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(Deep Cuts) One of the Smartest Scenes in Horror History (is in a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie)

By. Presont Fassel

I think it’s safe to say without offending anyone that slashers aren’t exactly a subgenre known for their great intellectualism, stellar plotting, and deep characterization. That’s not me being an elitist—I love me a good slasher. You’ll find more than a few franchises represented in my video library, not to mention a couple of good standalones. Whenever I see that a film festival I’m attending or a nearby movie theater is showcasing an old 80s slasher I haven’t seen before, I make a beeline for the box office. That said, I can also recognize that slasher movies were never meant to be thoughtful meditations on important social issues through the lens of horror. Yes, there were some lofty ambitions in the beginning—Halloween and the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre are both something special that transcends the “blood, boobs, and bros” formula that was to follow—but, for the most part,  they’re there for the horror fan who wants to turn their brain off for ninety minutes and just enjoy something cheap, exploitative, and fun. If “smart” films like Silence of the Lambs or The Shining can said to be the meat and veggies of the genre, then slashers are the candy: tasty, indulgent, and oh so bad for you. So, it’s fascinating to me when an otherwise proudly base slasher shows some rare moment of intelligence or inspiration; when, by accident or design, a movie ostensibly made with the least amount of financial and intellectual investment possible does something that’s not just thought provoking, but unique from other horror films altogether.

It’s especially fascinating to me that one such scene occurs in a Friday the 13^th movie.

Anyone who’s read the wonderful Crystal Lake Memories knows the films were never artistic pursuits. If a making of book could be said to had a thesis, then Memories’ would be “Paramount’s greed knew no bounds.” It’s a series expressly built on titillation, made by people with the explicit intent of making tons of money on the absolute least investment possible (even the most expensive film in the Paramount series, Jason Takes Manhattan, had a smaller budget than Sixteen Candles, and way more people die in Sixteen Candles). The continuity is shoddy at best and the acting tends to range from “OK” to “humiliating.” But for Jason Lives—expressly written as a metafilm by Tom McLoughlin to differentiate it from the rest of the series—it’s not a franchise known for its lofty ideas.

Then there’s The Final Chapter.

It’s arguably damning it with faint praise to call Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter one of the best slasher films of the 80s; that’s an assessment for another article. Disregarding the rest of the movie, though, early in the film there’s a single shot that just might be one of the subtlest, most jarring, thought provoking and downright human moments in any slasher ever made. It’s a moment that stands out even among some more well-made horror movies.

The opening of the film finds Jason’s body being loaded into an ambulance following the events of Part III and transported to the county morgue. As the corpse is wheeled through the halls of the most 80s hospital ever committed to film, the camera briefly pauses to linger on a crying family in a waiting room. The passing body is briefly juxtaposed with the bereaved, and then the gurney is wheeled out of frame and we’re left alone with the family for a further second more before we cut away. The moment is almost blink-and-you-miss-it. Considering we almost immediately cut to horndog coroner Axel perving out to an 80s workout video (Aerobicise: The Beautiful Workout, for anyone just dying to know), it’s easy to forget you even saw it. Pause for a moment, though, and think about who those people are, why they’re so upset, and, most importantly, why we’re seeing them in this movie at this juncture. These folks didn’t just find out their loved one died of cancer or that the heart attack was fatal. No, the implication is clear—these are family members of one of Jason’s victims from the previous film, and, oh God—those were people we just saw die.

It’s easy to disassociate from the characters in a slasher, especially the victims who don’t survive to the final act. It’s not for nothing that they’re generally referred to as “the expendable meat” in reviews and analysis of the subgenre. They’re barely even caricatures of real human beings—they have just enough life in them that there’s something to be snuffed out in the inevitable creative death sequences, which are the real reason we’re watching these things.

For one, brief, completely unexpected moment, though, we’re asked to make that identification. Most people have had a loved one end up in the hospital, either due to an accident, illness, or fatality. The experience of waiting, worrying, and even grieving in a hospital waiting room is one that many people have shared; and, by pushing Jason out of frame and leaving us alone with the family, we’re being asked to recall that experience and meditate on it.

