Month: April 2019

Three Fridays: A Comparison of ‘Friday the 13th’ – Part 3

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Four months ago, I had no interest in the Friday the 13th series. Yes, I had seen ‘Freddy vs Jason’ on a whim, and I knew that Jason was a near-invincible zombie killer who had slaughtered hundreds of horny teenagers over the years, but that was the extent of my knowledge and interest in his movies. But as I mentioned in my overview of the 1980 movie, I came across a fan-made adaptation of said film. Out of curiosity, I gave it a try, and was hooked, making me curious to see how it compared to the film and the 2009 remake. Today, we’re going to take a look a this adaptation: A fan comic re-imagening the events of ‘Friday the 13th’:

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Click here to read the comic

This comic, created by artist David Hopkins – a furry artist best known for his long running web comic, ‘Jack’ – immediately stands out because the cast are no longer human, but anthropomorphic animals. But don’t let the sight of cute cartoon animals in people clothes fool you: This is easily the bloodiest take on the original ‘Friday’ story. Much like the 1980 movie, the comic tells the origin story of Jason Voorhees and his mother. And, like the best remakes, it takes the original story and reinterprets it in interesting ways. Here, there’s no twenty-year gap between Jason’s death and his mother’s rampage, and unlike the 1980 and 2009 films, where Jason only pops up after Pamela is killed, both of them work together throughout the story to kill counselors, acting like a ghoulish version of Bonnie and Clyde. The other, most significant addition to this take on the story is it’s religious tone: While Jason’s survival was unexplained in the original film, his resurrection here is due to Pamela making a deal with the devil to bring him back to life (in a smart move, the devil is never heard or seen, making him an unseen menace).

The compressed timeline and supernatural elements gives this version of ‘Friday’ refreshingly different from the original, but what elevates it above being a simple slasher story is how most of its focus is on Pamela Voorhees. While she infamously only appeared in the final act of the original film without any foreshadowing, the comic makes her the main character instead of the counselors, letting us learn much more about her: In this interpretation, Pamela is a former member of a group of devil worshippers who eventually left and became a Christian, who then suffers from a horrific crisis of faith when Jason dies, and then backsliding when her pleas to God to bring Jason back aren’t answered.

This expanded focus on Pamela turns her from an already compelling and relatable character into a complex, fascinating individual who is bloodthirsty and ruthless, deeply loving, misguided, and even regretful about what she’s done. It’s easy to understand and related to her pain and goals for vengeance, even as she kills innocent counselors in truly horrific ways.

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Yet, despite all the horror and the gore here, there’s a strong undercurrent of innocence and tragedy here: there are no true villains in the story, only victims. Yes, Pamela stabs, burns, impales, and disembowels teenagers, but only to bring her son back, and ensure that no other children will die from the counselor’s stupidity. The counselors, while having severe lapses in judgement, aren’t evil and care about the kids under their care. Jason becomes a killer, but only at his mother’s urging. And in the end, Pamela has a moment of clarity about what she’s done, but dies and is damned. Jason loses his mother, and Alice is left shell-shocked and a nervous wreck. No one wins, and everyone suffers, turning ‘Friday’ into a tragedy of poor choices, suffering, and loss… but, you know, with cartoon animals!

While I prefer this comic over the 1980 and 2009 films, it does have a few missteps: At one point, Pamela tells Jason that they can kill everyone in the world, which doesn’t make much sense for a woman who initially only wanted to leave Crystal Lake with Jason, and then wanted to get revenge on a specific group of individuals for letting Jason die. Pamela’s famous scene, where she seems to channel Jason while trying to kill Alice doesn’t make any sense here: the film implied that Pamela was losing her mind, but in the comic Jason is right outside the building, making the line and Pamela’s seeming possession unnecessary and confusing.

Still, despite these missteps, this adaptation of ‘Friday’ elevates itself above standard slasher fare by focusing on Pamela and giving her a depth and richness that the films haven’t. Coupled with the grotesque, bloody kills, tight focus, and good pacing, this re-imagining of Jason’s origins is, in my opinion, the best of the three ‘Friday’ origin stories. If you’re looking for a slasher story with an uncommon depth, or a great ‘Friday’ tale, this will easily satisfy that need.

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Now that we’ve taken a look at all three of Jason’s origin stories, all that remains is to done final summary of them all and see what lessons they offer for the writer, a task we’ll dive into next week.

If you’d like to see more of David Hopkins’ work, you can visit his Furaffinity page here. If you’d like to read his JACK webcomic, you can do so here.

(All art on this page is posted with permission from Mr. Hopkins)

Perfect Moments: A Shadow On The Wall

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Once in a while, you come across a moment in a story that is so perfect that it stays in with you for years, or even a lifetime. These are moments that, in my opinion, are flawless; perfect gems of storytelling that cannot be improved in any way, and are a joy to treasure and revisit again and again.

