The Case for Remaking Friday the 13th
Jan. 5th, 2016 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeast(The movie, not the TV series... which I may get to.)
Friday the 13th is, perhaps, the birthplace of the classic slasher-flick. The first movie follows some teens in the reopening Camp Crystal Lake. They come in ahead of the crowds to do prep work and, in horror movie fashion, to be unrealistically oversexed. Also in classic horror movie fashion, they die in gruesome manners.
Oh, spoilers ahead.
The killer is Mrs. Voorhees, the mother of Jason Voorhees, who died at the same camp years earlier. He drowned and his mother blames the teenagers who, according to her, were too busy having sex to do their jobs as counselors and as lifeguards.
The problems of horror flicks have been discussed. They're both overly-sexualized and profoundly sex-negative. They seek to make you enjoy murder, rather than feel horrified. And so much sexism and racism.
Those are all things that can be improved. Horror, as a genre, as well as the slasher-flick as a sub-genre, can be about the human condition... rather than showing secondary sex characteristics just before they get destroyed. But, I want to focus on the wasted potential.
Friday the 13th starts out as a different series than it's become. As stated above, in the first movie, it was a human woman who did the killings (that, admittedly, required implausible strength). She'd gone movie mad (not to be mistaken for anything resembling real world mental illness) after the death of her son. The first couple sequels keep the mask-wearing, machete wielding murderer very human and not a literal monster. But, by the time Jason took Manhattan, he was a monster with only a desire to kill and a fear of drowning as his character traits.
To better fill this potential, I see three options. The first two options are what I'll call the Mrs. Voorhees options, because they keep the killer human. I'll call the third the Jason option, because there we look at the monster.
Option 1. We focus on the fact that Mrs. Voorhees lost her son.
To make this option something more impactful, let's learn some backstory, as the story goes on. Mrs. Voorhees didn't just lose Jason to the lake and a general assumption of counselors being horny teens, but to specific actions that show specific guilt. Harassment by other camp goers, counselors ignoring or even taking part, eventually things go too far.
And, an important part, Mrs. Voorhees tried to get justice the legal way, but couldn't. Perhaps there was just too much plausible deniability. Perhaps whatever made Jason a target made the courts/juries less sympathetic to him as a victim. Perhaps it didn't even get that far due to a police and court system that was in the favor of the guilty. Whatever the reason, justice was denied.
Left with either options of leaving injustice to stand or taking it into her own hands, Mrs. Voorhees, through a dummy business, reopened the camp, herself, as a means of getting the very people she blamed over in order to do the killings.
This is all, of course, discovered as the movie goes on, one part horror and one part murder mystery... it's just that the murders keep happening.
With this in mind, future movies can be not about killing teenagers because they happen to be teenagers, but about people attaining brutal justice where justice is otherwise denied. The fear becomes that, having done something wrong, the consequences can be delayed, but not for long. Different people can take up the mask and machete for responses to different injustices.
Option 2. We focus on Mrs. Voorhees that blames all of a demographic.
From Mrs. Voorhees's mindset, this isn't that different. Bigots don't make the conscious choice to choose bigotry over justice. They'll tick the "justice" box when given that choice directly, they just tend to view their bigotry as justice. In this case, the first movie can go largely as it does, but the series goes differently.
Instead of being completely isolated, the targets of whoever is the current person to take up the mask and machete will try to get aid, but find aid to be either unbelieving or even (with varying levels of blatancy) sympathetic to the murderer. The targets won't always be teens. Differing times to set could easily lead to ethnic minorities, homosexuals, religious minorities, up to modern day with trans people.
In this, the fear would be about being targeted just for being. And, that's a real fear for some people. That's a real human experience that should be explored.
Option 3. Jason is created by the murders.
This might even have been fun to explore in Freddy vs Jason. The Jason Voorhees of the movies isn't the actual Jason Voorhees. That boy, unfortunately, died... and stayed dead... and did not grow to be an incredibly tall murderer with only a fear of water.
The initial murders and the fear surrounding caused a legend. The legend may even have been used a couple times again. But, it's not Jason Voorhees that caused the legend, it's the legend that caused Jason Voorhees. People believed in the murderer, feared the murderer, performed little rituals about keeping the murderer away... even kind of wanted the murderer to exist.
This is somewhat less idea for remake and somewhat more fan-theory, but I still think it has potential. The reason that Jason is so powerful is that we made him powerful. The reason that his only two thoughts are to desire to kill and to fear drowning is that's how we made him.
Indeed, over the course of a series, all three options can be explored, culminating in a three way Jason vs Jason vs Jason extravaganza... but no more movies after that. That would be the end. We don't need to put Jason in space.
