THE STATE OF SHOCK -- CAMP CONFUSION

By Patrick Storck

October 31, 2002

The series that has as hard a time shuffling off the mortal coil as its lead does has just had a tenth chapter, with another on the way. The FRIDAY THE 13TH films have been a staple in American horror for over two decades now, with more theatrical sequels than any other horror series and a body count comparable to a major action scene in a Michael Bay film. What is strange about the series is how inconsistent is, and yet almost always true to form. Virtually every other established franchise, from STAR TREK to HALLOWEEN to FRIENDS, has a set of rules, patterns, back story, something that is used any time a new film or episode airs as a litmus test to verify that the product is worthy of carrying the name. I checked a few online stores, and couldn't find any NITPICKER'S GUIDE TO CRYSTAL LAKE, or variation thereof. As far as I can figure, nobody, fan or filmmaker, really cares, as long as the films entertain.

FRIDAY THE 13TH. An old woman kills camp counselors. I can buy that. Now let's look at JASON X's logline. An unstoppable killing force becomes a cyborg and terrorizes a spaceship returning from "Old Earth." In its own right, that would be a fine self-contained story or SHOWTIME series. When you hold the two up side by side, you have to wonder how a series of films can stray so far from the initial concept. Actually, you don't, because I've already done that for you. Then, if you don't like my answers, start wondering on your own. It's a free country where I live. Canadians will be forced to simply accept my answers, unless they rise up and break free of the oppressive regime in which they live. Until then, they will sadly have no choice but to see how public perception of the series and horror in general shaped the series more so than the previous entries. Poor canuck bastards.

Going back to the beginning, some negligent camp counselors allow a "special needs" child to drown, and his mother Pamela Voorhees (Pam to no one) enacts vengeance. Same deal years later when the camp is to be reopened. It seems hard to believe that anybody would agree to work at a camp where you're the replacement for somebody whose murderer was never caught, though back there wasn't as much telemarketing, so summer shit jobs were harder to come by. Even still, if I was going in for my first day at GloboTech to try and sell long distance and life insurance, and an old guy started screaming "Doomed! Doomed!" and waving his finger at me, I'd rethink my job options.

Mrs. Voorhees is beheaded (until HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, an on-screen beheading was lethal) at the end of the first film *SPOILER* and the lone survivor decides to enlist Michael J. Fox and Nancy McKeon to run the camp for the summer. Checking my notes, I see I have again confused all camp films as related, a problem I had as a child. Solid box office demanded a sequel, so let's look at what people took away: creative deaths, woods, teenagers, Voorhees, mother. The mother is dead, so who'd want revenge? Why, the son, of course! After all, he popped out of the lake at the end of the first one, which means Jason never really drowned. He's amphibious! It doesn't sit well when he witnesses his mother get decapitated. Already we lose logic and continuity. If he never drowned, why did his mother go nuts? If she didn't know he was alive, how did he survive for over a decade in the woods (or in the lake), alone, unnoticed, and apparently very handi-capable? The kid couldn't even swim, but yet he can forage for non-lethal nuts and berries, and trap, kill, and cook wildlife?

These days, Jason was a big, scary guy. It had been years since his "drowning," and there isn't much to do in the woods except work out and turn more evil. Audiences loved him, despite the flaws in logic, so Jason was the new in-house bad guy, and this time they didn't make the mistake of outright killing him, so he could be a part of the next sequel. PART 3 Checklist: Jason, killing, woods, hidden face. Open with Jason returning, kill, kill, kill, cha, cha, cha, let him swap a burlap sack for a hockey mask (the costume shops can't charge as much for burlap), beat him in a vague way, and roll credits. Instead of adding much to the story or mythology, they went the gimmick route by presenting scenes in 3-D. This was the first of the series I saw, thanks to heavy rotation on HBO, and my overactive child mind somehow made the 3-D work without the glasses. As a result, I always think blurry images with misbalanced hue and saturation are coming right at me.

The fourth chapter was the first to promise to be the last of the series. The hockey mask Jason picked up in the last one had become so recognizable, it was the centerpiece of the poster, despite not even appearing on the previous poster. This was the last FRIDAY to pick up right where the last left off, here having Jason presumed dead and taken to the hospital. It was still a cohesive narrative, more or less. Because three films in a row were consecutive events, brief recaps served to start the story quickly and get to the blood. As the "final" film, we now had to have a plot to tie it all together. Well, somebody thought we had to, so we got one. Tommy Jarvis, played by pre-GOONIES Corey Feldman, has to face a child's greatest fear: being stuck in the woods with Crispin Glover. Considering both were later cast in Spielberg-produced films (GREMLINS and BACK TO THE FUTURE, like anyone reading this site wouldn't know that) I think Steve has this one high on his "guilty pleasure" list. Special Edition, anyone? We could replace the machete with a wiffle ball bat, and Tommy could help Jason rediscover that inner child.

