Giving up the Ghostface

Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #18.

The new Scream movie — Scream 7 — is bad. Really, really bad. I’m not saying it makes Scream 6 look good — nothing could do that — but it did make me nostalgic for Scream 3 and the days when a bad Scream movie was still fun. It’s directed by Kevin Williamson, writer of the original’s smart, sexy, sassy screenplay, so I’ve no idea what went wrong here. Then, since today is the one sufferers of paraskevidekatriaphobia fear most, I take a look back at the first two Friday the 13th movies, both of which were made over 45 years ago, proving that the passage of time is more merciless and horrifying than even Jason Voorhees.

[DING ding ding ding di-di-ding ding ding ding ding ding DING]

— Wonder what scam it is today… Hello?

— Hello, Stephen.

— Listen, I’m not with Vodafone, you’re not with H.M.R.C., and I didn’t take out car finance between 2007 and 2024, so what do you want?

— Um… do you like scary movies?

— How scary are we talking? Dinesh-D’Souza-made-another-Trump-movie scary or Milly-Shapiro-sticking-her-head-out-a-car-window scary?

— Errr… the second one.

— Sure. “Texas Chain Saw Massacre”. “Silence of the Lambs”. Anything John Carpenter.

— What about the “Scream” movies? Those were scary.

— Well, the first one was, but the rest sucked.

— Hmph. I wanna play a game. It’s called ‘How Well Does Stephen Know “Scream 7”?’

— I’d like to play a game, too. I call it ‘How Does Stephen Get His Money Back After Sitting Through “Scream 7”?’

— Poor Steve. You didn’t like my seventh outing?

— Oh no, I was in the market for some Nineties nostalgiaslop. I especially enjoyed how the producers chucked a tonne of money at Neve Campbell to come back then had no earthly idea what to do with the character.

— Well, let’s see if you were paying attention. In “Scream 7”—

— ‘Hello, Sidney.’ Gale shows up. ‘Red Right Hand’. The Rules. New cast of forgettable, obnoxious teens. Red herrings. Improbable killers with implausible motives. Stab stab, bang bang. Credits roll. That about cover it?

— Shut up, you little bitch, or I’m gonna gut you like a fish.

— Wow. Just… wow. Like, it’s not 1996 anymore. We say ‘binch’ now. Educate yourself, my dude.

— [sighs] In “Scream 7”, the Macher house has been turned into—

— Some godawful cross between a “Stab” museum and an Airbnb, complete with your own personalised threatening phone call and animatronic Ghostface. That was a pivotal sequence. So pivotal we never return to it and it proves to be totally irrelevant to the movie.

— Okay. Next question: what name did Sidney give her daught—

— You mean the one with whom she has all the chemistry of an empty test tube? That would be ‘Tatum’.

— Final question: which legacy character returns—

— Which one doesn’t? And you know what, bringing back Stu would have had way more impact if it hadn’t been endlessly trailed in the marketing for the movie. The only one they didn’t bring back was, well, you know…

— [silence]

— The Gaza Greta Garbo.

— [silence]

— Melissa Ba—

— Spyglass Media Group would like me to read a statement at this time—

— No, no. It’s okay. Ix-nay on the Alestine-pay.

— Any final words before I slice and dice?

— I don’t think I can say it better than a girl at the screening I went to. Halfway through the movie, at a quiet beat, she sighed: ‘Well, this is shit.’

— [click]

Friday the 13th is a rare slasher franchise-starter that is of lower quality than many of its successors.

Indeed, viewed at this remove, it might be hard to figure out how this run-of-the-mill body-piler inspired eleventh sequels and became the iconic horror series of the Eighties. The answer — or one of them — is that May 1980 was another world. American TV meant three networks and the highest-rated show was 60 Minutes. There was no internet and therefore no internet porn. Slashers, like the beach and biker movies of the 1960s, were a rare source of teenage stimulation, with T’n’A — or the suggestion of them — and no parental oversight. That parents and church organisations despised these movies only enhanced their appeal for the youth of America. Twenty years later, these teens would be trying to keep their own offspring away from American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999), the millennial gross-out picture being the Friday the 13th of its day. The arc of the universe is long but it bends towards moral panic.

