperreal hillbilly (with Carter Soles) and on metonymy and ecology in Charles Burns’s Black Hole. He teaches literature and writing at Nashua Community College.

Wade Newhouse is professor of English and program director for Theatre and Musical Theatre at William Peace University in Raleigh, NC.  He teaches a wide range of courses including Southern Literature, Children’s Literature, and The Gothic, and he has published articles and book chapters on such writers as William Faulkner, Neil Gaiman, and Randall Kenan.  He directs one production per year in the William Peace University Theatre program and acts in local theatrical companies, most recently playing leading roles in Deathtrap, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth.  He also writes fiction and has published a handful of horror and science fiction stories in online zines.

Todd K. Platts is associate professor of sociology at Piedmont Virginia Community College. He has published many articles and book chapters on horror cinema. His recent publications include “Evolution and Slasher Films” (co-authored with Mathias Clasen) and “‘Horror Movies are Already Telling the Story…’ of Trump’s America” (coauthored with Kibiriti Majuto) His forthcoming publications include “Reviewing Get Out’s Reviews: What Critics Discussed and How Their Race Mattered” (coauthored with David Brunsma) and “The Unmade Undead: A Postmortem of the Post-9/11 Zombie Cycle.” He is currently co-editing Blumhouse Production: The New House of Horror with Mathias Clasen and Victoria McCollum.

Ethan Robles is a writer working out of Boston, MA. His fiction has appeared in Aphotic Realm, Sirens Call eZine, and Shotgun Honey. He is a staff writer at morbidlybeautiful.com and a frequent guest writer at horrorhomeroom.com. You can follow him on twitter @roblecop.

Carter Soles is associate professor of Film Studies in the English Department at SUNY Brockport. He has written on the cannibalistic hillbilly in 1970’s slasher films for Ecocinema: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2012), on petroculture, gender, and genre in the Mad Max franchise for Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (Lexington Books, 2019), and, with Kom Kunyosying, on the hyperreal hillbilly in The Walking Dead for The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018). He is currently co-editing an ecohorror anthology with Christy Tidwell and writing a book on cinematic ecohorror.

Brennan Thomas is an associate professor of English at Saint Francis University and directs the university’s writing center. She has published scholarly articles on the social, political and consumerist elements of the films Casablanca, A Christmas Story, Bambi, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the television series South Park.

Jason Wallin is Professor of Media and Youth Culture in Curriculum at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum (Palgrave MacMillan), Arts-based Inquiry: A Critique and Proposal (Sense Publishers) and co-producer of the extreme music documentary BLEKKMETAL (Grimposium, Uneasy Sleeper). Growing up, one of the only good things about my name was its association to the Friday the 13th franchise.

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is a professor at Loyola Marymount University, as well as an actor, director and stage combat choreographer. He is the author and editor of over two dozen books, including Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, Back from the Dead: Reading Remakes of Romero’s Zombie Films as Markers of their Time, The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Star Wars Films, The Streaming of Hill House, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Uncovering Stranger Things. He has also written over a hundred journal articles and book chapters on everything from Godzilla to exorcisms, Jesuit horror to African cinema.  You can find out more of his publications at www.SomethingWetmoreThisWayComes.com.

Ethan Robles

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) is not the best-known film of the Friday the 13th franchise. As the fourth installment, The Final Chapter seems comfortable with its formulaic construction and its embodiment of a clichéd slasher plot. We find Jason Voorhees murdered following the events of Friday the 13th Part III. He is transported to a local hospital, where he miraculously revives and begins making his journey back to Camp Crystal Lake. Near the infamous site, a divorcée, her children, and a group of unsuspecting teens are enjoying the summer days isolated in the wilderness. Their seclusion comes to an end when Jason arrives, having come home to continue his killing spree. Despite its simplicity, The Final Chapter is actually, I argue, one of the most daring of slasher films: it asks serious questions regarding the “Final Girl” of the horror genre.

