Because I’ve been listening to a podcast where the hosts are both critically astute about film and fond of the campy pleasures of the Friday the 13th franchise, I’ve started watching these.  I’ve absorbed enough quips about these movies at this point that it’s already like watching them in the company of friends–like most bad movie watching, it’s a social experience, not a cinematic one.  There’s nothing that brings people together like good-natured mockery.  And there’s a lot here to mock, and a handful of reasons to be good-natured about it.

Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, horror franchises largely don’t consist of actual movies–they are, or at least quickly become, delivery systems for a particular set of pleasures, which is why their structures are so often a mess: they aren’t telling you a story, they’re giving you things they think you’ll find enjoyable, sometimes as well as they can, nearly always as much as they can.  There are slasher movies that are actual movies–Halloween and Black Christmas are my top two–and that care about things like tension, mood, and characterization.  When Halloween makes illogical choices, like making Michael Myers both an otherworldly Shape and someone who has inexplicably learned how to drive a car, I still feel sure that thought went into that and that Carpenter weighed the logic against the ultimate effect.  When Friday the 13th Part 2 ends with a pointlessly lengthy fakeout that may or may not be a fakeout, it’s purely because they wanted one last scare but then didn’t want to either bother to resolve it or have it interfere with the planned ending.

The Friday the 13th movies are partly selling scares but, more than that, selling creative deaths, which is an odd but not original aspiration.  People in general have an interest in the various ways human bodies can collapse.  This is curiosity about death as pure curiosity, almost a kid’s curiosity–to the point where it’s not at all surprising that the main audience for these movies has always been teenagers–about how things work.  It’s not fear of the end, fear of mortality, or fear of pain.  It’s physics.  Stephen King once talked about how he and his friends examined  a dead cat when they were kids, and one of them had a very pertinent question: will the cat shit if they drop a brick on its ass?  It didn’t.  Friday the 13th Part 3: will your eyeball fly out of your head if someone crushes your skull in their hands?  Scientifically, possibly not.  In your most morbid nightmares, possibly yes.  Especially if we bothered to shoot the whole thing in 3D.

These movies are bad, but at their best, there’s a straightforward appeal to them.  They don’t have the gleeful, intoxicating badness of The Room or Sleepaway Camp, either of which I would happily watch basically any day of the week and both of which reward analysis, but they’re earnest.  They’re selling violence and they have no Funny Games-style contempt for that or for their most sincere audience.  If the movie is 3D, you’re also going to get 3D yoyos coming at your face and a joint being offered to you through the screen because hey, that’s part of what you came here for, right?  If it’s 2D, well, have a guy taking a machete to the face and then falling backwards down a lengthy flight of stairs in his wheelchair.

Morally… whole reams of commentary have been written on the moral qualities, or lack thereof, of the worst of the slasher films.  Cinematically, they don’t even really qualify.  Culturally, socially, they can be fun, particularly in the right company, where you can question why the hell anyone would cut only one eyehole in their mask.