Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 28

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Oh my God, it’s Friday!

Friday the 13th Part 2 changes everything and nothing at the same time. It’s a different killer and no longer at Camp Crystal Lake. But there’s still a lot of hormonal teens and a stack of dead bodies by the end of the film.

Before Viewing

The trailer for this sequel to one of the most popular slasher films of all time makes sure that you know you’re getting more of the same. Alice from the original film is wandering around her house making sure it’s locked up as the narrator confirms the number of her friends that died the previous year. He then makes sure the audience knows that on Friday the 13th of 1981 more murders will happen. And he begins counting upwards, from 13 through 23 (continuing the schtick from the original trailer), as imagery of some of the various new ways people will die are shown. The body count continues!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

Two months after the horrible incidents at Camp Crystal Lake, aka Camp Blood, Alice (Adrienne King) has nightmares of being attacked by Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), before beheading the killer. She awakens to a call from her mother who is checking in on her. Alice proclaims she just needs to get on with her life. As she is about to shower a mystery caller hangs up on her. Then a cat jumps in the open window, scaring everyone. Opening the fridge to get some food for the cat she discovers Pamela’s mummified head, just before Jason Voorhees stabs her in the temple with an ice pick.

The film picks up five years after the murders at Camp Crystal Lake, when Paul (John Furey) opens the Camp Packanack Counelor Training Center right next door to the infamous, and off-limits, Camp Blood. Sandra and Jeff (Marta Kober and Bill Randolph) are the first to show up in town, and they get a warning that they are doomed from town looney, Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney). The two counselors get directions to the camp from Ted (Stu Charno), a jokey redhead. At the camp, Paul welcomes the other counselors including Terry (Kirsten Baker), Vickie (Lauren-Marie Taylor), Scott (Russell Todd), Mark (Tom McBride) who is confined to a wheelchair, and Ginny (Amy Steel) who shows up late.

At the campfire that night, Paul relates the tale of Jason to the counselors. He was left for dead and then driven mad when his mother was killed, and he’s still out there. Ted scares everyone in a wolf mask and a spear, and they all have a chuckle. Crazy Ralph is creeping around the woods and is garroted by Jason. Sandra and Jeff decide to sneak over to Camp Crystal Lake to say they’ve been there, but a police officer (Jack Marks) sees them and sends them back. On his way out, the cop sees someone run through the woods and chases him into a ramshackle shack. At this point the cop gets the backside of a hammer in the back of his skull for trespassing.

After dinner, most of the counselors go to a bar in town, including Ted, Paul, and Ginny. At the camp, Terry begins looking for her dog Muffin, even though Jeff saw a mutilated dog in the woods earlier, but decided not to tell her. After a quick skinny dipping she chases after Scott who stole her clothes. He gets tangled in a rope snare and while Terry is looking for a knife, he gets his throat slashed by a machete. Terry returns, looks into the camera and screams. (She’s now dead too!) Mark and Vickie start to come on to each other, so she goes to change. A rainstorm comes in and Mark waits on the patio, when a machete smacks him in the face and his wheelchair falls down a flight of steps.

Jeff and Sandra are getting it on upstairs when Jason finds them and shoves a spear through both of them, post-coitus. Vickie returns and discovers the bloody sheets and is shocked when Jason, wearing a burlap sack over his head, jumps out of the bed and stabs her with a big kitchen knife. Paul and Ginny leave Ted at the bar and return to the camp. They find no one around, but discover blood upstairs. The lights go out and Paul is attacked, but Ginny can’t see if he’s alive or dead. Jason chases Ginny to her Volkswagon with a pitchfork, which he stabs through the roof.

Ginny finds a chainsaw and defends herself before running into the woods. She finds the rundown shack, and inside, an altar with Mrs. Voorhees’ head on it. Thinking quickly she puts on Pamela’s sweater, which is also on the altar and using a stern voice commands Jason to stop. The killer is perplexed by this, seeing his mother rather than Ginny. That is, until he notices the severed head again, which returns his bloodlust. At that moment Paul arrives and while Jason is distracted, Ginny drives a machete into his shoulder. Back at camp, scratching at the door concerns Paul and Ginny, but it’s Muffin, still alive. Suddenly an unhooded Jason leaps through the window at Ginny. The film cuts to Ginny being loaded in an ambulance in shock. But where’s Paul?

