Friday the 13th

 Year:  1980

Director:  Sean S. Cunningham

Screenplay:  Victor Miller

Starring:  Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, Kevin Bacon

Running Time:  95 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Camp Crystal Lake is preparing for it's grand reopening after being closed for twenty years.  The camp, however, has a bad reputation town, where it is nicknamed "Camp Blood" due to it's history of mysterious deaths and disappearances.  The local eccentric, Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), claims that the camp has a "death curse".  However, six teenage camp counsellors have arrived at the camp, along with the new owner (Pete Brouwer), to prepare for the opening in two weeks time.  When the owner leaves the camp to get some supplies, the counsellors enjoy themselves. However, the fun soon turns to terror as they are brutally murdered one by one by an unknown prowler.

Producer and director Sean S. Cunningham was known to horror fans for producing Wes Craven's notorious debut film The Last House on the Left (1972).  Prompted by the success of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Cunningham decided to do his own take on what would become known as the "slasher" genre.  Sticking to the calendar theme of Halloween, the title "Friday the 13th" seemed like a no-brainer for a horror film title, and Cunningham was in fact concerned that the title might already have been used, and so while the script was still being drafted, he took out a full page ad in the film industry trade magazine Variety announcing Friday the 13th as being in production, partly to raise additional financing for the project, and partly to ensure that no-one objected to them using the title.  The film sticks closely to the Halloween story structure, which would become the standard for slasher films.  Beginning with a short prologue set in 1958, most of the film takes place over a 24 hour period in the "present day", on Friday 13th June.  During the scenes set during the day, the first half hour or so of the film, we are introduced to the characters, thinly sketched as they are, and there is one murder, which the main characters are unaware of.  It's at night, during a torrential rain shower, that the fun really starts.  There is nothing particularly memorable in the script, and the performances are variable at best, if effective enough for this type of film.  Future Hollywood star Kevin Bacon has an early appearance as one of the camp counsellors, and a memorable death scene.  The score by Harry Manfredini is obviously inspired by Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho (1960), but it does have the memorable "ki ki ki, ma ma ma" motif, that represents the unseen killer.  The gore effects are by legendary special effects artist Tom Savinvi, who had previously worked on Dawn of the Dead (1978), and they are impressive.  After the controversy surrounding The Last House on the Left, Sean S. Cunningham wanted to make. film that was, as he put it, "a rollercoaster ride", the film its directed effectively, aside from some quite jarring transitions, and both script and direction suffer from some real lapses in logic (the killer always seems to know where the counsellors will wander off to on their own, and be ready with a variety of different weapons, and also seems to be able to travel from one place to another very quickly without being seen or heard).  The scenes where the camera takes the killer's point-of-view, lurking behind trees and observing the characters from a distance, are effective.  For a fun horror movie, however, it works almost as the cinematic equivalent of a campfire ghost story.  Simple, gruesome, silly and fun.  The film was a huge success, kickstarting the slasher movie boom of the early 1980s and launching a franchise which has, to date, clocked up eleven film, including a cross-over with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, a remake, a TV series, comics, novels and video games.    

Jeannine Taylor, Harry Crosby and Adrienne King in Friday the 13th