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The Movie

‘Signs.’

The Moment

Why it’s perfect

No matter the project, and no matter what medium, all storytellers face one problem when telling a story: How do you tell your audience everything they need to know about the main character within the first third of your story? There are countless ways to do so (Many, many, many, many, ways, actually), but I want to take a look at one of my favorite introductions, one that accomplishes so much despite showing so little.

2002’s ‘Signs’ opens with a man waking up in bed inside a house near a cornfield. He listens to see if someone else is awake, picks up some socks, brushes his teeth, and then hears a little girl scream. It sounds boring, but when he’s brushing his teeth, we initially don’t see Graham, just the door to the bathroom and the wall beside it. But on that wall is the faded outline of a vanished crucifix.

In an instant, that outline tells us that something terrible happened to this man, something that made him turn his back on his faith. We don’t know what that event is, but after seeing a family picture of him with a woman who doesn’t appear in the scene, it’s easy to guess. Coupled with the silence of the scene, the dim lighting, and the feeling of loneliness, we know this man has been through a lot, turning him into an underdog who’s trying to recover, but has seemingly given up and has resigned himself to just existing.

I’m still amazed how one tiny detail can tell so much about someone. When done correctly, such a trait can tell us the main problem the character is going to try and overcome, or tell us a lot about their history. Consider the following scenarios and what they tell us:

*We’re in a home. There’s a photo of a a woman and a young girl on the mantlepiece, but we can just faintly see the edges of someone’s pants on the edge of the photo, which looks like it was ripped.

*An old, out-of-shape man eats a microwavable meal for one in his tiny, filthy apartment. On a wall behind him are newspaper clippings and framed magazine covers about a star baseball player who was legendary in his day.

*A group of terrified explorers enters an enormous cave and finds it piled high with hundreds, if not thousands of bones of giant creatures, many covered in gashes. They hear something growling from deeper within the cave.

All three tell us something about characters: The first might revolve around a disgraced husband. The second, an old man who longs for the days when people cared about him, and the third, an unseen beast who has been around a long time, and clearly dangerous. When utilized properly, such small details can reveal so much about a character, even before they appear or talk. In my opinion, that cross in ‘Signs’ is one of the best examples on how to do it right – and in under a minute, no less!

Three Fridays: A Comparison of ‘Friday the 13th’ – Part 2

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When I finished taking a look at the original ‘Friday the 13th’ last week, I hoped that the 2009 remake would offer a new twist or angle on the story, or perhaps a new idea that would add to the Jason mythos. And at first glance, it sounded like the movie had everything going for it: a bigger budget, a bigger scope, and including elements from the first few films. Thus, with the disappointment of the original still fresh in my mind, I started the remake, hopeful that I’d get a more exciting version of Jason’s origins.

After a very quick recap of Pamela’s attempt to kill horny teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake, ’13th’ wastes no time in getting to the basics: young adults head out to a remote lake, get drunk, get high, get naked, have premarital sex, and die at Jason’s hands. A familiar formula, but it isn’t a bad thing. I was impressed at how quickly the film got to the killing, and it was quickly made clear that Jason doesn’t mess around: in the span of a few minutes, he wipes out everyone in the small group of horny, drug-seeking young adults in gruesome fashion, including bear traps, machetes, and a particularly horrible, drawn-out death for an unfortunate young woman in a sleeping bag.

And then the opening title appeared; I had been so sucked into the opening act that I was shocked to realize that the film hadn’t even started yet! Now excited, I watched as the movie started up, glad to see that things were going well.

An hour and a half later, I watched the end credits, crushed at being disappointed once again.

As a modern remake and reboot for the Friday the 13th series, ‘Friday’ is a return to the classic elements of the franchise: Camp Crystal Lake, Jason killing with his machete, and his eventual defeat at the hands of a lone, young woman, all in an attempt to leave behind the over-the-top silliness that the franchise became known for, culminating in Jason’s trip to outer space, and facing off against Freddy Kruger. A little housecleaning isn’t a bad move in and of itself: When a series heads back to its roots, it’s a chance for a clean start, and to introduce the series to new fans while honoring what came before and keeping series traditions for the returning fans.

Sadly, however, ‘Friday’s attempts to strip away the over-the-top elements of the franchise also takes away much of what made Jason memorable. Yes, he may have become ridiculous in his later outings, but a demonically-possessed, cyborg zombie Jason is far more interesting to watch, especially when he uses his superhuman durability and strength to perform wildly inventive kills. But by removing the silliness and Jason’s enhanced abilities, ‘Friday’ unfortunately turns itself into a routine slasher movie. As with the original, if we were to take away Jason and Camp Crystal Lake, there would be little left to distinguish itself from its peers: Most of the kills – which revolve around being stabbed, slashed, and impaled with a machete, shot with an arrow, or being stabbed with various items – feel routine and unimaginative (with the exception of the aforementioned sleeping bag kill). The story feels routine, and aside from his new ability to run, Jason himself feels like almost any other slasher villain in hundreds of other horror movies: Just a normal man in a mask who’s strong and tough to kill.

