Cunningham: Friday the 13th (1980)

If Friday the 13^th had done no more than cement the creepiness of summer camp as an American institution, then its shadow over subsequent popular culture would already be great indeed. But, for all its pulpy legacy and serial promiscuity, this is one of the most beautiful and elegant of 80s slasher films, as well as the most surprisingly cinephilic and classical in its allusions and assurances. In many ways, it takes its cues from Halloween, opening with a murder that occurs in the 1950s – in this case, at Camp Crystal Lake, in what appears to be upstate New Jersey – and then flashing forward to the present day, where a group of teenagers have arrived to work as camp counselsors as Crystal Lake prepares to open once again to the public. Like Halloween, too, the opening is shot in first-person, but what distinguishes Friday from its predecessor is just how far Cunningham takes that POV approach, with the action regularly shifting to the killer’s perspective, often at the most unexpected and unlikely moments. In fact, so fluid and flexible is this POV sensibility that it quickly collapses into establishing shots, as well as any shots that are even slightly off or oddly framed, along with POV shots from the various characters themselves, conjuring up a synthetic, syncretic, composite perspective that’s as dissonant against this gorgeous backdrop as the camera itself, from whose movements it feels increasingly feels indistinguishable. Indeed, by about a third of the way through, there’s a sense that any camera movement somehow contains the killer’s perspective, as we’re collapsed into a roving, prehensile gazethat zooms, pans and pivots away from any discernible or imaginable body, so subliminally and effortlessly fused with your own position as spectator that the film doesn’t really have to go to any great lengths in terms of voyeuristic or sexploitative spectacle – the pleasures of looking are more than exhausted by Cunningham’s exquisitely restrained mise-en-scenes, which wouldn’t feel out of place in a dramatisation of Walden, or a pastoral interlude by Douglas Sirk. As a result, the murder scenes are quite imagistic, revolving around tableaux of intensified, penetrative looking – it’s the most indebted of all slashers to Argento – rather than extended action sequences, even as Cunningham manages to condense each death to a plosive, brutal, manifesto of gore that makes all the bodies feel like found objects, ornaments in a twisted memento mori that stakes out Crystal Lake as its canvas. Even when we are actually present at the moment of death, it feels as if we are stumbling across the body – and that we have been expertly orchestrated to stumble across the body – with the same surreal surprise and horror as the characters, as they try to envisage what kind of character, what kind of monster, could have done this. Yet because the killer never is, and never can be, in the frame – we are light years away from Jason as a character, let alone the campy, charismatic caricature of later, installment, spin-offs and crossovers – the dread refuses to affix itself to any object or subjectivity, instead building around the dark voids that Cunningham opens up at the back of the action – windows, doorways, benchtops – as you scan the far horizon for a flicker, a presence, that you suddenly, chillingly, realise is already behind you, all around you. For all Betsy Palmer's off-kilter charisma, then, Jason’s mother is slightly anticlimactic in her very appearance and embodiment, but, then again, she’s only a conduit for Jason, who’s a conduit for the camera – she merely emerges from a darkness that’s terrifying precisely because it’s lost its power to determine what is concealed and what is revealed anymore, slave to the bright point of light that gradually gathers around Jason, a tungsten orb that is somehow darker than anything we can see, anything we can feel, in this beautiful, mercurial, eviscerating offering.