Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake

For Day Two we’re going to talk about one of the main genres to have their films set at summer camps, and the film that kicked off that trend.

Author

Tyler Clark
July 11, 2023

Good morning Consumers. This is Please Consume, The newsletter that loves movies as much as David Cross hated being in Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

Friday the 13th (1980)

For Day Two we’re going to talk about one of the main genres to have their films set at summer camps and the film that kicked off that trend.

We know one isn’t coming until October but we said screw it and we’re going straight for Camp Crystal Lake as we cover the ORIGINAL Friday the 13th.

Living in the Echo Chamber

It is kind of a moot point amongst film fans now, but we cannot go without mentioning that the villain in Friday the 13th is not Jason, but is in fact Mrs. Borgese.

It’s the strange Mandela effect that we get with basically all horror films of this nature, whether it be Nightmare On Elm Street, Hellraiser, or Evil Dead. The first film is always more stripped down, more laid-back than its sequels.

Look at Nightmare On Elm Street. In the original film Freddy Krueger isn't a jokester, he’s just a scary monster that kills you in your dreams. Or Hellraiser. Pinhead isn’t the only Cenobite; there are so many others. And Ash doesn’t even get a chainsaw hand till Evil Dead 2!

I think it’s safe to say that in the horror genre, franchises overtake the individual films. Oftentimes people think about a movie, but they’re actually thinking of a weird mishmash of all the films.

Friday the 13th might be the most popular example. It’s spokesperson, the character that we all think of when we hear that title, isn’t even in the movie, let alone wearing a hockey mask. Jason doesn’t come into the franchise till the second film and doesn't get the mask till the third, and yet we all just accept that Jason is Friday the 13th.

Staying Power

I think it’s fair to say that the original Friday the 13th is kind of unremarkable.

It’s not bad, but it’s not a masterpiece that should be put behind bullet proof glass. It's flawed, goofy, and corny. It kills Kevin Bacon before the one-hour mark and yet it has massive cultural staying power that influenced the slasher genre more than basically any other movie save for Psycho and Halloween.

For example, the trope of campers dying at a summer camp that we would see for years to come in rip offs and dollar store-straight-to-Redbox releases all stem from this movie. It’s this very basic premise that all great horror films understand which is the fear of not being able to escape what’s right around the corner.

It’s that you have no idea what is hiding out in the woods, a primal fear that would be explored in other films like It Comes At Night or In The Earth. But none keep it as streamlined as Friday the 13th does, and while the franchise would expand to New York and even Hell, it will never escape its roots at Camp Crystal Lake.

The Beauty of Indie Horror

As we said before, this is no masterpiece, but it does have a charm to it. So much of that charm comes from the fact that it is so intertwined with late 70s/early 80s independent cinema.

It’s very easy to track how independent cinema and horror, specifically the slasher genre, were on basically the same track. Films like Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were independently financed, and when reading about Friday the 13th, you hear so much about how pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps the whole production was. They were marketing the film before they even had financing to fully film it, they couldn’t test any of the stores they wanted to, and they were making many of the visual effects in the camp's real cafeteria kitchen.

Watching the film now, seeing it for all of its shaggy energy and, at times, underwhelming filmmaking, is honestly kind of inspiring, knowing what it would later spin off into. And it’s doubly beautiful now watching that spirit still held up with the next Jason Voorhees content coming from A24.

Today’s Scene

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