When the credits were rolling, I was struck by how I had to focus to recall any memorable moments that stuck with me, those, ‘that was so cool!’ scenes that we love sharing with our friends later on. To my surprise, the only thing that stuck with me was that I like how the main character, Clay, is a person with a strong, believable reason to go to the hunting grounds of a serial killer (he’s looking for his missing sister), and that, even better, he manages to find and rescue her… until Jason bursts out of the lake at the end of the movie, presumably killing her, and making his whole quest pointless.

While I was hopeful that the 2009 remake of ‘Friday’ would correct the mistakes of its predecessor, I was disappointed to find that it was little more than your typical horror flick, one that happened to have Jason Voorhees in it. It did have a faster pace, more action, more kills, and more of everything to keep our attention (I didn’t fast-forward through it), but there was nothing particularly memorable about it.

But not all is lost; there exists one more version of Friday the 13th, a fan-made version that, in my opinion, tells the best version of Jason’s origin story. Come back next week, where we’ll take a look at this adaptation, which isn’t what you’d expect.

 

Favorite Moments: Game of Chairs

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We all have our favorite moments in movies, books, and games, moments that stay with us long after the story is over. This column is my attempt to examine my favorite moments and see why they stick with me.

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The video:

Why it’s great:

It’s Sesame Street poking fun of Game of Thrones.

…

Okay, I guess I’ll have to do more than post a sentence I never thought I’d write. What makes this sketch by Sesame Street great is that it manages to do three things at once:

1. Do a G-rated parody of an R-rated franchise.

2. Make it educational and entertaining at the same time.

3. Throw in plenty of in-jokes that only adult watchers of ‘Thrones’ would get that would fly over the heads of younger viewers.

It’s Reason # 3 that really makes this sketch shine: What 8 year old is going to catch the in-jokes about the bloodiest wedding in human history, the death of the most irritating teenage monarch ever, decapitation, and so much more? None, I’d warrant. You can almost hear the writers giggling as they turn R-rated horror into G-rated jokes, and on a children’s educational show, no less!

 

Three Fridays: A Comparison of ‘Friday the 13th’ – Part 1

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When it comes to horror franchises, few are as well known as Friday the 13th. Created in 1980, this series has gone on to include twelve films, countless books, comics, action figures, and video games, not to mention spawning the legendary Jason Vorhees, who remains one of cinema’s most famous slasher villains, with over two hundred (!) kills to his name.

Yet, even with its prestigious history, I’ve never sat down to watch all the films, the one exception being ‘Freddy vs Jason.’ I thought it was a fun film, but it didn’t get me interested in watching the rest of Jason’s filmography. All that changed, though, when I took a look at a recent, fan-made interpretation of the 1980 film, which made me curious to see how it fared to both the original, and the 2009 remake, leading to the rare scenario of being able to see the same story being told three different ways.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be taking a look at all three interpretations: The 1980 original, the 2009 remake, and a 2019 fan-made version that I’ll keep a secret for now. If you haven’t seen the original film, I’d recommend not reading any further until you have, as this series will spoil major plot details.

With all that said, let’s begin with the film that started it all: 1980’s, ‘Friday the 13th’

As said so memorably in 1962’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and 2012’s, ‘Prometheus,’ “Big things have small beginnings,” perfectly sums up Jason’s first big-screen outing, a small-scale slasher flick that finds camp counselors facing certain death when stranded at a small summer camp in a remote forest. Thanks to pop-culture osmosis, I knew all the twists before watching the film: that Jason is barely in the film, that his mother is the killer, and that everyone but one girl dies. Still, knowing the plot before seeing a movie isn’t always going to ruin it: I knew how ‘Alien’ and ‘The Shining’ turned out before watching them, and they were still scary, effective films that became personal favorites.

I’m afraid the same can’t be said for ‘Friday.’

For all the praise put upon it as one of the best films in the series (or the best, depending on who you’re talking to), I found ‘Friday’ to be surprisingly dull. It gets off to a good start, with a camp counselor named Annie heading off to Camp Crystal Lake…  only to be killed before she even reaches the front gate. Killing off who you think is going to be the main character in the first act is a great way to suck people in, and I was eager to see how the film went from there. Regrettably, I was disappointed that ‘Friday’ follows the standard trope of building up doomed teenagers before killing them off in an isolated location. There’s nothing wrong with that (and Crystal Lake at night in a thunderstorm is an effective horror setting), but the film’s glacial pace results in numerous periods of boredom, to the point where I even fast-forwarded to get to the inevitable killings, which are quite tame compared to what came later in the series (the arrow-through-the-throat kill is quite memorable, though).

