This Friday the 13th, Celebrate the First Real Jason Movie: ‘Friday the 13th Part 2’

Without any new Friday the 13th movies on the horizon — various legal and creative issues have kept the property in limbo for years — horror fans might naturally turn to streaming for themed Friday the Actual 13th watching. It’s easy enough to go for simplicity and catch either the original Friday the 13th , which seems to be perpetually streaming on Paramount+, or the mostly ill-regarded but appreciated-in-some-corners remake , which currently lives on Max. But if you don’t have time for a marathon and want to watch one Friday the 13th movie this or any such Friday, consider, if you will, the elegantly titled (and explosively titled-screened) Friday the 13th Part 2 , which is arguably where the series really established itself as more than a Halloween knockoff.

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Well, not creatively; creatively, the series is pretty much forever a Halloween knockoff. But if the first movie has a certain eerie, low-budget woodsiness that gives it some atmosphere in retrospect, it’s Part 2 where Jason Voorhees becomes an actual slasher villain, promoted from gruesome backstory. Hilariously, following the success of the first film, the Friday the 13th series initially considered ripping off (probably unintentionally) discarded sequel plans for the Halloween movies, which involved making a different, unrelated Halloween-themed horror movie each time out, rather than following the continuing adventures of Michael Myers. (Later, John Carpenter and Debra Hill would go on to give this a shot via Halloween III: Season of the Witch , now a cult favorite but at the time a baffling source of horror-fan confusion and anger.) Rather than proceeding with a different horror story set on the same cursed day, Part 2 capitalizes on the last-minute, Carrie -ish jump scare of the original, where drowned boy Jason, son and motivator of the original’s slasher Mrs. Voorhees, emerges from the lake to drag poor Alice (Adrienne King) under water.

Alice actually wakes up in the hospital (again, shades of Carrie ), leaving an open-ended suggestion that perhaps Jason is (nonsensically) still alive. Alice makes it all the way to the cold open of the sequel, where she’s living on her own and still having nightmares about her experiences at Camp Crystal Lake (conveyed to the audience via nearly five full minutes of clips from the previous film, already eating into the sequel’s 86-minute runtime). Then, in a sequence that mixes more Halloween knock-offs (point-of-view shots), dumb bullshit (point-of-view fake-outs that don’t actually correspond to a real POV; an it’s-just-a-cat jump scare), amusing teasing (the famously nudity-heavy series doesn’t quite follow Alice into the shower), and a dash of craft (long unbroken handheld shots), she gets killed by an unseen assailant, who has also planted the head of Mrs. Voorhees in her fridge.

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From there, the story jumps ahead… five years?! Yes, there’s a five-year time-jump from the murders in the first film to the proper beginning of the second, which makes sense in terms of counselor training resuming on Crystal Lake (not the camp itself), but also means that this 1981 film is taking place in the distant far-off future of 1985! In a neat touch, the events that audiences would have remembered from just a year ago (or the intro of this movie) have been consigned to a corny campfire story that the head of the training institute uses to scare his employees on their first night. “Five long years, he’s been dormant,” he intones, reflecting the way that slashers draw upon goofy scary-story word-of-mouth – if the Jason story were any more complicated than a Halloween knockoff, would it really travel so efficiently?

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Accordingly, the rest of the movie is basically your standard Friday the 13th picture in terms of structure: Young adults congregate in the woods, goof around, have sex, get killed. Is it a really good slasher movie? It is not, and it’s not quite as deep-woods evocative as the original. Yet this is also a relatively stripped-down Jason movie, where the villain still resembles a human, rather than a pure killing machine. Jason still doesn’t have his signature hockey mask, which he acquires in Part III, meaning that the movie hides his face with a little more care, before he eventually finds a pillowcase to use as a makeshift mask. The boyish simplicity is somewhat less impenetrable than that damn hockey mask, iconography that would eventually harden into a lazy default (and, once again, a poor man’s Michael Myers). The movie actually shows Jason’s face, albeit briefly.

We also get a glimpse of what appears to be Jason’s interim home: a squalid little shack in the woods that multiple characters come across. It even has a toilet. Does Jason Voorhees use the bathroom? This is the kind of thought-provoking question Friday the 13th Part 2 is unafraid to ask. Seriously, though, a Jason Voorhees who might still have to eat, sleep, use the facilities, or actually take a second to recover from a chainsaw injury now feels like a fair fight and a novelty – a creepier man in the woods than the hulking Terminator he’d eventually become.

The movie was directed by Steve Miner, who went on to make the third film too (the first one to actually come out on a real Friday the 13th!), and whose Wikipedia boastfully notes that he is the only director to make movies across the pantheon of slasher series; he also directed the (mostly bad) Halloween H20 in 1998. However middling this sequel is – definitely not as good as the same year’s Halloween II , which it remarkably beat to market – and despite being the lowest-grossing of the first five installments, it allowed the series to continue. Whether Miner was perpetuating the cycle of bad slashers or helping to forge an icon, who’s to say. But so many years later, Friday the 13th Part 2 feels almost like its own scrappy reboot.

Jesse Hassenger ( @rockmarooned ) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com , too.

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