Why Friday the 13th Movies Aren't Scary
It is impossible today to watch the original Friday the 13th with the same innocence and lack of expectations that audiences in 1980 must have brought to the film. Even so, however, Friday the 13th touched a nerve in audiences that allowed the film to generate numerous sequels, even if many could argue that those sequels never matched the scare factor of the original. This paper explores the differences between Friday the 13th, the original, and some of its sequels to explore why the subsequent films have not been as terrifying to audiences.
Friday the 13th begins with a 1958 murder in which we never see the killer. The man's murder is not particularly gory and the movie actually freeze-frames on the woman's face the moment before her death. The set-up, therefore, is both horror and suspense. The movie then uses these murders as the backstory for the camp counselors coming back to Camp Crystal Lake twenty years later and the murder of the young woman twenty minutes into the film. Once again the killer is never seen. The audience experiences the horror of this exuberant, free spirit's murder with the suspense of not knowing who is her murderer.
Much is made throughout the first half of the film of the camp counselors' innocence and inexperience of life, in general, and the woods, in particular. For example, the film portrays a scene in which the counselors react fearfully to a snake in their cabin. Also, the man in control of them calls them "babes in the woods," which they demonstrate themselves to be throughout the film. The film also introduces Ralph, the portent of doom, as a means of additional suspense. The film, therefore, does not rely entirely on the killer's characteristics as a means of terrifying the audience. Rather, the film works because it uses a combination of setting and character to generate suspense, which then becomes horrifying with the introduction of th...