While ‘Friday’ was mostly a disappointment for me, it does have one element that saves it from the pile of over-hyped movies: Pamela Vorhees, Jason’s mother. At first glance, a middle-aged woman with no fighting skills or unique abilities doesn’t sound like a compelling villain, but Pamela elevates herself with one of the most sympathetic backstories to be found in slasher cinema: A mother who lost her only child due to negligence, who is driven by unimaginable pain to get revenge on those who let him die, and stop other children from suffering the fate her son did. I can think of few other killers in cinema who are so sympathetically evil; Pamela’s so easy to relate to, even if we don’t agree with her killing innocent counselors who had nothing to do with Jason’s death. And to twist the knife even further, the revelation that Jason is still alive means that all her killings and her twisted quest for justice was all for nothing, turning the film into a tragedy where nobody wins, nobody gets justice, and all the suffering everyone goes through was for nothing.

Wow.

When looking at ‘Friday’, both as the start of a franchise, and as a standalone movie, it’s my opinion that it isn’t very good. If it was removed from the ‘Friday’ franchise and stripped of it’s historical status, ‘Friday’ would probably be remembered as a rather standard slasher film that would struggle to stand out among its peers. Still, Pamela’s effective performance saves ‘Friday’ from being a complete disappointment.

While ‘Friday’ isn’t a good film, in my opinion, it does deserve to be recognized for its villain, and for starting one of the most famous slasher franchises in history… well, that, and the hilarity of knowing that Pamela’s little boy will one day blast off into outer space and hack people to death on a space station as an undead demonic cyborg.

Tune in next week, where we’ll take a look at the 2009 remake of ‘Friday’ and see what a modern-day take on Jason’s origin has to offer.

Favorite Moments: The Lion King (low budget)

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We all have our favorite moments in movies, books, and games, moments that stay with us long after the story is over. This column is my attempt to examine my favorite moments and see why they stick with me.

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The video:

 

Why it’s great:

If you were a little kid during the 90’s, you were probably traumatized by seeing Mufasa fall to his death in ‘The Lion King’. I should know; I was one of those kids who was heartbroken at seeing him become wilderbeast roadkill, and another unfortunate victim in Disney’s never-ending quest to kill all parents.

So, naturally, someone had to take the scene and remake it in 3D, but with incredibly silly animation that looks like it was saved from an animation student’s recycle bin, making another great example of how taking a dramatic scene and interpreting it with silly, amateur production values can make for comedy gold.

What we can learn from ‘Limbo with Lyrics’

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NOTE: The music video for this song features a child drawn in a stylistic manner repeatedly dying violent deaths.

When it came out in 2010, ‘Limbo’ quickly became one of the most famous independent video games ever created, quickly putting developer Playdead on the map. With it’s beautifully dark art style, bleak aesthetics, brutal violence, and haunting soundtrack, ‘Limbo’ is a masterpiece of grim video games… so, naturally, parodies starting coming our way, including this rather amusing song.

There’s only one lesson to learn from this video, but it’s a good one:

Be cautious when doing making light of real-life horrors

If you haven’t played ‘Limbo’, here are two videos to show you what kind of game it is:

When I initially started this article, I was going to write about how the use of an upbeat tune and comedic sound effects makes for comedy gold when contrasted with very dark media (which it does very well). After all, such a mix has worked before:

However, I then realized that while that combination of lighthearted fun and horrific suffering is funny for fictional stories, it doesn’t work as well when used in real life: A fun Reggie song about concentration camps in Nazi Germany would be rather… tasteless. So would a happy jazz tune about atrocities committed by ISIS to innocent people. It’s easy and fun to parody Jason Vorhees, Darth Vader, and the Alien and Predator, but when it comes to poking fun at torture, genocide, or the mutilation and murder of ordinary people, we walk a very dangerous line between making a point and being tasteless.

Now, nothing is off limits when it comes to comedy. Writers should be free to do dark comedy if they wish, on whatever subject they wish. But discretion is important: Doing a parody song about how millions can’t pay their bills, afford insulin, or even a place to live can be funny because it critiques society and makes a point. Doing a Reggie song about children having limbs hacked off because their parents couldn’t make daily quotas on a rubber plantation probably won’t have the same effect.

When audiences watch or read comedy, they want to laugh and get away from the horrors of the world, if only for a few minutes or even a few seconds. As writers, we have to be careful how we use horror to make them laugh. If we use the horrors of a fictional world, we have more leeway because those horrors don’t really exist. But if we use the evil that surrounds us in everyday life, we must be careful of the point we’re trying to make… unless we’re talking about people who push shopping carts in grocery stores at half a mile an hour and block isles so that no one can get past them. They’re fair game.