The Friday the 13th franchise may be virtually synonymous with the slasher’s excesses, yet The Final Chapter offers an intriguing twist on the traditional slasher narrative. Instead of focusing on the Final Girl, The Final Chapter breaks form and gives us the first Final Boy. The film’s most complex character, Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), offers an entirely new relationship between the survivor and the slasher villain—as well as entirely new representations of gender and sexuality in horror. Tommy Jarvis is the only character in the film who is able to halt Jason’s relentless killing, and his arc is particularly important because it parallels his sister’s, Trish Jarvis (Kimberly Beck), including her transformation into the Final Girl. By comparing these two characters, The Final Chapter discloses the fundamental differences between a Final Girl and a Final Boy and, more importantly, it illuminates the meanings of the Final Boy within the slasher genre.

Trish (Kimberley Beck) – the Final Girl

Before comparing Tommy and Trish, I want to define the Final Girl trope and its relation to the Friday the 13th franchise. Defining the term is significant, because the Final Girl is one of the few scholarly concepts that has broken into mainstream culture. From very tongue-in-cheek films like Scream (1999) and The Final Girls (2015) to Riley Sager’s novel, Final Girls (2017), the concept has accrued nuances and meanings the more it has been adapted. That’s not a bad thing.  These adaptations invite conversation around the underlying themes of the slasher film and allow audiences outside of academia to see the richness in genre movies. However, understanding the Final Girl’s original definition is important, especially when examining the original trope’s evolution into the Final Boy.

The first iteration of the Final Girl came from Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The book is known for the articulation of the Final Girl concept, but narrowing the scope of the work does a disservice to Clover’s scholarship. Men, Women, and Chain Saws is perhaps the first scholarly book to appreciate low-budget, shock cinema and ascribe meaning to a genre that was traditionally written off as low-brow. Clover is not the only scholar and writer to see meaning within low-budget horror film, but she may have been one of the first to understand the significance of horror cinema for academic scholarship. Considering how hard it is for in-depth, scholarly writing to move beyond the confines of the ivory tower, Clover’s work deserves more credit than simply for identifying the Final Girl. Nonetheless, it is the Final Girl that remains her principal legacy.

On the surface, the meaning of the Final Girl is evident. Clover writes that the Final Girl

“is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). But in either case, from 1974 on, the survivor figure has been female.”[i]

The Final Girl, then, is the last one to face the killer and either escape or fight. Nuance arises from the Final Girl’s exposure to fear and violence. Unlike her murdered friends, the Final Girl is forced to “look death in the face” and to carry the burden of that look throughout large portions of the film. And despite the brush with death and the terror of being hunted, she is still able to escape or defeat the killer. The question, then, is why are the Final Girls the only ones who are able to survive? Clover’s answer is tied directly to gender and sexuality.

The Final Girl is not only the last survivor of the slasher; she also encompasses a shift away from the highly sexualized females that often end up as victims. To Clover, it is no coincidence that the Final Girl is usually virginal or, in some cases, portrayed as asexual. In her words, “The Final Girl is boyish…she is not fully feminine – not, in any case, feminine in the ways of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects.”[ii] In calling the Final Girl sexually reluctant, intelligent, and capable, Clover signals her difference from other female horror film characters. If the Final Girl embodies these qualities, then the females that become victims cannot possess the same attributes. They are fundamentally opposed and this difference leads to their contrasting fates.

Friday the 13th, especially The Final Chapter, is rife with boys and girls who think only of sex, indulgence, excess, or transgression. They are the subject of horror film cliché, acting as fodder for shock and gore. Viewers are most definitely on the side of the Final Girl, invested in her capability, despite her consistent brushes with death and violence. Up until The Final Chapter, the Final Girl was always a girl. Perhaps she was less sexualized than the other females in the film. Perhaps she was portrayed as a tomboy or as androgynous, but the slasher never explicitly made these Final Girls into boys. It’s here that The Final Chapter moves away from form and asks the question: what would it mean to have a male survivor? As though forcing the audience to consider this question, The Final Chapter provides its viewers with both a Final Girl and a Final Boy.

Tommy and Trish Jarvis’s gender difference influences the various transformations that horror film protagonists must undergo in order to overcome the killer. Trish, our model Final Girl in this experiment, is largely what we would expect to see given Clover’s definition. Like Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) before her, Trish is coded as nonsexual. She does not dress in scandalous outfits or swoon over men. In the mornings, she jogs with her mother. In the evenings, she reads books. For the first half of the film, her only reference to relationships is a mention of the possibility of her parents reconciling their divorce. When asked to skinny dip with a bunch of teenagers, she responds, “No thanks. I think I’m overdressed.” Every facet of Trish’s characterization is designed to be in direct contrast to the sexuality of the other teenagers in the film. Trish checks every box of Clover’s definition, and, as horror fans, we can safely assume that she is our hero. The Final Chapter, however, has other plans.

