Alternate Takes 02.14.09: Friday the 13th

Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 02.14.2009

This Valentine's Day, grab your loved one and watch teenage kids get hacked and slashed. Then join Alternate Takes as we look at the genesis of modern day slasher films.



Welcome to Week 39 of Alternate Takes

This week, make sure you catch my reviews
His Name Was Jason
Coraline
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Onto the column...



With the reboot of Friday the 13th this weekend and the 3D release of My Bloody Valentine last month, it appears the slasher movie is making an official comeback. Rob Zombie might be credited with kicking things off last year with his reboot of Halloween, but movies like Hatchet have helped keep the genre alive for its core fan base for years now. The death that crap such as Urban Legend and I Know What You Did Last Summer brought about may have been greatly exaggerated. Just as with all beloved genres, it just needed time to simmer before unloading on us once again the sight of scary men with big knifes killing promiscuous naked chicks and stupid jocks in the best ways possible.

While many credit Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho as the beginning of the genre, it in fact has origins that stretch back even further than that. Serial killers have existed throughout time but none may be as famous as Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in late 1888. He hunted the streets of Whitechapel killing prostitutes. Most of the victims had their throats slashed and their bodies mutilated. It seems that Jack the Ripper fits the profile of what a slasher in modern horror films looks like.

In her book, Men, Women and Chainsaws, author Carol J. Clover defines the slasher as the bottom of the horror heap, "the immensely generative story of a psychokiller who slashed to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived." She goes on to call Psycho the "appointed ancestor of the slasher film."

Like most slasher horror films, Psycho is never meant to be taken seriously and Hitchcock himself explained in his wonderful interviews with Francois Truffaut those exact intentions as he called his film "a serious story told with tongue in cheek."

"If Psycho had been intended as a serious picture," he continues, "it would have been shown as a clinical case with no mystery or suspense. The material would have been used as the documentation of a case history... In the mystery and suspense genre, a tongue-in-cheek approach is indispensable."

Humor was not the only thing Psycho brought to the slasher genre. The fact that the most famous actress in the film, Janet Leigh, would die early in the film makes the audience understand there are no rules. "In the average production," Hitchcock explained, "Janet Leigh would have been given the other role. She would have played the sister who's investigating. It's rather unusual to kill the star in the first third of the film. I purposively killed the star so as to make the killing even more unexpected... Psycho has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ."

The thought process was that Psycho would lead directly to Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978). That is inaccurate as the same year Texas Chainsaw hit theaters, another slasher film would be released called Black Christmas. The movie was written by Roy Moore, based on a series of actual murders that happened in Quebec around Christmas time. It was directed by the very multitalented Bob Clark, who went on to also direct teen comedy romp Porky's and holiday classic A Christmas Story. It also included an interesting cast with Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey), Margot Kidder (Superman) and John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street).

More than any other movie up to that time, Black Christmas demonstrated what a slasher movie should look like. It tells the story of an unknown man stalking girls in a sorority house. Much the same as later films, such as Halloween and Friday the 13th, you never see the killer but do see through his eyes as he moves throughout the house. The composition of the camera work also is used to make the camera the evil, giving you a claustrophobic feeling you can't escape. Halloween owes more to this movie than any other that came before.

In a question and answer session, Clark explained the development of Halloween. "About four years later I started a movie with John Carpenter set in the Tennessee Mountains with retarded people," he begins. "John was a great fan of Black Christmas, that's why he got Warner Bros to hire me to do this movie. He said ‘are you going to do a sequel to Black Christmas?' and I said ‘I don't plan to do anymore, you're film is my last horror film.' John said ‘if you did do it what would it be' and I said ‘I would have the killer was caught and it would be later that year the next fall and he has escaped and he's going back to the sorority house and I'm going to call it Halloween.'"

"But, let me say this," he continued. "John Carpenter wrote a screenplay, directed the movie, cast it, did the music, edited it, did all of that. In fact, the movie was brought to him by the company with the title already on. I think John loved the movie and believe he was influenced some by it but he did not copy my movie and Halloween is entirely John Carpenter's and its one of the greats of its time."

