![]() ![]() ![]() Jason Voorhees, once established as the main character in the Friday franchise, stayed the same stoic spirit of slaying - if anything he got quieter and creepier as the series went on and he became a zombie. Freddy was reduced from a creature of nightmares with a horrifically scarred visage to a kid-friendly goofball. Over the course of the series the Freddy Krueger character was slowly milked of menace, and the terrifying monster was replaced with a wise-cracking game show host. The closest competitor in terms of consistency must be the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but even that series blows it in a fundamental way that Friday never did: it ruined its main character. While the other series came out of the gate in a blaze of brilliance, Friday the 13th ambled onto the track like Jason Voorhees, moving at a reasonable pace and happy to let the other runners exhaust themselves. Unlike the other classic slasher series, the first Friday doesn’t even set up the iconography of the series. The original Friday the 13th is a very solid movie, a very good entry in the burgeoning slasher genre, a sort of American take on the giallo concept. It doesn’t have the revolutionary grunginess Tobe Hooper brought to Leatherface and family. But the producers didn’t recognize that, and so they just kept churning out a bunch of terrible sequels.īut the first Friday the 13th isn’t a work of genius. He saw the high water mark he had set and knew that he could not ever again reach it with The Shape. How can you recapture the specific genius of Halloween? The answer is that you can’t, which is why John Carpenter tried to change the direction of the series with Halloween III: Season of the Witch. How could they when we’d be comparing them to films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street? But the greatness of these foundational films is also the weakness of their franchises: when a series begins on such a high note it is all but impossible for the future films to match it. If we were to put individual films against each other, no Friday the 13th movie would stand a chance. And the reason for that is simple, and the key to the series’ success is something you can apply to your everyday life: consistency. It reigns supreme in the slasher world, for sure, but even in the wider universe of horror sequels - a wide universe indeed - it is the tops. There is no horror franchise that tops the Friday the 13th films. ![]()
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