Throughout the film, Tommy Jarvis is portrayed as Trish’s foil and is continually associated with monstrosity and sexuality. When Tommy first appears on screen, he wears a mask that is not dissimilar to that of Jason Voorhees.

Tommy’s monster mask illustrates his association with monstrosity

His interest in monstrosity is not unintentional. Tommy is a monster maker. His room is filled with masks and props that he created. At one point in the film, he brings Rob (whose sister was murdered by Jason and who is now hunting the killer) to his room to show off his many designs. Tommy’s interest in monstrosity and monster makeup has implications for the film’s plot, but it also contributes to one of the central differences between Final Girls and Final Boys. Tommy is allowed to associate with monstrosity throughout the film, while Trish is meant to fear monstrosity in order, ultimately, to defeat it. This factor isn’t the only fundamental difference between the siblings, however.

The Final Chapter is near comical in its brimming sexuality, and Tommy, a twelve-year-old boy, is no exception. Early in the film, there are two explicit references to Tommy’s sexuality. Upon witnessing the teens skinny dipping, Tommy is transfixed by their naked bodies. Unlike Trish and her hesitancy to participate in nudity, Tommy watches them avidly, and the camera focuses on the female bodies, mirroring his gaze. When driving away, he comments on the skinny dippers, saying, “Some pack of patootsies, huh?” In this interaction, his curiosity is rather bland. It is not surprising that a child nearing or entering puberty would have an emerging interest in sexuality. This moment feels somewhat innocent. However, things are a little different when Tommy is confronted with actual sex.

When he has an opportunity to witness sexual interaction, Tommy’s behavior presents animalistic qualities that starkly diverge from the attributes of Clover’s Final Girl. Tommy spots one of the teenage women from his window and, in a scene not unfamiliar to audiences, he watches her undress and embrace her boyfriend. As he witnesses the initial nudity, he leaps around on his bed, smashes his face into his pillow, and grunts. As the scene progresses and the boyfriend steps into the window frame, Tommy jumps around again, grunting, elated at what he is seeing. There is no mistaking that Tommy is sexually aroused by the scene. As though we needed more evidence, his mother enters his room during this episode and he hides his curiosity from her by feigning sleep. These spastic, animalistic movements are much different than the poised, uninterested sexuality of the Final Girl. While Trish is consistent in her avoidance of sexual interaction, Tommy fully embraces such desires—and he does so, moreover, without punishment from Jason.

The contrast between Trish and Tommy raises questions regarding their relation to the killer, Jason Voorhees. When the film is nearing its end, Trish is forced into the Final Girl position rather quickly and is exposed to the killer and the life-threatening violence that Clover describes. Trish is made to view corpses; she witnesses Rob’s murder; she is chased, beaten, and cornered. As we expect with the Final Girl, she is able to hurt the monster. She outsmarts Jason on multiple occasions, drives a blade deep into his hand, smashes a television over his head, and drives a hammer into his neck. Regardless of all this damage, she does not stop him. Indeed, it feels as though the Final Girl is about to fall victim to Jason, until Tommy steps in.

The confrontation between Tommy and Jason cements the Final Boy as fundamentally different from the Final Girl and a mirror image of the killer. The now-dead Rob left behind news articles regarding Jason. Tommy rifles through these clippings before the climax of the film. He learns Jason’s story and sees an artist’s rendering of Jason as a child. While Trish is being chased, harmed, and traumatized, Tommy is transforming. He cuts his hair, shaves his head, and applies makeup so that he resembles a young Jason.

Tommy’s monster mask illustrates his association with monstrosity

As Jason is attacking Trish, Tommy appears on the stairwell and reveals himself to be a carbon copy of the artist’s rendering. Once he notices the boy, Jason is immediately drawn to him. He stops attacking Trish and approaches his younger self. He is nonviolent, paused. This moment of recognition between Jason and Tommy saves the two siblings’ lives.