“Jason’s a legend, Ginny. A legend!” – Paul

Welcome to the final Friday of 31 Days of Horror for 2022. Since there was no actual Friday the 13th this month, the positioning of Friday the 13th Part 2 has become arbitrary, but also part of a week where every article was dealing with a specific day: Happy Birthday to Me, 30 Days of Night, Happy Death Day, and I Know What You Did Last Summer (specifically the Fourth of July). The second in the long line of Friday the 13th films follows the events of the first film, using the first couple minutes to recap the ending of part 1. It’s notable for being an early sequel to another popular film that utilizes the franchise name in the title. Horror sequels had been around for decades, with many of the Universal Monster movies from the 30s and 40s getting sequels (Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, etc), as well as the Hammer Horror films from the 50s and 60s. But these sequels might not have been as obvious. The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter, and The Creature Walks Among Us are a few of the titles audiences would have seen. After the release of The Godfather Part II in 1974 it seemed like adding a roman numeral or a part ‘X’ to the title of the original film was the preferred method for letting viewers know that this film was related to the previous one. The 70s had a few older titled sequels, like Beware! The Blob and Scream Blacula Scream, but Exorcist II: The Heretic began the new style of film titles for horror films. Damien: Omen II and Jaws 2 also utilized this new convention that Friday the 13th chose to follow.

This process of naming the films certainly let audiences know what they were getting, which was usually more of the same. Friday the 13th Part 2 definitely provided that in spades. This sequel contained approximately the same body count (10 victims, depending if you count Paul at some point, or the dead dog in the woods, which turns out not to be Muffin), it featured a final girl who is able to incapacitate the killer if only for a a little while, and continued the trend of creating new and interesting ways for the victims to be killed. It introduced Jason as the main antagonist, but had not yet provided him with his signature hockey mask (which is coming in the next sequel). Lots of fans, or people who are only aware of Jason via his existence in popular culture, may forget that his disguise this episode was a burlap sack, very much like the depiction of The Phantom in 1976s The Town That Dreaded Sundown. That film had an unidentified killer wandering the streets of Texarkana, Arkansas. Jason’s disguise might also be an homage to The Elephant Man, a film about John Merrick who was a deformed man in London in the 19th Century. He had a similar deformity to how Jason is portrayed in this film when his hood is removed.

The movie also attempts to work some pop psychology into the plot to give audiences a reasoning about why Jason is the way he is. Ginny mentions that  he might be “a child trapped in a man’s body” or an “out of control psychopath” due to his deformity and being raised in isolation by his mother, which isn’t exactly true. The flashbacks have Mrs. Voorhees mentioning that the camp counselors should have been watching him closer. But that wouldn’t be known by Ginny, since everything people know about the character is legend and innuendo at this point. But Ginny’s background in psychology does make her the perfect person to at least be thinking about who this killer is. She uses that knowledge that he might be someone with a mother fixation (possibly a little like Norman Bates in Psycho), and uses that against him. By putting on the mother’s sweater she’s able to connect with him by pretending to be his mother, which works for at least a little bit.

Ginny also is shown as a smart and resourceful woman, which is sometimes, but not always a condition of being the final female. She is able to use Jason’s weapons against him, like the machete which she injures him with at the end. People may also point to the use of the chainsaw as a way of teaching Jason how to use that device in future films. Unfortunately, Jason has never used a chainsaw in any of the Friday the 13th films. Any such memory of him doing so is probably people conflating Jason and Letherface, from the Texas Chain Saw Massacre films. Ginny’s ability to think on her feet makes her the perfect kind of protagonist to put against Jason. While Alice, from the original film, managed to decapitate and kill Pamela, that turns out to be mostly a fluke. She spent most of the film being scared and running impotently from the killer. Ginny, on the other hand, takes as much of a stand as anyone could in this situation and manages to keep a (mostly) level head on her shoulders, getting the upper hand on Jason at least twice.

Friday the 13th Part 2 also one-ups the creep factor in the film. The nudity is one of the elements that stands out as having more screen time. Most of the nude scenes, specifically the scene of Terry skinny dipping make use of the POV camera. This type of shot, in horror movies at least, usually indicates the killer (or a voyeur) is watching. There seem to be many more of these types of shots, which linger on the women mostly, watching their butts or breasts, and just creating what film scholars call “the male gaze.” It makes the audience complicit in these acts by putting the POV of the viewer as the one watching. People may not consciously understand why they feel disturbed by some of these shots, other than the creeping anxiety of the horror film. But there’s definitely a psychological component to it all.

This second episode of the Friday the 13th franchise, which would go on for many years, feels like more of the same, but also a worthy sequel to the original. It may not be better than part 1, but it certainly is on par. It delivers the kills and the tension without a lot of unnecessary dilly-dallying in between. Jason has not yet achieved his mythic preternatural abilities, but shows that he might have something going on that is not normal, being able to bounce back from that machete wound. And how much of that ending is to be believed. Much like the attack in the boat in Part 1, Jason’s final attack on Ginny feels more like a dream sequence. Sounds like he’s coming back though!

Assorted Musings

• As Terry enters the water for her moonlight swim, the beginnings of the Jaws theme plays on the soundtrack.
• The stabbing of Sandra and Jeff happens off screen, presumably because it was too graphic. If so, it was probably cut to maintain the R-rating.