Tommy tries to figure out what makes Jason tick (he never considered the Hell Worms, discussed later) and gets a nice field study as your unfriendly neighborhood Voorhees picks off the teenagers next door. Tommy finds that understanding a serial killer is like explaining a joke: you analyze it, take it apart, see why it works the way it does, and in the process, you kill it. For the first time, we actually see Jason actually die. Cease to be. He is an ex-maniac. The story is over. There's nothing supernatural so far, so we assume that anybody who dies stays dead, even if it takes the raw killing power of a Corey to do it. The series was completely done with ...

...for a full eleven months and nine days.

A NEW BEGINNING stuck to Jason being dead, the biggest mistake of the series. After all, Jason IS the series now that everyone had forgotten about sweet old mom. Somebody is turning slightly grown-up Bad News Bears at a mental health camp into something resembling the camp food itself, and all eyes look toward imbalanced victim Tommy Jarvis, now played by John Shepherd, likely because for a fleeting moment in his life, Corey Feldman was deemed "too expensive," save for a brief cameo where he does his impression of a suffocating fish in a yellow slicker. In a complex mystery that makes Agatha Christie look like Jessica Fletcher, we find out the killer is really ... I shouldn't say ... okay, I'll tell: some guy we could care less about, but only by concentrating really hard on caring less, then giving up on how much you care about caring less, and finally succumbing to watching TRADING SPACES instead of caring at all. Despite the second highest body count of the series, the movie was deemed crap by fans and critics alike.

The lesson was learned. If you want to keep milking something for all it's worth, make what people want to see. Successful horror needs to be groundbreaking, but successful horror sequels need to be amped-up retreads. Tommy is brought back because he was in the last two, and the only character who might possibly want to dig Jason up. Well, him and Paramount's money guys. To insure Jason is dead, he stabs him through the chest with a metal pole in a lightning storm. Having never read the works of Mary Shelley, he was unaware of the dire consequences of his actions. Now JASON LIVES, and immediately kills off celebrity guest TV's Arnold Dingfelder Horshack. As a zombie, he has now become supernatural.

People had assumed in retrospect that Jason was actually killed at the end of each film and has come back from the dead before, so this was an easy sell. The bulk of the film consists of amusing setpieces and creative takes on the general perception of the series. One major change that was lost in the following films fairly easily was the renaming of the Crystal Lake community to Forest Green, then later to VALERIE'S HOGAN FAMILY, then back to Crystal Lake. Scenes that were cut included Jason's absentee father, probably because they involved too much history and not enough karo syrup. The end of the film has Jason drowning in the same lake he did but actually didn't years before, plus a bonus boat propeller to the head. JASON LIVES has some great kills, decent production value, and never takes itself too seriously . Despite making less money than the last film, it was considered a success. Another sequel was put into production, a TV series (related in name only) went into production, Jason was doing mall openings, and all was happy in Crystal Lake.

Now that realism was gone and Jason was back, a world of possibilities opened up. Girls work better as horror leads, and psychic girls allow for all kinds of fun mayhem, so A NEW BLOOD let Tommy go, picked up Tina, and did okay. Now the challenge was keeping Jason's misadventures interesting, and the woods were getting a bit stale, so Jason hops aboard a cruise to the Big Apple. While the film is called JASON TAKES MANHATTAN, it's actually Vancouver, and he doesn't so much take it as wander through a few streets here and there for 20 minutes at the end before being mutated back into a dead little boy by those pesky New York toxic waste purges. And that's when the CHUDs came. They can get rid of the strip clubs and hookers, but still they do nothing about the toxic waste. I only wonder which Troma would choose to keep around if they could.

Before we move on to when things went the way of a John Byrne story arc, let's see what we've lost. First off, Mrs. Voorhees is a non-issue. Second off, somehow despite the killer who now returns from the grave with an ease that would make Buffy jealous, people are still buying cabins, having cruises, and fishing for monsters in the Crystal Lake area. The area should have lower property value than what Bosnians call "the bad part of town," but apparently it's a swell place to raise a teenager. The series has been boiled down to a simple formula. Wake Jason up from death, give him someplace to kill a bunch of people, add an authority figure we want to see die, end with some set piece to kill Jason off, make a small profit, and come back in a year or two. Any sense of mythology became secondary, a convenience. A NEW BLOOD opened with a quick rough retrospective of the series to sum it up in a way that fit the plot so we didn't have to waste time with all the details later. MANHATTAN seemed to avoid such a thing, trying not to remind us how many times we've been down this wooded path.