Tommy’s replication of Jason underlines the central differences between the Final Girl and the Final Boy. Trish and Tommy are both chased and hunted by Jason. They both face violence, and they both live through the massacre. Tommy differs, however, because he literally becomes the monster. Throughout the film, he is allowed to indulge in practices—in an attraction to both sexuality and monstrosity—that would have spelled doom for a Final Girl. These characteristics lead Tommy to the distinctive fate of the Final Boy: to survive the slasher film, the Final Boy must (exactly) mirror the killer. And this conversion is not only superficial. While uncontrollably hacking into Jason with a machete, Tommy screams, “Die! Die! Die! Die!” By killing Jason with such brutality (and Jason’s signature machete), Tommy not only looks like the killer, but he also becomes one.

The Final Chapter’s ending indicates that Tommy cannot return to normality following his encounter with Jason. Not only has his appearance changed, but his mental state is corrupted by his transformation. Having also survived, Trish asks to see her brother. Still clad in his Jason Voorhees makeup, Tommy embraces his sister. The film ends as Tommy stares into the camera, a deranged look in his eye, mirroring Jason’s dead, focused stare.

Tommy’s dead eye stare confirms his transformation into a killer

There is no doubt that the Final Girl is always fundamentally altered by a slasher film’s events. However, Tommy’s gaze indicates that he is irrevocably lost to his transformation. The Final Boy pays for his indulgences in a way that the Final Girl cannot. Indeed, Tommy eventually dons the hockey mask himself in The Final Chapter’s sequel, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985).

The differences between the Final Girl and the Final Boy exemplify the longstanding importance of binary gender to the slasher film. Indeed, the genre relies on dichotomized conceptions of masculinity and femininity. As Clover herself writes, the Final Girl is a girl precisely because “abject terror . . . is gendered feminine.”[iii] Likewise, the Final Boy relies heavily on the inherent violence that is coded masculine.[iv] Tommy’s engagement with monstrosity and his burgeoning sexuality feel “normal,” because viewers expect masculine subjects to be interested in monster movies and women’s bodies. This gender coding makes Tommy’s transformation into “monster” possible. The Final Boy continued to evolve and should certainly be studied further. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) offers a Final Boy who is struggling with homosexuality. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) returns Tommy Doyle to the Halloween franchise and is explicit regarding the depths of his trauma.[v] Like the Final Girl before him, the Final Boy offers an opportunity to look closely at the implications of gender and sexuality within the horror film. Tommy Jarvis is only the first of many stories yet to unfold.

Notes:

[i] Clover, 35.

[ii] Clover, 40.

[iii] Clover, 51.

[iv] Clover does, of course, qualify the “femininity” of the Final Girl, who is able to adopt the “masculine” traits of seeing and effecting violence. But Clover nonetheless adheres to a binary system of gender in that she goes on to argue that, because she can see and use violence, the Final Girl is in fact “‘like a man’” (58). She is “masculine” albeit in a female body. Other scholars have critiqued Clover for her tendency to equate all the Final Girl’s strength, perceptiveness, and aggression to her “masculinity.” See Pinedo 82-84, who famously claims that Clover reads the Final Girl as a “male in drag” (82).

[v] The Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises are, perhaps, the common associates to the Friday the 13^th series and are paired together to emphasize their relationship to the Slasher genre. However, there are more recent films that feature the Final Boy that deserve mention. Regarding Hostel (2005), Dawn Keetley proposed that Paxton (Jay Hernandez) becomes the Final Boy and, in doing so, allows male viewers to identify with abject terror that is normally associated with the Final Girl (Keetley). By focusing beyond the Slasher sub-genre, Keetley opens the conversation to differing horror films and allows us to view films like Saw (2004), Final Destination (2000), Get Out (2017) as continuing the Final Boy’s legacy.

Works Cited:

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. 2^nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Directed by Danny Steinmann, Paramount Pictures, 1985.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Directed by Joseph Zito, Paramount Pictures, 1984.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Directed by Joe Chappelle, Miramax, 1995.

Keetley, Dawn. “The Final Girl, Pt. 4: The Hostel Films and Paxton as “Final Girl”.” Horror Homeroom, 21 Feb. 2016. <http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/final-girl-part-4/>.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Directed by Jack Sholder, New Line Cinema, 1985.

Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.