{"id":14011,"date":"2020-05-08T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=14011"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:19:16","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:19:16","slug":"friday-the-13th-at-40-how-to-steal-and-sell-a-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/friday-the-13th-at-40-how-to-steal-and-sell-a-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday the 13th<\/i> at 40: How To Steal and Sell a Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Proto-indie filmmaker Roger Corman once said, \u201cMotion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century \u2013 they combine art and business!\u201d Not the most romantic sentiment from the Pit and the Pendulum<\/em> director, but the proof is in the box office returns: Corman\u2019s low-budget pictures consistently made a healthy profit for nearly four decades. His secret, among other more frugal things, was knowing what the people want and giving it to them: bikinis, explosions, spooks, and counterculture. In his 1980 slasher Friday the 13<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em>, Sean S. Cunningham adopted the strategy; he threw every profitable aspect of previous horror hits into a blender and hit puree. The result is one of the most lucrative and duplicated slasher films of all time. As the movie\u2019s 40th anniversary peeks around the corner with machete in hand, it\u2019s time to pay our respects to its brazen financial motivations and kitchen-sink approach that would make the likes of Herschel Gordon Lewis proud. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his book Nightmare USA<\/em>, film historian Stephen Thrower calls Friday<\/em>  \u201cthe lynch-pin deal between mainstream cinema and the exploitation independents.\u201d Jaws<\/em> primed the pump by relocating B-movie sensation into the realm of big studio fare: a severed leg here, a nubile skinny dipping victim there. John Carpenter\u2019s Halloween<\/em> (1978) and Brian de Palma\u2019s Carrie<\/em> (1976) upped the ante, but it wasn\u2019t until Sean S. Cunningham made a gory cash grab in 1980 that the slasher formula was solidified. Less movie-making than deal-making, Friday the 13<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em> fires for maximum effect and profitability. In the Crystal Lake Memories<\/em> documentary, screenwriter Victor Miller recalls the genesis of his involvement: a phone call with Sean Cunningham that began, “Halloween<\/em> is making a lot of money at the box office. Why don’t we rip it off?” Cunningham doesn\u2019t lay claim to much artistic capital, which is probably one of the reasons why the franchise hasn\u2019t gotten much of a critical gaze beyond the formula it established and the tsunami of a subgenre it (along with Halloween<\/em>) helped to inspire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe simple truth is that I need a hit film,\u201d he told Fangoria<\/em> in 1980. \u201cSo few people survive at all in this business, making any kind of film; it\u2019s all very nice to talk about \u2018cinema,\u2019 but the truth of the matter is that Friday the 13th<\/em> seems to me a strong commercial property, and I think now is the right time for it.\u201d With nothing but the title, the director took out a hype ad of epic proportions in the July 1979 issue of Variety<\/em>: \u201cFrom the people who brought you The Last House on the Left <\/em>comes the most terrifying film ever made: FRIDAY THE 13TH.\u201d With nothing more than a full-page promise and a title, Cunningham managed to secure financing from Georgetown Productions (an arm of Hallmark Releasing Corp, that of Last House on the Left<\/em> fame). Armed with a production budget of $125,000, Cunningham and Miller locked down an ideal shooting location in a New Jersey Boy Scout camp and cranked out a script. As author David Konow tells it in Reel Terror<\/em>, Georgetown upped their bid to $550,000 after reading Victor Miller\u2019s script.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The summary, for the uninitiated: a group of counselors arrive at Camp Crystal Lake to reopen the former summer camp, despite local warnings of a curse after a child tragically died there years before. The implied \u201ccurse\u201d was that of the dead boy\u2019s ghost, one Jason Voorhees, taking his revenge on the counselors that let him die. The curse, however, turns out to be very real, in the form of an unknown assailant knocking the teenagers off one by one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story and beats are colossally derivative. Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho<\/em> provided the inspiration to surprise the audience within the first 20 minutes, while a more recent stalk-and-slash gave the film\u2019s opening  its structure. In a scene that lifts directly from Halloween<\/em>, the audience is privileged to the killer\u2019s POV as he (or she) strikes down an amorous pair of young lovers. In Fangoria<\/em>, Cunningham admits that the choice was more wallet-driven than creative: \u201cOriginally, we had planned to shoot that scene in quite a different way. It was written to occur by the lake on the campgrounds, there was to be a chase throughout a boathouse and by the water, and a few other things. The first night we had planned to shoot it, it snowed. The second time, our generator failed. So, we had to choose a location that had its own current source\u2014which turned out to be the interior of a barn. Working on a limited budget, there wasn\u2019t much choice other than doing it that way. I\u2019m hoping that people can take it as a sort of tip of the hat to Mr. Carpenter.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time the sequels were off and running, the Halloween<\/em> homogenization intensified: in Part III<\/em>, the now-grown Jason wore a mask, donned utilitarian clothing, and picked off horny kids and unsuspecting folks in the wrong place at the wrong time, much like a Shatner-faced boogeyman we all know. The one Friday the 13th<\/em> element that didn\u2019t (yet) solidify in the fright formula as we know it is that of the killer\u2019s identity. It\u2019s not until Part 2<\/em> that the male killer makes his appearance, and by that time slashers My Bloody Valentine,<\/em> Halloween II<\/em>, Prom Night<\/em>, Terror Train<\/em>, and Maniac<\/em> took the gender trope and ran with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The carbon copies keep coming. In a closer that producer Steve Miner calls \u201cgrand theft cinema,\u201d Friday the 13<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em> ends with defeated survivor Alice (Adrienne King) drifting along Crystal Lake in a canoe, seemingly safe\u2014until young Jason shoots out of the water and pulls her down. The scene is a blatant mimic of the final dream sequence of Brian de Palma\u2019s Carrie<\/em> (1976). Harry Manfredini\u2019s score does the heavy lifting to create a sense of safety for the viewer, a Pied Piper on the piano leading the audience to one final scare. It\u2019s a pitch-perfect coda to a story that hits all the right notes for peak titillation. If you\u2019re going to steal, steal from the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contrary to the slick editing and atmospheres of Halloween<\/em> and Tobe Hooper\u2019s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/em> (1974) (in which you think you saw more penetration and bloodletting than you actually did), Friday the 13<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em>\u2019s<\/em> body count is front and center, with many kills shown on screen. In order to further level up, Cunningham recruited makeup effects artist Tom Savini, fresh off the success of George A. Romero\u2019s visceral zombie joint Dawn of the Dead<\/em> (1978). Savini\u2019s background as a combat photographer served him well on the set, enabling him to create kill sequences that he likens to pornographic money shots. Slashed throats, beheadings, and impalements pepper the threadbare narrative, the blades following an algorithm established in Italian giallo cinema in the decade prior (indeed, Friday the 13<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em> Part II<\/em> contains an infamous shish-kabob killing that apes a murder scene in Mario Bava\u2019s A Bay of Blood<\/em>). The carnage prompted some critics to call for an \u2018X\u2019 rating rather than the \u2018R\u2019 it earned from the MPAA. They presented the gratuitous slayings as a flaw: in his review of Terror Train<\/em>, Roger Ebert called slashers of the 80s \u201ca series of sensations, strung together on plot. Any plot will do. Just don\u2019t forget the knife, the girl, and the blood.\u201d There\u2019s no shade in the observation that Friday the 13th<\/em> hits all of these marks, which is precisely why it worked like gangbusters in its time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The studio tag-team came along at the perfect moment and proved Cunningham right when he said that it was the \u201cright time\u201d for such a film. According to Richard Nowell\u2019s Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle<\/em>, Friday<\/em>\u2019s financiers set up a screening for MPAA members, and a studio-wide bidding war ensued between Paramount, UA, and Warner Bros. Warner did secure international distribution rights, but Paramount emerged the victor. Paramount, in picking up and promoting the film, effectively manufactured a horror blockbuster. Cunningham\u2019s feature wasn\u2019t the only Halloween <\/em>cash-in; the entire cross-media marketing strategy was calculated to suggest content similarities to the 1978 smash hit, from the comic book-style poster (both films\u2019 posters feature an unknown killer brandishing a knife against a pitch-black background) to the double-dog-dare-you trailer quipping, \u201cYou may only see (Friday the 13th<\/em>) once, but once will be enough.