Wade Newhouse Though Mrs. Voorhees and Jason represent the archetypal fear of death by monster, the sylvan setting of summer camp in the original Friday the 13th movies is a particularly contemporary all-American place to stage such anxiety. Michael B. Smith’s account of the summer camp industry emphasizes that the impact of the historical camp […]
Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles Jason Voorhees is the most popular backwoods slasher killer. While Leatherface and the largely suburban Michael Myers came first, neither of those masked psychopaths have achieved the same iconic status as Jason, whose identity can be evoked simply via the image of the hockey mask he wears from Friday the […]
Todd K. Platts It is no secret that critics loathed the films of the Friday the 13th franchise. For them, the films occupied what scholar Carol Clover termed “the cinematic underbrush” that were “[d]renched in taboo and encroaching vigorously on the pornographic.”[i] What remains a mystery, though, is exactly how reviewers expressed their disdain for […]
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. In his insightful and fascinating study Educational Institutions in Horror Film, Andrew L. Grunzke observes that three trends in the latter half of the twentieth century produced horror films that were “centered around various aspects of school life.”[i] Those trends are: the dominance of teenagers in horror audiences; the development of monstrous […]
Brian Fanelli After the fan backlash that followed Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985), the only film in the series (other than the first) that didn’t technically feature Jason Voorhees as the killer, the franchise needed to get back on track. Cue writer/director Tom McLoughlin, who already had some horror cred from […]
Wickham Clayton Co-creator and director, Sean S. Cunningham, describes Friday the 13th (1980) as “a roller-coaster ride, a funhouse sort of thing.”[i] It is artificial, visceral fun that spikes adrenalin, provides thrills, but doesn’t aspire to much in the way of intellectual engagement or emotional connection (beyond terror and horror) with characters or story. The […]
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 […]
Originally financed to capitalize on the success of Blacula in 1973, Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973) uses a distributor-mandated focus on vampires as the framework to make an elliptical, arthouse horror that threads together the many faces of the vampire myth (seducer, blasphemer, carrion creature) to make an inward-facing investigation of the perils and […]
During a pandemic, watching horror movies can be therapy. Supernatural horror tends to have religious themes, but ironically a strange short movie series “based on true events” has swapped fabricated religions for the “actual” entities. One of the strangest horror movie titles is The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. Apart from the fact that […]