Mr. Karnick has already written a wonderful essay on the original Friday the 13th movie with an eye toward the forest path it opened up for subsequent horror films.  Well, the reboot of the movie came out this past week on DVD, so I thought it only fitting to examine how the new movie demonstrates just how lost in the woods we really are when it comes to horror.

In his examination of the original movie, Mr. Karnick quite aptly explained how the original movie "codified" the formula for slasher films.  Previous films had, however slightly, sought to connect the audience to the victims before their dispatch, but after the first Friday it was the killer that was given some back story.  However, there was some salutary effect to this as it portrayed the world as gone uncontrollably violent with revenge visited upon innocents rather than those responsible for the wrongdoing.  This helped audiences with ways to detach from worries and laugh at fears born of the moral chaos of the 1970s.

Boy, I sure wish the makers of this new movie had read the essay before they tried to "reboot" the franchise with this.  Mr. Karnick has it right on when he notes that slasher films help the audience exorcise their fears through a fun roller coaster ride.  But the makers of this movie don’t seem to get that you don’t fear movie monsters when you think of them as victims.  Sure, the really, really, REALLY good movies find a way to walk that line where the audience members understand the villains because they see in them the worst, unchecked things inside themselves.  The audience can simultaneously understand the monster and differentiate themselves from it.

But I have a newsflash for the writers here.  JASON IS NOT AN ANTI-HERO.  He’s not Mel Gibson in Payback.  He’s not Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven.  He’s definitely not Christopher Nolan’s Batman.  He’s not doing bad things because they’re right in a world turned upside down.  He’s a killer.  He’s a force of nature.  He’s death.  That’s what makes him scary.

The makers of this movie were more concerned about preserving the iconography of Jason’s mask.  Sadly, Derek Mears, the wonderful actor who played Jason, came the closest to understanding how to revitalize Jason and make him scary.  He runs.  He thinks.  And Mr. Mears does a wonderful job of capturing some of those moments.  You can see him making Jason like a predatory animal, and those moments come off pretty well.

But he also felt that Jason was a . . . and in our self-obsessed culture you knew this was coming . . . victim.  That’s right.  The serial killer is really the victim here.  This is really Mr. Karnick’s observations taken to the next level.  He noted that the original movie took the focus off of the "survivor girl" (a wonderful phrase coined in the post-modern slasher film, Behind the Mask:  The Rise of Leslie Vernon) and placed it on the killer.  We stopped developing the victims beyond basic human compassion and looked instead to the motivations behind the killer.  This reboot is what that first step has wrought.

The truly dangerous thing about most of the modern "slasher" films is that the directors have stopped trying to identify with the victims.  There is no longer any sense that what the killer is doing is wrong.  You can see it here with a DVD that allows you jump to each "kill".  But this move was presaged by movies like House of 1,000 Corpses and the Saw franchise.  Say what you will about the previous Fridays, they all stuck with John Carpenter’s vision of the bogeyman.  Jason and Michael Myers (and throw Freddy Kruger in there, too) were the personification of evil.  They were unstoppable until the custodian of virtue vanquished them.  True they were never really killed, but evil never is.  And you were at least allowed to leave the theater with the feeling that good can, and indeed had, triumphed over evil.

With movies like House of 1,000 Corpses it becomes disturbingly clear by the end of the movie that the writer/director Rob Zombie is actually on the side of the serial killer family.  He wants them to win.  This is not Clive Barker’s Nightbreed where the monsters are misunderstood misfits; Zombie’s Firefly family are people who are sadistic and psychotic but the director wants them to get away with it.  And they do.  It is no wonder that Mr. Zombie chose to update Halloween by showing you Michael Myers’ troubled childhood. 

True, nihilism can be scary, too.  The message that good doesn’t always win can be very scary.  But there’s a difference in making that point and simply rooting for evil, sadistic people to win.  In the former situation you may feel scared, but you still can tell the difference between right and wrong.  In the latter, it distorts that view and gives another nudge toward moral relativism. 

Saw took this to the next level.  Unlike all other movies before it, you spend the entire movie actually wondering how the killer will get away with it.  The victims are not treated with the indifference that Kevin Bacon got in the original Friday the 13th.  They are all flawed, and the killer is seen as the hero that exposes that flaw to them.  At the end, for the movie to work, it HAS to be the victim’s fault and the killer HAS to get away with it.

And that’s where this new Friday comes in.  The writers not only spend time trying to make Jason’s behavior make sense, they spend an equal amount of time making the victims look like jerks.  The audience has no reason to regard them with even the most basic human compassion because they are all made into gross, irritating caricatures.  Just as Ray Liotta in Hannibal had to utter sexist slurs as our new "hero" Hannibal Lecter fed him pieces of his own brain, you’re pushed to root for these victim’s demise.

So what?  It made a lot of money, right?  Well, note that this movie had a huge open and dropped off VERY sharply after the opening weekend.  In contrast, My Bloody Valentine 3-D enjoyed a more gradual decline over the month of its release.  My Bloody Valentine wasn’t Citizen Kane, to be sure.  But it didn’t take itself this seriously, and you aren’t meant to hate the victims.  In fact, more attention was paid to mystery plot twists in Valentine than in the new Friday.  I would submit to you that Friday made its money on pure exploitation value, but didn’t really scare anyone.  The hardcore fans went to see it, the same ones that will jump to each "kill", but no one else thought it would be a good idea.

At bottom, the new Friday spends too much time on the trappings of the slasher genre.  The filmmakers took the pieces of the previous movies and tried to amplify them.  They would’ve done better trying to give serious thought to what makes something scary.  Melville’s Ahab had a famous soliloquy when talking about the white whale: "If man will strike, strike through the mask!"  The Romantics (Melville and Hawthorne, not those five guys in leather suits) equated life with a mask pulled over the supernatural and unknowable God.  The truly terrifying thing was death itself. 

John Carpenter showed he understood that by creating the personification of death in Halloween.  Even the schlocky Friday the 13th sequels conveyed an understanding that Jason was a stand-in for death, and the audience conquered its fears of death by going to see those movies.  But this movie conjures nothing behind its hockey mask, leaving us with no desire to strike through it.

Hitchcock’s bomb-under-the-table example would’ve been a good place for the writers to start.  Even the makers of the original Friday the 13th understand that.  You show the audience a bomb under the table while two people are sitting there, oblivious to their impending deaths.  The audience will be on the
edge of their seats.  If, on the other hand, you show two people sitting at the same table and the bomb explodes suddenly without the audience having known it was there, you get only a moment of startled fright from the audience.  Hitchcock proved that the former gets repeat business and makes movies into classics.

This new movie proves that the latter explodes in the first weekend, only to be forgotten by the next.

Make no mistake, I’m not blaming this movie (or any of the movies I’ve mentioned) for all of society’s ills.  I’m pointing out where they’ve lost track and how they’ve stopped being effective.

Perhaps I’m naive, but I believe there are more people that choose to differentiate themselves from serial killers than those who want to identify with them.  There’s more money to be made from scary movies that genuinely try to scare you than from those that at best cater to the lowest common denominator and at worst try to lower our standards at a time when improvement is most needed.

–R. J. MacReady