I Watched the Kick-Ass Six and a Half Hour Friday the 13th Documentary Crystal Lake Memories for my Upcoming Book The Fractured Mirror, So I'm Getting a Happy Place Piece Out of It As Well
If I had not written myriad articles and books on the subject, readers would still know that I am mentally ill due to the insane amount of time and work I have devoted to my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror.
Oh, but I long for that day, in the very near future, God willing, when I will be able to refer to The Fractured Mirror as my new book rather than a book that I have spent somewhere between three and nine years writing.
Because there is something deeply wrong with me, I’ve taken an assignment that already bordered on impossible—watching and writing about every narrative American film about filmmaking released within the last century—and made it much harder.
For example, I did not need to watch Crystal Lake Memories, a six-hour and forty-minute long documentary about the Friday the 13th franchise. If I had not watched it and included it in The Fractured Mirror, I doubt that even a single soul would have complained, particularly since I’ve given some wiggle room in terms of what to cover in the book while I’m trying to write up every narrative American movie about filmmaking I’m only covering a broad cross-section of documentaries about filmmaking.
Time is always important to me. But it’s particularly important right now because I am in a mad fever to finally finish The Fractured Mirror. I will not stop feverishly consuming movies that fit the criteria until I have a finished book that is quietly absolutely massive in terms of scope, length, and ambition.
I didn’t have to write about Crystal Lake Memories. Truth be told, I’m not even a Friday the 13th fan. Where the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street all have their origins in influential masterpieces by some of the horror filmmakers of all time, the first Friday the 13th movie, while successful and iconic, isn’t considered particularly good, let alone masterpieces.
Though he produced Last House on the Left and directed Friday the 13th no one would consider Sean S. Cunningham a particularly distinguished filmmaker, let alone a frightmaster on the level of Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper.
I chose to cover Crystal Lake Memories because I’d heard wonderful things about it, it fits the criteria of The Fractured Mirror and because I am absolutely fascinated by the behind-the-scenes drama of prominent franchises.
If I hadn’t found Crystal Lake Memories’ subject matter irresistible, I wouldn’t have written a 700-page book on it.
Crystal Lake Memories’ length begins to seem less punishing, masochistic and insane when you consider that it covers all twelve movies in the Friday the 13th canon. That’s the ten films in the official series as well as the commercially successful but critically derided 2003 crossover extravaganza Freddy Vs. Jason and the 2009 reboot.
Six hours and forty minutes sounds insanely long, but that more or less works out to a half hour or so for each film. Can each entry in the series support a half-hour of commentary, quips, and shenanigans? Definitely. The crazy thing about Crystal Lake Memories is that it could be even longer. I’d watch a feature-length documentary about every film in the series AND the late-night show, which I watched as a child as part of my ongoing exploration into which shows and movies had boobs in them. If I remember correctly, Friday the 13th delivered on that level as much as something on free TV could.
Crystal Lake Memories does a thorough job with all of the entries in the Friday the 13th series as well as the Canadian syndicated series, which briefly employed such noted Canuck filmmakers as Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. Cronenberg must have dug the experience because he made a second contribution to the Friday the 13th universe by playing a bad guy in Jason X.
That’s the one where Jason goes to space! I love that horror franchises depart Earth and venture into the cosmos after tiring of Earth-bound horror.
After the first entry, the question with pretty much all horror franchises is, “How do we keep this going?” When you capture the public’s imagination with an unforgettable exemplar of evil, what do you do for a follow-up?
That was the question Friday the 13th faced with each sequel, crossover, and reboot. The filmmakers ended up contributing elements so synonymous with the series that even horror buffs can be forgiven for existing from the very start.
For example, Friday the 13th is famous as a deathless franchise about a machete-wielding linebacker of a man who wears a hockey mask while punishing camp counselors for smoking marijuana despite it being illegal, drinking despite being underage and having sex outside of marriage.
Yet that incarnation of Jason Voorhees did not exist until the third entry in the series.