Part nine continued in this direction by not including either a number or the name FRIDAY THE 13TH. Paramount had tired of being associated with horror, and especially with the horror series most often trashed by critics. When MANHATTAN only pulled in $15 million (still a $10 million profit, but the weakest for the series) the plug was pulled. Besides, the only script ready was simply Jason in a field with a dead horse and a baseball bat. New Line, who'd been built by horror with fare like the ELM STREET and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE films, bought the property to reinvent and end it. Do you buy a dog to put it to sleep? Apparently, since New Line's JASON GOES TO HELL claimed to be THE FINAL FRIDAY. Jason would finally not only be killed, but sent to whence he shan’t return. Those are only some of the betrayals the audience must cope with.

Unlike ERNEST GOES TO CAMP or ERNEST GOES TO JAIL, where the titular character actually goes to camp and jail respectively for the majority of the film, Jason doesn't get there until the tail end, and it's only implied, really. Having forgotten the debacle of A NEW BEGINNING, it isn't really Jason for a majority of the movie. Technically it is his spirit, hopping from body to body like an evil Dr. Sam Beckett, trying to put dead what once had life, but without the hockey mask and so on, it just didn't work. It proved not to be final, and didn't take place entirely on Friday, so all that remains honest in the title is THE.

The plot of THE was untrue to form, making too many twists, turns, and revelations, and the characters were too distinct, even secondary characters. The initial script was too well crafted for what had become the guilty pleasure horror series. Had it not been Jason, this movie would probably have a lot more fans and spawned its own series of poor derivative sequels. Instead it betrayed its loyal core audience and openly avoided the history of the line. Jason, we find out, had a sister. Apparently only a Voorhees can kill a Voorhees, and only through a Voorhees can Jason be reborn. Huh? Big Bad Mama said in the first one that he was her only child. I ask the ladies in the audience: is it possible to give birth to a second child without knowing it? Slips your mind? Get back to me on that. We're also introduced to the Hell Baby concept, where Jason's spirit is in a baby thing that helps hop bodies, unless a guy eats Jason's heart, or maybe the wind blows southeast with a chill factor of 68 degrees as the moon passes through the seventh house. Jason also apparently has Hell Worms like Freddy had, the concept I personally blame for killing mainstream horror until SCREAM. Did Cujo have Hell Worms? It would explain very little, but why not? We are given so much new information and mythology from the depths of the left field of Crystal Lake Park that it was almost a relief to walk away from the series. For years it seemed that THE would be it.

Seven years later, New Line put JASON X into production. A few months later it was done, and after a year or so on the shelf it was finally released. With over a decade since the last film to try and stay semi-linear, the amount of freedom that could be taken was nigh-infinite. Jason wreaking havoc on a spaceship of high-school students 450 years in the future was somehow completely believable. The opening, like last time around, just assumed that Jason was back and we shouldn't really waste any time explaining exactly how. The show COACH did this for years, until some executive woke up and realized it was their network airing the damn show. Craig T. Nelson has to this day not been informed. The rest of the film is a bunch of fun set pieces, good humor, and a high hottie quotient, making it one of the most enjoyable FRIDAYs, despite the absence of origin. As a last comparison, I'd like to point out the elements from JASON X that were in the original FRIDAY THE 13TH, in any capacity.

Camp Crystal Lake is now the Crystal Lake Research Facility, but we get some ‘80s-style horny girls in a virtual Crystal Lake scenario, so there's a stretched link. There's sex, drugs and loads of creative violence, so we still have a barely received R-Rating. We still have a killer named Voorhees, and not Lark of SAVED BY THE BELL fame, thankfully. Characterwise, there are teens and a villain. Last, lest I forget, music by Harry Manfredini. I think that does it. We've switched bad guys, good guys, location, planet, tone, studio and film format (JASON X was shot on digital video). The series has completely morphed over two decades into something almost unrecognizable, but luckily still enjoyable. For something so simple with so many sequels, apparently that's the way to go. When FREDDY VS. JASON comes out next year, let's hope the trend continues, spiraling Jason lore straight into HAWKMAN-level continuity problems. Actually, maybe Jason IS Hawkman. Hmmmm ...

For more movie mayhem from Patrick, check out his Danger Seekers Movie Collective.

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