Screenwriter Victor Miller and director Sean S. Cunningham never intended their picture to be anything more than a rip-off to cash in on the success of Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). They weren’t the only ones to have the idea. Other holiday-themed slashers of 1980 include Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980), Christmas Evil (Lewis Jackson, 1980), and New Year’s Evil (Emmett Alston, 1980). Miller and Cunningham simply hit the right balance of sexual suggestiveness and gore and marketed their movie well, with posters of the number ‘13’ crashing through glass and a trailer counting out 13 kills. (There are actually ten in the movie.)

Of course, what made Friday the 13th enduring was its hockey-masked machete-swinger, Jason Voorhees. Right? Um… yeah… he’s not in this one. Well, not properly. You see, Jason was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. He was dead as a doornail or a horny camp counsellor in the vicinity of Crystal Lake. For the most part, he features in the original as a motive for the killer, but the movie made so much money that a sequel was needed and, all of a sudden, Jason was undead, like a homicidal Lazarus.

Our final girl in this first entry is Alice Hardy and she is steely, resourceful and puts up one hell of a fight when the climax comes and the killer with it. Naturally, she takes a while to notice that her friends keep disappearing (about every ten minutes or so) but eventually she finds their bodies displayed in gruesome poses. (Another borrow from Halloween.) The kills are what Friday the 13th is all about and they were famously the work of practical effects guru Tom Savini. They’re tame by today’s gore standards but their execution is flawless. Savini is almost without equal in these matters. Especially memorable is a close-up of a luckless chap, played by a young Kevin Bacon, reclining in bed, savouring a post-coital joint, when an arrow erupts through his throat. As with the American Pie flicks decades later, grossing out parents was a big part of the appeal. (This one time, at summer camp, they stuck an arrow in my trachea.)

The denouement, in which Alice floats away in a canoe, Good seemingly having won the day, is iconic, though it may not carry the same force for first-time viewers today. Friday the 13th provided the basic structure for the movies that came later, both in its own series and in its imitators, but it is slower-paced and less energetic. Still, an imitator with imitators. They did something right.

The good news: Five years after the butchery seen in Friday the 13th, Camp Crystal Lake remains closed.

The bad news: There’s another camp right next door and another platter of dumb teenagers is plating itself up for the slaughter. Oh, and remember, Jason? The kid whose drowning inspired his mother to kill a bunch of teenagers? More good news: he’s not dead after all. More bad news: he’s now a grown man stalking the woods for oversexed camp counsellors and building a shrine crowned with his mother’s decapitated head. At this point, Jason has still to acquire his celebrated hockey mask (that will come in the next instalment) and is stuck with a potato sack over his head, a la Phantom Killer in The Town That Dreaded Sundown (Charles B. Pierce, 1976).

Facing off against the big dumb lug is Ginny Field (Amy Steel), a child psychology student who is able to put her academic training to use in outwitting the simple slasher, which is like outsmarting a ham. Cloth-face is so dumb and uncoordinated it’s hard to believe he could get through an entire killing spree without sticking himself with a pitchfork. Ginny makes a decent accounting of herself when things get physical, though the fate of boyfriend Paul Holt (John Furey) is left up in the air. Friday the 13th Part 2 has a darker sense of humour than its predecessor, as evidenced in the method for wiping out wheelchair user Mark (Tom McBride). From nowhere, Jason’s machete lodges in his face, sending him backwards down a flight of stairs. It’s tasteless and a little mean-spirited but it was the Eighties.

A note on numerals: While the poster brands this Friday the 13th Part II, the on-screen title uses the Arabic numeral ‘2’. This began a tradition of the Friday the 13th movies being merrily inconsistent when numbering sequels. The next movie (1982) went by the title Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D on its poster and Friday the 13th Part III on the film itself. The fourth movie (1984) dropped numbering altogether, while the fifth (1985) sometimes called itself Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning and sometimes omitted the numeral. Numbers were back for Parts VI (1986), VII (1988) and VIII (1989), retired again for 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (which would have been Part IX), and resurrected like our titular antihero for Jason X (2002). So, no, Sting. Murder by numbers is not as easy to learn as your ABC.