Jason isn’t the bad guy in Friday the 13th. That honor belongs instead to his mother, who lost her mind when camp counselors at Crystal Lake were too busy schtupping to save her boy Jason from drowning.
Jason comes back from the dead to serve as the primary villain of Friday the 13th Part II, but he uses a potato sack instead of a hockey mask to hide his face. A potato sack! There was a whole damn movie where Jason Voorhees ran around with a cloth bag over his head, like some manner of off-brand scarecrow, and horror lovers of the world still said, “Fuck it. I don’t care how shitty that looks. I’ll still see it and the sequel and the sequel to that.”
As recounted by its cast and crew, Friday the 13th was born of a beautiful, beautiful dream. The filmmakers, most notably director Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller, wanted to make a lot of money ripping off Halloween with a film that had all of its sordid, teen-friendly elements but none of the craft, sophistication, or artistry of Carpenter’s classic.
Friday the 13th was a whodunnit with a twist ending. The crazed murderer hacking their way through camp was a frail old woman on a vendetta.
The future of the series lies in its final jump scare, which found an undead child incarnation of Jason Voorhees leaping out of the water to attack a girl in a canoe. The filmmakers understood that Jason Voorhees was their man and their monster, but they still hadn’t figured out the bit about the hockey mask.
The filmmakers and actors in Crystal Lake Memories do not hold any grand delusions about the series' quality or integrity. They are wonderfully irreverent and blissfully frank about a series that remained scruffy, low-budget, and borderline homemade even after it became a consistent cash cow for Paramount.
The runaway success of Friday the 13th did not lead to robust budgets or impressive production values. The appeal of the series, to Paramount at least, lies not in its negligible creative or cultural value but rather in being surefire money-makers.
Keeping the budgets low and the casts mostly unknown ensured that the sequels would all make a healthy profit and keep the money train going strong.
There is a widespread perception, not entirely unmerited, that the entries in a slasher franchise are interchangeable and self-cannibalizing. There’s a sense that the movies are pretty much the same.
Crystal Lake Memories insists instead that the Friday the 13th sequels were precious cinematic snowflakes, each decidedly different from the last. As a casual fan of Friday the 13th, I gravitated toward the most outrageous and distinct entries, most notably Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason X, and Freddy Vs. Jason.
The documentary makes it seem like every entry has been outrageous, distinct, and unforgettable. The franchise has attracted any number of colorful characters both in front of the camera and behind it, including Tom Savini, the makeup and special effects guru who got his taste for gore while serving as a combat photographer in Vietnam.
The Friday the 13th veterans take malicious delight in pointing out the many elements of the series that do not make a goddamn lick of sense. They love to point out snubs and flubs and continuity errors.
The continuity in Friday the 13th is so tortured and impossible that it’s essentially one giant error spread across twelve entries.
Friday the 13th and its hockey mask-wearing slasher became world-famous household names, yet the films remained low-budget, sketchy endeavors, the kind of thing that embarrassed respectable Paramount executives.
This deep dive into Crystal Lake goes into fascinating detail about how practical effects were realized. This is a Fangoria subscriber’s dream in that it seems as concerned with how the films were made and the compromises involved as the films themselves.
Special effects maven like the legendary Tom Savini, who explains that he got his taste for gore as a combat photographer in Vietnam, goes into gory specifics about how the carnage was created.
Crystal Lake Memories made me want to binge the entire series despite being perhaps unwisely candid about the many weaknesses of the films in particular and the series as a whole.
This is a better documentary than the Friday the 13th movies deserve. I loved it.
The only downside is that now I have to watch the nearly four-hour documentary by the same team about Nightmare on Elm Street, a franchise I adore and am very familiar with.
I could say that I am suffering for my book, but the truth is that I enjoyed every minute of Crystal Lake Memories, and there are a lot.
It’s a very welcome reminder that researching and writing The Fractured Mirror has involved an awful lot of time, work, and energy but also tremendous pleasure, even joy.
So, if you have six and a half hours to devote to a documentary about Friday the 13th series, I cannot recommend this highly enough.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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