mummyshark:

Okay, so we all know what happened in the first movie. Now let’s jump to the third movie.

Once again, the surviving hero canoes over the lake, ostensibly so she’ll have a place to safely collapse, but really because of what comes next: Another trippy scare, where not only is Jason still alive and running like a pro sprinter, but where Pamela Voorhees’ corpse jumps out of the water, much like “Boy Jason” did in the first film.

Since Pamela’s corpse would be headless in real life, there’s no room to view this as anything other than “not real.”

But why do I suppose “forced hallucination” over “dream sequence?” Simple: To my knowledge, Chris didn’t have any idea about Pam, and even if you’d argue that she’d heard the news about the prior killings and yadda yadda yadda, I don’t think that’s enough to fuel a nightmare about a lunging lady corpse.

So my theory is these events aren’t random nightmares, but forced hallucinations. The lake’s spooky and haunted and full of dark magic. And I could take it even further, because more evidence exists in the later sequels. It’s not just “characters going mad from stress.”

mummyshark:

This is something I hope to tackle during the Countdown, because it’s one of my favorite subjects.

Focusing mainly on Parts 2, 3 and 4 – because that’s where my loyalty was most definitively built – these are horror movies, but they’re not just horror movies. They’re also movies about young adults getting to have the kinds of “vacations” I used to dream about as a kid. You know, the whole idea of being out on their own in a pretty dead town where the only thing to do was act on their impulses.

Crystal Lake had a lot in common with Pleasure Island from Pinocchio – get there and have your fun, but be careful, ‘cause you’re gonna pay for it.

I just love that aspect of the earlier films. The whole “bunch of friends mixed with non-friends thrown together for what essentially amounted to weeklong parties in the woods.” If you only know F13 by its reputation, this sounds off, but when you see the movies, it’s pretty clear and it has a lot of layers.

(And FYI, that was my main problem with the remake: It knew this, but it didn’t really understand this.)

Beyond that are other reasons, of course. I enjoy Jason as a character. I love the fact that he evolves from movie to movie, more often by happenstance than by storyline direction. I love that no two Jasons are exactly alike.

Thanks to changing trends, different directors and the simple fact that the franchise was “worth more” or “worth less” depending on the year, the F13 movies grew to have quite distinct flavors, too, and they hit upon so many mostly-lost horror “trends.” Part 5 is trashy. Part 6 is MTV. Part 7 is direct-to-video style. Part 8 represents the era when cinema wanted to get hipper but didn’t always know how to do that. Part 9 is ‘90s sci-fi. Part 10 is 2000s spoofy. Like, look at the each movie’s release date and then match it up with other movies that came out in those years. You’ll find that it makes SUCH WEIRD SENSE.

I could go on for hours, really.