Suddenly, all those torn jaws and axed faces weren’t just walking tropes or archetypes—they were real kids with real lives that were brutally ended, and they left behind real families who’re now suffering with real loss and grief. For a second, the laughs are over, the meditation on the gore and cool SFX are over, and we’re being asked to place ourselves not in Jason’s shoes, not even in the victims’ shoes, but rather to consider the loved ones left behind: the graduations that’ll never be attended, the holiday dinners that’ll have an open seat this year thanks to the man in the hockey mask.

Jason's victims are usually remembered for how they die, but the franchise rarely considers what happens to the people left behind. Davalyn Baker approaches that question from another angle in Friday the 13th and the Fear of Nobody Watching the Kids, examining the anxieties surrounding the children and teenagers who become the franchise's victims.

While we were watching the kids in Part III get machetes to the crotch and gawking at the next gore set piece, the families of those kids from Part II were being notified that their children were dead. It completely shifts the paradigm not just of the victims but of Jason. Though he returns to form later in the film, donning the mask and slipping back into the safely unbelievable realm of zombie hillbilly, for those few seconds, the hokey, pop-friendly monster is suddenly a monster in the realest and most terrifying sense: the sort of cold-blooded psycho we see and fear on the six o’clock news. The guy who “had a bad day” and decided to take it out on his wife and kids. The incel with an AR15 and address to the nearest nightclub. The religious radical spouting propaganda while setting protestors on fire.

It is, in effect, a challenge to the audience to think more deeply about what they’re consuming—a fascinating prospect,  given that Final Chapter premiered the same year as the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, the movie which, within five years, would have audiences cheering for- and eagerly quoting- an undead pedophile. That challenge can perhaps best be explained by Final Chapter’s pedigree: it was written by Barney Cohen, whose major claim to fame came from his role as a co-creator of (and writer for) CBS Afternoon Playhouse, a family-friendly “issues” anthology that served as a spiritual precursor to the more well-known After School Special. Cohen was tapped by Final Chapter director Joseph Zito precisely for his empathetic look at 1980s teen life; Friday the 13^th Part 3 had featured perhaps some of the most one-dimensional characters to ever grace a slasher (I’m pretty sure one of the kids is actually played by a sheet of dot matrix paper), and Zito wanted to go out on a higher-quality note for what was meant to be a franchise-ending generational event. Little surprise, then, that a writer hired for his truck with empathetic portrayals of real people in difficult situations would choose to highlight the real-world implications of this type of heinous brutality.  

It’s rare, even in a more thoughtful horror movie, for the film to actually consider the human value of its victims or the suffering of those they leave behind. That’s something we’ve only really begun to engage with in the new millennium, as trauma has become the literal or metaphorical monster in so many Trum-era horror films; and, even then, we can still tend to compartmentalize or dramatize. A lingering look at a bottle of pills, some first-act gunplay to demonstrate firearms proficiency, and some random outbursts of anger have quickly become shorthand for “trauma” (traw-ma) in horror, to the point it’s easy not to put yourselves in someone else’s shoes. For all their lip service to deeper explorations of a character’s grief and inner life, we’re often left in the realm of lip-service, and those pill bottles and lingering stares ultimately hold no more emotional impact than a tackle box and rod-and-reel serving as shorthand for a character’s love of fishing.

For any slasher movie to contemplate the real-world implications of what it depicts onscreen is virtually unheard of; for a Friday the 13^th to do it is weirdly revelatory, and, dare I say, groundbreakingly progressive. With the recent premiere of Crystal Lake and its more thoughtful approach to the franchise, we can perhaps anticipate more serious, nuanced explorations of the real-life implications of slasher media. I’d argue this year’s In a Violent Nature 2, itself a loose remake of Final Chapter, down to a brilliant “He’s killing me!” homage, is one great big meditation on “what would it be like if a slasher were real?” Decades before A24 or Neon dared ask “What if the monster was really trawma?”, though, a Friday the 13^th film was answering that question in a much more subtle and profound way than entire contemporary movies—and, again, especially for a Friday the 13^th movie, that’s a major accomplishment.

That interest in the people behind the body count carries into Crystal Lake, where Pamela Voorhees receives considerably more psychological attention than the original films ever gave her. In Crystal Lake: The Psychology of Pamela's Love for Jason, Bee Delores examines Pamela's grief, her relationship with Jason, and the emotional history behind one of horror's most notorious mothers.

 

Note: Portions of this article originally appeared on HeardTell.com