There are slight differences, taking the killer out of the enclosed sorority house and making him able to get his victims no matter where they run to. We also see the killer and know all about his back story, which was purposively left out of Black Christmas to make the killer more ominous and mysterious. From Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Halloween, something strange happened. In TCM, the "final girl" was a passive individual who simply ran for her life the entire movie. Halloween presented something a little more interesting, a final girl who began the film passive but grew to develop an active defense for survival. It was scary as Sally ran from an unstoppable killer but it was empowering to see Laurie stand up to her fear and face the evil.

It is interesting that in his review for Halloween, film critic Roger Ebert quotes Alfred Hitchcock from an interview he conducted with the man as he gave almost the same response Hitchcock gave Truffaut when asked about Psycho. "I enjoy playing the audience like a piano..."

"Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller," Ebert continued, "a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to Psycho. It's a terrifying and creepy film about what one of the characters calls Evil Personified."

That is high praise coming from Roger Ebert. The man finished his review of Friday the 13th Part II by saying "I remembered the movie fantasies when I was a kid. They involved teenagers who fell in love, made out with each other, customized their cars, listened to rock and roll, and were rebels without causes. Neither the kids in those movies nor the kids watching them would have understood a world view in which the primary function of teenagers is to be hacked to death. *This review will suffice for the Friday the 13th film of your choice."

What makes a film like Halloween praise worthy and Friday the 13th so damning? "It is the babysitter to be killed by the boogeyman," said Moustapha Akkad, the executive producer of Halloween. "It's not the boogeyman that attracted me but the babysitter because every kid in America can relate to the babysitter."

Producer Irwin Yablans recalls calling John Carpenter at home and telling him the story idea for Halloween and Carpenter agreed to come aboard the project. Carpenter's first choice broke the film out of the shadow of Black Christmas when he produced the first kill of the movie to be at the hands of a young boy. That boy would grow up into a figure known as The Shape and Michael Myers effectively became the boogeyman. "This is not a human being," explains horror author Clive Barker for the documentary Halloween: 25 Years of Terror. "This is a shape. Just like the word Boogeyman evokes something which is not really human and isn't therefore accessible to reason, isn't therefore something you can argue with or debate with or even ask for mercy from."

While Halloween owes much to Black Christmas, there is also a great deal of debt to be paid to classic monsters such as Frankenstein or Dracula. The movie mixes the all too real fear of the faceless serial killer and the monsters that can't be defeated. There is even a Van Helsing character in Dr. Loomis, always chasing the monster. And it is the victims, the babysitters of the real world, making the audiences identify and fear for their safety. Jamie Lee Curtis' babysitter was what made Halloween so special.

Two years later, another young filmmaker took the horrors of Halloween and moved them outdoors, in the woods, around a body of water known as Crystal Lake. While the twist of the film is ingenious and rivals the opening of Halloween for surprise, the similarities are numerous. "Sean called me up and said Halloween is making incredible money at the box office, let's rip it off," screenwriter Victor Miller admits in the new documentary His Name Was Jason. "I went to see Halloween and was scared to death, loved the movie and studied it and figured out the system and went home. The longest part of the process of creating the first Friday the 13th was figuring out the venue. What John Carpenter and Debra Hill had done was to create a world where teenagers could not be helped by adults."

Miller would go on in his interview to mention the large influence of Psycho on Friday the 13th, with the mother/son dynamics by switching the roles and having the son dead and the mother hearing the voices. He says Cunningham told him he wanted to borrow from Hitchcock by killing a major character in the first twenty minutes. Unlike both Psycho and Halloween, Friday the 13th was horribly reviewed and as a result was incredibly successful as people wanted to see why it was so bad. He also calls the end of Friday the 13th "Grand Theft Cinema" to Carrie, bought and paid for.

Regardless of the similarities to previous films, Friday the 13th became the most popular slasher film franchise ever made. Part of the reasons for the success is the fact it was a major studio release, while Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were both smaller independent releases. With the studio power and the interest in the now taboo "Video Nasty's," it would go on to make a fortune. It was also one of the most gory slasher films to date.

