Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [108]
Originality, however, has always been overrated in genre movies. Ripping off your predecessors is a noble tradition, and, for the audience, spotting these cinematic quotes is part of the fun. Where studios went wrong was not in copying the movies from the seventies, but in learning the wrong lessons from them. The monsters stopped hiding in the shadows. They became the stars, known by their first names, like Freddy, Chucky, and Jason. Children dressed up like these maniacs for Halloween, and fan clubs worshipped them. Michael Myers started as the bogeyman, but the Halloween series followed the same conventional path as that of The Exorcist sequels. In Halloween II, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode asks that terrible question: “Why me?” It is revealed that Michael is actually her biological sibling, and before long, the mysterious noncharacter becomes familiar, even vulnerable.
In the 1980s, there were a few serial killers whose motivation was shrouded in mystery in movies like The Stepfather and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. These movies remained cult hits in a time when horror was reaching a mass audience. Just as the killers seemed increasingly ordinary in mainstream horror, the victims in the most popular horror movies became completely interchangeable, forgettable blank slates. This shifted the audience identification radically. People rooted for the killers and saw their victims as irrelevant casualties.
Many saw this flaw in moral terms, but there was also an aesthetic issue: it shrank the horror movie down to size. Emotional involvement is dramatically valuable for many reasons, but one of them is that it can be used as an effective distraction, like the magician who tells a joke to keep our attention away from what he’s pulling out of his sleeve. If the audience didn’t care about the victims at all, then it was more difficult for a director to manipulate their responses. As a result, horror fans regularly outsmarted these movies. They anticipated the kills, shouted back at the screen, and had fun at the dumbness of it all. These movies still made audiences jump, but the scares did not linger. They allowed you to sleep well.
The most popular franchise of the era was Friday the 13th, a well-made stalker movie with frequent kills and just enough naked flesh to satisfy young male audiences. Director Sean Cunningham had already changed the genre in the 1970s by producing the underground cult movie The Last House on the Left, but after deciding to copy the success of Halloween, he set his sights on a larger audience. He was always more interested in pleasing the crowd than Wes Craven was, and he found the perfect project to do it in. It had the right title, some attractive unknown actors, and most important, Jason. This iconic modern villain was deformed, mute, and able to hold his breath for long periods of time. He makes only a cameo in Friday the 13th, leaping out of the water to grab his teenage victim. By the second installment of the series he became the focus, clearly inspired by Michael Myers. He walked just like him, wore similar clothes, and also pursued nubile, promiscuous teenagers.
Many of the scariest scenes in the original Friday the 13th were shot from the point of view of the killer, accompanied by a propulsive musical hook (cha-cha-cha-cha-cha) that served the same purpose as the theme written by John Carpenter for Halloween. Almost everything about the Friday the 13th series was derivative of the movies of the seventies. The setting (by the water) and some of the kills (the skewering of the couple like a shish kebab) were taken from Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve. Jason’s mask belonged to a long line of killers from movies like Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The shock endings were straight from the playbook of Carrie. Even Cunningham concedes that the movie was hardly original, calling it “interesting maybe as a social document, in historical terms of what can happen in the movie business at a particular point