The Slasher Series: Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981)
Jason Voorhees becomes the '80s biggest baddie in an awful movie.
A few years back, I published a series of Halloween-related articles about the first appearances of iconic movie slashers. That site is no longer around, but I enjoyed the articles that came out of it, so as a special October treat, I’m going to publish them until Halloween.
What Friday the 13th movie do you use to talk about the debut of Jason Voorhees?
Do you start with the first installment, even though Jason only shows up at the end as a seaweed-drenched child? Do you go for Part 3, when he finally obtains the hockey mask? Do you revisit the 2009 remake, which smashes all the origin stories together? Or do you go with the first sequel, when Jason took center stage as horror’s Big Bad?
Well, gather ‘round the campfire, put a potato sack on your head and grab your machetes, kids. Today we’re talking Friday the 13th Part 2.
The torture continues
There’s no denying it: the Friday the 13th movies are trash. But, as Michael Bay can attest, trash still makes money, and when the original Friday the 13th raked in an astonishing (for 1980) $39 million, Sean Cunningham’s Halloween rip-off needed a follow-up, fast.
Only one problem: The killer in Friday the 13th, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), had been decapitated. And while horror movies have proven that death is not always fatal, having your head lopped off is usually one thing you can’t come back from.
The solution? Make Pamela’s dead kid Jason not-so-dead and not a kid. Angered by his mom’s beheading, Jason kills the survivor of the first film and then, five years later, stalks through a new camp opened close to Crystal Lake. The result? Jason, even in early form, became a new horror icon.
The plot of Friday the 13th changes very little from film to film, and only a few signifiers separate them in viewers’ minds. So Friday the 13th Part 2 isn’t notable because of its story, but because of its moments. It’s the one where Jason wears a bag over his head. The one where the kid in the wheelchair gets a machete through his face. The one where the Final Girl puts on Mrs. Voorhees’ sweater to trick Jason.
There’s a reason this film is remembered for these moments and nothing else else: It’s not good. None of these films are. They lack the cinematic mastery John Carpenter brought to Halloween. There are no moments of dread or suspense, no sense of atmosphere. Aside from an effective moment at the very end, not even the jump scares work. And with Part 2, the series hadn’t had its Fast Five moment of self-awareness yet, where it understood exactly what it was and leaned hard into the gore and Jason hero shots. It’s a horror movie without scares, a slasher flick with few effective slashes.
Several critics of the Friday series have mentioned Cunningham’s past as a porn producer and how it fed into his work as producer (the film is directed by Steve Miner, who went on to a career of slightly better slasher flicks). The film is structured like porn: The acting is wretched, the story is non-existent, and for the audience, it doesn’t matter; they’re just here for the money shot anyway, except instead of sex, it’s a violent death scene.
There is, however, one element that works, and that’s Amy Steele’s performance as Ginny, the film’s Final Girl. The master’s student who’s dating the camp director, Ginny is the rare Final Girl who isn’t a virgin, but isn’t treated as vapid, flighty or bitchy. She’s likable and resourceful and her interactions with the other characters paint her as more intelligent and mature than most Friday girls. Steele brings more personality to the character than was given to her on the page, and her final showdown with Jason hinges less on ferocity and more on wits. Steele is good in the role, and while I understand why she moved onto other things, it’s a shame she never returned to the franchise.
Jason: Not-quite-there yet
As bad as the Friday the 13th movies are, I must admit a morbid fascination with them. I’ve tried to revisit them several times, and I still get excited about rumors of reboots. Even though I know the films are garbage, I’m drawn to them.
I think the reason why is Jason Voorhees. This is odd, because he’s likably the most poorly written, shallow villain of our iconic slashers.
At least Freddy Krueger has a backstory and is a supernatural threat. We’re invested in Michael Myers because he’s so inexplicably evil. Even Chucky has a sense of humor.
But just who is Jason Voorhees? In the first film, he was a drowned boy, possibly a dream. In this one, he’s an angry momma’s boy bent on revenge. In the sequels, he’s an unstoppable killing machine with supernatural healing powers. He walks slow, he likes tools and that’s about it. There’s nothing clever about Jason.
But he wears the hell out of a hockey mask.
Jason’s appeal literally lies in his iconography. Our pulse still quickens when we see that hulking form and hockey mask. He gains character not through story, but through movement. Is he running after his victims, or does he breathe deeply and turn his head before his body (despite not showing up until film seven, Jason wasn’t fully Jason until Kane Hodder donned the mask)? Those are the things that define Jason. The rest? Excuses to have him show up.
But even those elements provide the villain more depth than the films’ heroes get. And because Jason is the most fleshed-out character in the franchise, he becomes the hero. The others are just fresh meat. The Friday the 13th series becomes Jason’s story and we find ourselves cheering on a sadistic killer as he slaughters teenagers for doing nothing more than behaving like teenagers. There’s even a bit of a Halloween reversal at play: Where we felt protective of those kids because they felt real and lived in a world invaded by evil, the protagonists in a Friday the 13th movie are shallow and vapid, and it’s they who are trespassing on Jason’s turf. The result — films where we cheer on an inhuman being as he kills innocent humans — is a troubling dynamic.
But Friday the 13th Part 2 doesn’t even have that. Jason is just being defined, and he wears a pillowcase on his head (a ripoff of The Town that Dreaded Sundown) or looks, unmasked, like any random hillbilly. He doesn’t have a defining move; in many scenes, he’s not seen at all. I guess keeping your mother’s decomposing head on your coffee table could be read as creepy, but maybe he’s just sentimental.
I understand these films have their fans, and I’m not going to begrudge them. We like what we like. But nearly 40 years removed, the Friday the 13th films feel even more like crass rip offs, and pale beside better works like “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or “Halloween.” I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of Jason Voorhees, but I might be curbing my enthusiasm when I see that hockey mask again.