"I'm close friends with Sean Cunningham," director Wes Craven states in the documentary Going to Pieces, "and his feeling is, forget all the social commentary and everything else. Let's just be so outrageous that people won't be able to believe what they are seeing. He went for that arrow through the eyeball thing which was in its own way strangely subversive."

The following movies would simply copy the format of its predecessors. Movies like Prom Night, Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool's Day, and Happy Birthday to Me copied the now established pattern, none of which were ever as good as the originals. The morality tale that was so prevalent in both Halloween and Friday the 13th gave way to a desire to just find the coolest way to kill someone. The genre was dying until the idea came to add a more supernatural aspect to the proceedings.

A dream killer named Freddy Krueger, a creature from hell named Pinhead, a leprechaun, a doll possessed by a serial killer, and a take on the Bloody Mary legend called Candyman all presented us with a slasher that was more than just a human being. Even the classic originals went in the direction as Michael Myers became indestructible and Jason Voorhees became a zombie. It was the beginning of the end of the slasher film.

The short revival in the nineties, thanks to the self aware Scream, gave a false hope the slasher was making a comeback. Unfortunately, the following films were too self aware and never captured the spirit of the originals. There were a few solid additions over time, including a rare self aware film that delivered in the film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. In much the same way Scream referenced the slasher films of the past, Behind the Mask also recognized what films came before.

The film starts off with a documentary film crew following a serial killer named Leslie Vernon, discovering how he kills. Vernon is a killer in the form of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. The film switches between mockumentary format and an actual horror film. Vernon shows us throughout the first part of the movie tricks of the trade. You know how people always end up tripping over a broken step, finding they can't get a door opened, or trip over random objects while trying to get away? It's because the killer booby traps the house before the night of the murders. He also shows how a killer remains in the condition he needs to be to withstand bullets, shovels to the head and more. Finally, he also shows how he can always catch the victims despite always appearing to be walking. It is a brilliant look at the slasher in a great little film.

The film offers a fantastic performance by Nathan Baesel as Leslie Vernon and a fun supporting performance by Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger).

"In bed one night, with Dave Letterman joking in the background, I began to read this script," Englund remembers. "I couldn't put it down and then it was two in the morning. It was smart, it was self referential, it had a unique original character to it who was a psycho killer genius who was charming and talkative with this terrific new kid playing the lead."

The next year another movie came out that carried the banner of the slasher movies of old, starring Robert Englund (Freddy), Tony Todd (Candyman) and Kane Hodder (Jason).

"I've always been a fan of horror films," says Hatchet director Adam Green. "When I was about eight years old, I think my brother showed me Friday the 13th II and John Carpenter's The Thing and I was just completely addicted right off the bat."

What makes films cyclical is new filmmakers influenced by the films that inspired them to pick up a camera. The writing team of Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason, Friday the 13th [2009]) know the intricacies of Friday the 13th thanks to years of being fans of the franchise. It is clear when watching Hatchet that Green is a huge fan of classic slasher films.

"The formula for Hatchet is completely derivative of movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which was sort of the goal," Green said. "In the 1980's we had awesome slasher movies because we had good villains and they had a great mythology behind them. Then they got beaten to death with all of the sequels and the knockoffs and it sort of ate itself up... Unfortuantely, Scream spawned a decade of PG-13 horror movies and teen "whodunit" things, which were always like Scooby Doo where they pull the mask off. Nothing would have made me happier than if they pulled the mask off of Ghostface and he was scarred and disfigured. That would've been fucking awesome!"

With an attitude like that, it is clear why the horror community got behind Hatchet and praised it as a return to form for the slasher genre. It was a strange case where Internet journalism helped the film get picked up with Ryan Rotten (ShockTillYouDrop.com) and websites like Fangoria and Bloody-Disgusting getting behind the film from the start.

Following this successful return of the slasher format, instead of getting more original slasher films, we are getting reboots of the old films. With Rob Zombie's Halloween, My Bloody Valentine 3D, this weekend's release of Friday the 13th, and the upcoming reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street, it appears the slasher film has risen from the dead.