My cousins were invested in the idea, and I could see that “being Jason”, whatever the hell that entailed, was championship strategy indeed.
Remember, I still had no conception of Friday the 13 th whatsoever, though my mental gears were definitely turning. The two brothers proceeded to argue for a little while over the parameters of the game, none of which seemed terribly concerned with rules or scenarios or the like, but rather boiled down to a single, belligerent point of emphasis: “I wanna be Jason!” I must’ve watched this back and forth for five solid minutes. What was Friday the 13 th exactly? Sounded like a very strange game to me, though my cousins were sure excited. I still fondly recall a vivid memory of milling about, at (approximately) the age of nine, in the upstairs of my grandparents’ grand, gothic house with two beloved cousins, ten and eight respectively, when one of them announced, “we should play Friday the 13 th!” One of the joys of growing up is the degree to which you can naturally go about pruning those sorts of conversations out of your life, whether by updating your social circle, changing your surroundings, or both. I have always felt an instinctive attraction to things “other”, of course, and have, as a result, found myself on the defensive side of more arguments about “harmful” art and censorship and selective morality than I can properly recount (or care to). For heaven’s sake, why, might you ask? I don’t rightly know. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, in fact, about what a surprising little swath of my adolescence and teenage years was given over to fuzzy but fond memories of watching an unstoppable killer stalk nubile teenagers around the grounds of a New Jersey summer camp.
John Carpenter’s Halloween is, without question, my favorite horror movie of all time – its prominence as recurring subject matter on this site, whether directly or as an invariably unfair comparison point, is conclusive proof – but its rough-hewn demon spawn, Friday the 13 th, actually qualifies as my favorite horror series. “He neglected to mention that, downtown, they call this place ‘Camp Blood’…” On behalf of blog/camp management, I hope you enjoy your time down at the lake! -EN In celebration of DAE’s fifth anniversary, that original piece has been revisited, expanded, and thoroughly updated, which is something its author both has wanted to do and, frankly, should have done years ago. Since its publication in October of 2014, “Ranking, Dissecting the ‘Friday the 13th’ Series” has been by far the most viewed post on Darkadaptedeye.