Friday the 13th is, perhaps, the birthplace of the classic slasher-flick. The first movie follows some teens in the reopening Camp Crystal Lake. They come in ahead of the crowds to do prep work and, in horror movie fashion, to be unrealistically oversexed. Also in classic horror movie fashion, they die in gruesome manners.
Oh, spoilers ahead.
The killer is Mrs. Voorhees, the mother of Jason Voorhees, who died at the same camp years earlier. He drowned and his mother blames the teenagers who, according to her, were too busy having sex to do their jobs as counselors and as lifeguards.
The problems of horror flicks have been discussed. They're both overly-sexualized and profoundly sex-negative. They seek to make you enjoy murder, rather than feel horrified. And so much sexism and racism.
Those are all things that can be improved. Horror, as a genre, as well as the slasher-flick as a sub-genre, can be about the human condition... rather than showing secondary sex characteristics just before they get destroyed. But, I want to focus on the wasted potential.
Friday the 13th starts out as a different series than it's become. As stated above, in the first movie, it was a human woman who did the killings (that, admittedly, required implausible strength). She'd gone movie mad (not to be mistaken for anything resembling real world mental illness) after the death of her son. The first couple sequels keep the mask-wearing, machete wielding murderer very human and not a literal monster. But, by the time Jason took Manhattan, he was a monster with only a desire to kill and a fear of drowning as his character traits.
To better fill this potential, I see three options. The first two options are what I'll call the Mrs. Voorhees options, because they keep the killer human. I'll call the third the Jason option, because there we look at the monster.
Option 1. We focus on the fact that Mrs. Voorhees lost her son.
To make this option something more impactful, let's learn some backstory, as the story goes on. Mrs. Voorhees didn't just lose Jason to the lake and a general assumption of counselors being horny teens, but to specific actions that show specific guilt. Harassment by other camp goers, counselors ignoring or even taking part, eventually things go too far.
And, an important part, Mrs. Voorhees tried to get justice the legal way, but couldn't. Perhaps there was just too much plausible deniability. Perhaps whatever made Jason a target made the courts/juries less sympathetic to him as a victim. Perhaps it didn't even get that far due to a police and court system that was in the favor of the guilty. Whatever the reason, justice was denied.
Left with either options of leaving injustice to stand or taking it into her own hands, Mrs. Voorhees, through a dummy business, reopened the camp, herself, as a means of getting the very people she blamed over in order to do the killings.
This is all, of course, discovered as the movie goes on, one part horror and one part murder mystery... it's just that the murders keep happening.
With this in mind, future movies can be not about killing teenagers because they happen to be teenagers, but about people attaining brutal justice where justice is otherwise denied. The fear becomes that, having done something wrong, the consequences can be delayed, but not for long. Different people can take up the mask and machete for responses to different injustices.
Option 2. We focus on Mrs. Voorhees that blames all of a demographic.
From Mrs. Voorhees's mindset, this isn't that different. Bigots don't make the conscious choice to choose bigotry over justice. They'll tick the "justice" box when given that choice directly, they just tend to view their bigotry as justice. In this case, the first movie can go largely as it does, but the series goes differently.
Instead of being completely isolated, the targets of whoever is the current person to take up the mask and machete will try to get aid, but find aid to be either unbelieving or even (with varying levels of blatancy) sympathetic to the murderer. The targets won't always be teens. Differing times to set could easily lead to ethnic minorities, homosexuals, religious minorities, up to modern day with trans people.
In this, the fear would be about being targeted just for being. And, that's a real fear for some people. That's a real human experience that should be explored.
Option 3. Jason is created by the murders.
This might even have been fun to explore in Freddy vs Jason. The Jason Voorhees of the movies isn't the actual Jason Voorhees. That boy, unfortunately, died... and stayed dead... and did not grow to be an incredibly tall murderer with only a fear of water.
The initial murders and the fear surrounding caused a legend. The legend may even have been used a couple times again. But, it's not Jason Voorhees that caused the legend, it's the legend that caused Jason Voorhees. People believed in the murderer, feared the murderer, performed little rituals about keeping the murderer away... even kind of wanted the murderer to exist.
This is somewhat less idea for remake and somewhat more fan-theory, but I still think it has potential. The reason that Jason is so powerful is that we made him powerful. The reason that his only two thoughts are to desire to kill and to fear drowning is that's how we made him.
Indeed, over the course of a series, all three options can be explored, culminating in a three way Jason vs Jason vs Jason extravaganza... but no more movies after that. That would be the end. We don't need to put Jason in space.
