Welcome to Camp

In October I watched the entire Friday the 13th film series, something I have not done since high school, adding the several films that had not yet been released before the early nineties. I was never much of a horror fan as a kid, but I’ve made up for lost time in recent years. Horror is a tremendously entertaining genre to study, and very interesting, in part because horror films are often unpretentious and can therefore be used to explore ideas without worrying about such boring niceties as taste, sense and political correctness (of course, this can be applied to genre films more broadly). For example, plenty of movies have told stories of disaffected veterans struggling to adjust to civilian life after a homecoming, but only a handful have done it as effectively as Bob Clark’s 1974 Deathdream (AKA Dead of Night), in which a family receives the news that their son has been killed in action a few days before he actually comes home. He’s a changed man, unable to relate to his old neighborhood friends or family, and a lot more interested in killing people to drink their blood than he used to be.

Similarly, endless pamphlets, comic books, after-school-specials and plenty of movies have tried to educate young people about the “problems” of drugs and premarital sex, but few craft the message as directly as slasher films. Except—are horror films really as conservative as that? Do they mean it, or is there something else going on? A side conversation…

But what accounts for the entertainment value of mainstream horror, such as Friday the 13th and its sequels? In many ways, it’s easy to say these are simply bad movies, poorly made, nonsensical, endlessly repetitive and even simply boring. It’s easier to say that all of that (except for the last) doesn’t matter in terms of enjoyment. I considered my appreciation for Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (4th of 12 movies, as of this writing).

An objectively bad movie, in terms of some of the things supposed to matter most: writing, acting, directing. And what could be more disreputable than the third sequel in a slasher series? In my Letterboxd review I used the words “campy” and “cheesy,” which are apt descriptors. Plenty of people would not even watch such a “film.” Yet it was so much fun to watch (even more so if you’re watching the whole series); it was mass camp, delightfully, an object of appreciation far beyond its designation as a cheap horror sequel.

What all of that means, it turns out, is very complicated to suss out. Camp? don’t get me started, honey. I recently read a popularly cited paper by Annalee Newitz from some time ago about the stark differences between camp and cheese, which was great, but not altogether clarifying for me what I’m doing when I watch a Friday the 13th movie.

More to come. (He said, fatefully.)