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A multi-million dollar campaign popped off to the tune of $4.5 million, nearly double the average marketing budget for North American releases of the time. It hit theaters nationwide on May 9, 1980, with all of the legitimacy of a studio feature. Halloween<\/em> was a predecessor that made millions, but even Carpenter\u2019s classic was held at an arm\u2019s length by Hollywood, like many indie horrors of the era. Paramount, conversely, had the capital to push their new acquisition with the muscle they normally give to blockbusters like King Kong<\/em> (1976). The dice landed in the backers\u2019 favor: Friday the 13th<\/em> brought in over $39 million in the States. It was the second-highest grossing horror film of the year, behind Stanley Kubrick\u2019s The Shining<\/em>. The counselor-killing tale was such a strong commercial property that it pinged on the radars of more vanilla types in the film world; critics eviscerated it across the board. Just two issues after Cunningham beamed that it was the \u201cright time\u201d for a film like his, Fangoria<\/em> head Bob Martin ran an Editor\u2019s Note launching a resentful counter-attack against film critic Gene Siskel, who was so incensed by Friday the 13th\u2019s<\/em> existence that he intentionally spoiled its ending in his review, and encouraged readers to flood Paramount\u2019s corporate headquarters with hate mail. Pissing off critics but selling theater tickets with feverish fury, the film made undeniable waves at just the right moment. Paramount\u2019s gamble on Friday<\/em>, and its ensuing success, ushered in a new era of modern horror in which the genre was the star for studios and distributors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The ensuing imitators flooded in and sliced teens up throughout the decade, sometimes with nothing more than an event-based title or a woodsy setting: Madman<\/em>. Graduation Day<\/em>. Final Exam<\/em>. April Fool\u2019s Day<\/em>. Bloody Birthday<\/em>. Within the franchise, Friday the 13th<\/sup><\/em> followed its own template and stuck with the good stuff: youths on parade, and then there were none. It would take three more films before the powers that be truly honed the backwoods slasher formula to a sharp edge in Friday the 13th<\/sup> Part IV: The Final Chapter<\/em>, in which Frank Zito presents moviegoers with the iconic Jason that we adore today. The nuclear fallout from the original spawned lucrative media mutations that crawled their way into pocketbooks worldwide, from comic books to action figures to a video game. It\u2019s fun to dissect art masterpieces like Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em> and decipher thematic clues in the props of The Shining<\/em>, but there\u2019s something to be said for commercial giants like Friday the 13th<\/sup><\/em> that left a monstrous footprint in genre cinema simply by doubling down on the hustle and delivering on its promise. It\u2019s not a classic because it \u201ctranscends horror\u201d or some other pithy arthouse snobbery. Cunningham wanted to make some money with some decent scares\u2014and he succeeded. The picture serves as a cheeky commentary on the seismic changes that can rumble from the film industry, the epicenter directly under whichever crafty (some might say mercenary) creators can see which way the wind is blowing and put a product out quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cunningham followed in the glorious opportunist footsteps of Roger Corman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Al Adamson: make it cheap, make it fast, and make it thrilling. It\u2019s perched at an odd place in horror film fandom: the story was too much of a success to be an underground cult classic, too groundbreaking in its time to fade into obscurity and enjoy a renewed appreciation from the media restoration house du jour, <\/em>and too technically competent to be \u201cso bad it\u2019s good.\u201d In a realm that sits on the fringes of cinema and valorizes shocking originality, Friday the 13th<\/sup><\/em> is KISS\u2019 Dynasty<\/em>, it\u2019s KRS-One\u2019s \u201cStep Into A World\u201d remix with Puff Daddy; it\u2019s the sell-out joint that taps the cultural keg of the era at the perfect time to yield victory on the charts. Through homage and huckster carnival-barking, Cunningham, Miner, Miller, and the studio that gambled on them effectively raised the mainstream genre bar with the sort of violence, titillation, and rude energy that one could previously only find in independent drive-in fare of the 1970s. Doff your cap (or hockey mask) to a 40-year-old game-changer that combines art and business to make one of the great enduring scare-fests. Don\u2019t forget to stay away from the camp\u2014it\u2019s got a death curse. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Friday the 13th” is now streaming on Prime Video<\/a>.<\/em> Paramount is releasing a 40th anniversary Blu-ray Steelbook<\/a> on June 16.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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