Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Friday the 13th!!!

Note: I hadn't realised I wrote this ten million years ago when I was covering the Friday the 13th series but never published it, so here it is:

Everybody loves Jason, but before Jason was even in junior league hockey, someone else was killing camp counsellors at Crystal Lake. Who could it be??? Well you probably already know, but in case you don't, this article contains spoilers.

Glass shattering titles, fades to white and cutaways of clouds crossing the moon were all cool little motifs that tied the series together before they just forgot to do those.

Friday the 13th concerns Steve Christie's ill-fated attempt to revive the summer camp that was shut down in the 1950s after a boy named Jason drowned and two camp counsellors were subsequently murdered. Everyone in town is shit-scared of the place, calling it Camp Blood, possibly because the greatest character ever, Crazy Ralph, spends all his time cycling around drunk off his face telling everyone they're doomed if they set foot in the camp grounds.

IDK if he was even in the script, or just wandered onto the set while cameras were rolling.

Most of the movie is taken up with the camp counsellors killing time until the kids show up (presumably they never do, given the state of everyone at the end of the movie, although I like to think one family set off from across the country and arrived before they ever got the message). The counsellors are blissfully unaware of anything going on, but everyone else in Crystal Lake is on edge. A motorcycle cop stops by the camp and goes on a left-field rant about pot and people going crazy at the full moon. I love this character.

The Village People were never the same after the great schism of June 13th.

Friday the 13th is in a tradition of stories taking place over a day (minus the pre-titles sequence, which takes place in 1957) that includes Slacker, The Breakfast Club, Halloween, Prom Night, and Waiting for Godot. It's a slice of life punctuated with murder. The camp counsellors go swimming, whack a snake, play strip Monopoly (a poor choice since, as we all know, Monopoly never ends), and talk about disturbing dreams.

On one level, dropping her off by the cemetery is just film-school foreshadowing, but on the other hand shooting this flick in a town called Hope makes it a cemetery for hope, which is much darker.

Who is the killer? Is it Steve Christie? Crazy Ralph? The motorcycle cop? No, it's someone we've never met before! If this is a deliberate subversion of murder mystery conventions, it's kind of brilliant. Of course the killer is Mrs Voorhees, Jason's mother, who is typical of concerned parents everywhere in that she's perfectly willing to go to ridiculous extremes to prevent another death, like killing multiple people. Yes, she says she couldn't let them open the camp again after what happened to Jason, so she kills everyone instead.

The movie, uh, cleverly misleads you by casting a blatant man as her double in all the pre-reveal scenes.

Mrs Voorhees is a great killer and it's sad that she's so overshadowed by her son. She may have a shaky grasp of her own motive, but she's a good shot with a bow and arrows and she has the patience to wait under a bed while Kevin Bacon gets lucky before killing him. She also seems to be able to pass for normal or indeed forget about her spree killing ways in between camp openings, because she's known to Mr Christie, and has managed not to kill him until Friday the 13th rolls around. This is why I want to see a prequel series set in Crystal Lake featuring Mrs Voorhees, Mr Christie, Crazy Ralph, the trucker who says "Camp Crystal Lake is jinxed" and others living in the town. It would be like Twin Peaks.

>falling by julee cruise starts playing