“I don’t have much to say. It’s pretty straightforward slasher stuff.
So what I’ll say is why I think the plot of Friday the 13th, the proto-slasher(?) is really dumb.
If youâve heard of this, youâve no doubt heard that Jason isnât the killer, but Jasonâs mom. If you haven’t, then this probably isn’t information that matters to you at this point.
This whole mom thing doesnât work. Because we donât even SEE Jasonâs mom until the last half hour of the movie. So the whole time youâre wondering who the killer is…and itâs a character you didnât even know existed. So it’s not like you could say, “You know what? I bet it was that middle-aged woman!” That wasnt even a selectable option until it was a foregone conclusion.
We miss a lot in this movie compared to the contemporary Halloween. In Halloween, we see the killer fully way before the action really starts. It works. It builds tension, and we see that Michael Myers or The Shape is formidable. In Friday, we donât get to see the killer, we see most of the kills from either a first-person of the killer perspective or with the killer completely absent.
Characters recognize Pam Voorhees before they’re killed, which makes us think the killer is someone we know, but it ends up being someone THEY know, but we donât. It’s a cheat, at best.
This movie is one of the OG slashers, so the rules werenât clear yet. But itâs definitely a storytelling rule that if youâre going to put a mystery out there, if the true perpetrator turns out to be an unknown, itâs just not going to work. Itâs a little bit of a fuck you to the viewer. The way this works out best, the viewer would get some clues as to whoâs doing the shit, but they wouldnât all know who it was before the reveal. So in retrospect, youâd look back and say, âOh, that makes sense!â With Friday the 13th, thatâs not possible because you donât even know about what happened to Jason, let alone about his mom, until Pam Vorhees shows up 40 minutes before the ending.
Anyway, a little more plotting would’ve helped a lot. And I can totally forgive this early entry into the genre, but I think some newer movies could learn from the past and raise the bar a little. “