Looking Back at Friday the 13th (1980)

Over the next thirteen weeks, the Friday the 13th franchise will be ripped apart, dissected and, maybe, put back together again by nanites (depending on what century we are in). This is a series of films that has taken the audience on a hell of a ride from the low-fi beginnings at Crystal Lake before scouring the local woodland and taking in Higgins Haven, the Pinehurst Halfway House, Camp Forest Green, Manhattan (via Vancouver), Hell, space, Springwood and finally, because Jason is nothing but a homebody, back to Crystal Lake again. When Barry and Claudette snuck away from a rendition of Hallelujah all the way back in 1958 before being murdered by an unseen assailant, little did audiences think that Friday the 13th would become an intrinsic part of horror history.

The making of the original film is widely known now. Exploitation film-maker Sean S. Cunningham, enticed by Halloween’s hefty profit margins, decide to take another dark date on the calendar, Friday the 13th, and, by placing a full-page advert in Variety, discovered that the rights to the title were available. From there, working with writer Victor Miller, a film was created that, although not copying Carpenter’s classic beat for beat, certainly did begin to emphasize the tropes we recognize today in the slasher sub-genre.

What audiences actually get with the original is a tightly plotted film that, although hardly a character study, does provide likeable characters and, in Alice, an underrated Final Girl who deserves a re-evaluation, particularly as actress Adrienne King has really begun to own her work in recent years. This can be seen both as a fine artist, with beautiful paintings of that 1980 era Crystal Lake location Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, but also as an actress again in fan film Jason Rising (2021) and her involvement in the Peacock series Crystal Lake (2026).

Then there is the body collective of counsellors which actually seem to be nice people. Some of the later sequels often brought a disparate group of people together who just didn’t seem to like each other, even though they were being portrayed as ‘friends’ (looking at you Friday the 13th Part III). We have the stock characters of course with the Joker (Ned), the hero (Bill) and the mother hen (Brenda) but we also get that classic Greek harbinger of doom, Moros, in Crazy Ralph and the sweet Annie who ends up being Marion Crane’d as we are led to believe is the Final Girl before an unfortunate encounter with a knife.

Although many of the cast were unknowns, and have unfortunately stayed that way, partly due to their involvement on this film, there were some interesting selections. Harry Crosby (Bill) was Bing Crosby’s son and his involvement almost feels like a reaction against his violent Catholic upbringing. Kevin Bacon was a theatre kid who had just joined the John Belushi fraternity in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Adrienne King was a Meisner-trained actor who also danced in many films including Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Hair (1979). It was in the casting of 1950’s actress Betsy Palmer that Cunningham found his Donald Pleasance, the classic actor to add credence to the violence. Famously, Palmer took the role so she could buy a new Volkswagen Scirocco and, even through Siskel and Ebert’s particularly meanspirited dissection of her participation, her performance is nothing but committed.

Indeed, when looking back on the original, the filmmakers definitely got something right, even if it was just catching the early eighties slasher zeitgeist. Whereas Halloween (1978) concentrated on an attack on suburbia, here we see the equally terrifying nature as horror trope that can be seen throughout the arts from William Shakespeare’s fairy-meddling A Midsummer Night’s Dream to his all the more horrific Titus Andronicus to the Romanticist paintings of Caspar David Freidrich and Forest Murmurs by Richard Wagner. Again, although Cunningham had explored, along with Wes Craven, the forest as prison ideal in The Last House on the Left (1972), itself a loose adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), here, through this low-budget schlocker, it is actually Friday the 13th which made the fearful forest concept both mainstream and incredibly lucrative.

Although the plot appears to be simple in premise, unseen murderer kills a series of underwritten teens, aided and abetted by Tom Savini at his most gruesome, there is actually more to be seen here as time has gone on. Firstly, Harry Manfredini’s orchestral score is a powerhouse that has a lineage to Bernard Hermann without ever actually thieving directly from the latter. Cunningham famously played an early edit of the film for financiers, sans score, to which he received feedback which could politely be called ‘negative’. Some time later, with the score added, everyone knew they had a hit on their hands. Manfredini also made sure that the music would only ever play when the killer was present, thus building the atmosphere and suspense to even higher levels. It could be argued that Manfredini is the MVP of the franchise as he has been more of a mainstay to the series than nearly anyone else and, for the disco track on Friday the 13th Part III (1982) alone, the man should be regarded as a slasher hero.

Secondly, the previously mentioned Tom Savini really moved the film away from Carpenter’s more subtle Halloween night murders by making sure the camera stayed on the violence. This obviously found trouble with the MPAA but some of the effects, particularly those of star-crossed, pot-driven lovers Jack and Marcie (arrow through neck and axe to the face), found their way through to opening night showings on May 9th 1980. It is often with the off-screen murders that Savini plays it tough, Bill pinned to the generator door by arrows and Ned’s lifeless face on the bunk above our aforementioned lovers as they real climax.

Finally, this was the film that genuinely solidified the tropes of the slasher genre. Twelve years later, Carol J. Clover would document these elements in her seminal text Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) and, although there were slashers before, it was here that the template was scored in blood. From the stock characters already mentioned to the stalk and slash formula, following the release of Friday the 13th, almost one hundred slasher films were released in next six years. So, without this film we wouldn’t have had such sub-genre classics as My Bloody Valentine (1981), The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and the camp (pun intended) classic Sleepaway Camp (1983).

In a contemporary context, it is difficult to look at Mrs Voorhees and not feel sympathy. Her son drowned when he should have been getting looked after by camp counsellors (Barry and Claudette maybe?) and had to see multiple generations (again, of maybe the Christie family) attempt to reopen the unsafe locale. She has clearly suffered mentally to the point where, not only does she feel that her son speaks through her, but that the only way she feels she can finally stop the cycle is to kill everyone at Camp Crystal Lake. So, although this is a cheap, in the can slasher, it is hard not to feel sympathy for her and, similarly to a young Michael Myers, the POV shots place the audience right into the mind of the broken mother.

Friday the 13th isn’t original. Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween did it first and better. The acting isn’t as on-point as those first two films either. Sean Cunningham was a director with a modicum of talent but with an eye on the profits. However, something clicked on that set. Through the locations, the music, the effects and a cast that, on paper, shouldn’t have worked, a $60,000,000 hit was born ($228,037,651 in 2025). The beauty of all of these moments can be seen in the penultimate scene, Alice, waking in a canoe after the violently beheading Mrs Voorhees the night before. Manfredini’s end credits music plays, the misty hued shot of Camp Crystal Lake seems almost beautiful bar the barbarity and then…Jason Voorhees appears and a franchise was born.